Microsoft's CEO touts Windows Phone 7, a coming upgrade, and his company's partnership with Nokia at Mobile World Congress.
Stephen Shankland
Stephen Shankland worked at CNET from 1998 to 2024 and wrote about processors, digital photography, AI, quantum computing, computer science, materials science, supercomputers, drones, browsers, 3D printing, USB, and new computing technology in general. He has a soft spot in his heart for standards groups and I/O interfaces. His first big scoop was about radioactive cat poop.
BARCELONA--At the Mobile World Congress show here, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer today made the case for Windows Phone 7, including the current version, an update coming in a few weeks with copy and paste and with some application performance improvement, and a more significant update due toward the end of 2011.
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IE9 coming to Windows Phone 7
IE9, including hardware acceleration and support for the HTML5 standard, is due to ship with the update of Windows Phone 7 arriving later this year. Microsoft showed this fish-tank demo (in this orientation) to illustrate the benefits of hardware acceleration; the demo was fast on IE9 but dragged on Safari on an iPhone 4.
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Windows Phone 7: now with 8,000 apps
The ecosystem isn't there compared to Android and iOS, but Ballmer believes it's well under way, with more than 8,000 apps available today for Windows Phone 7.
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IE9 coming to Windows Phone 7
Mobile browsing needs some of the performance people are used to on PCs, where the Web caught on initially, Ballmer said at the MWC show.
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Coming: better Windows Phone 7 multitasking
The late 2011 update to Windows Phone 7 will bring better multitasking to the OS, including faster switching among applications and a specific set of services third-party applications can run in the background. Audio from a third-party player, for example, will still play.
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Twitter integration coming to Windows Phone 7
An update to Windows Phone 7 later in 2011 will bring tighter Twitter integration.
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Nokia CEO Stephen Elop
Nokia CEO Stephen Elop took the stage to tout his company's tight partnership with Microsoft.
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Ballmer touts Nokia deal
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Microsoft OneNote integrated with future Windows Phone 7
Today's Windows Phone 7 can tap into OneNote documents.
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Microsoft Office integrated with future Windows Phone 7
The late 2011 update to Windows Phone 7 will bring deeper Microsoft Office integration: with the ability to access not just OneNote files, but also Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
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Skydrive integration coming to Windows Phone 7
Microsoft's Skydrive, an online storage system, is headed for Windows Phone 7 in an update due later this year.
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A look into Skydrive on Windows Phone 7
This demonstration shows how a shared Skydrive folder looks on Windows Phone 7.
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Xbox extends on Windows Phone 7
Microsoft has had success with its Xbox franchise, and its Xbox Live online gaming technology extends to Windows Phone 7.
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Smart Design philosophy
Windows Phone 7 has a "smart design" philosophy that Ballmer believes more effectively puts the user at the center of the mobile-phone experience.
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External sharing over Skydrive
Skydrive lets people share folders with others, including others using a new version of Windows Phone 7 due later this year.
