Microsoft Announces Windows Phone 7 Series OS

15th Feb 2010 - Microsoft has announced Windows Phone 7 Series, the latest version of their cell phone operating system. The new version of the OS will be available on phones at the end of the year, and will try to catch up some of the ground that the company has lost to Apple's iPhone and Google's Android OS.

The new OS takes a very different approach to previous versions, creating a series of "hubs" which bring together information from different programs, web sites and other sources. The 6 hubs are people, Pictures, Games, Music & Video, Marketplace and Office.

The home screen of Windows Phone 7 Series devices offers a number of tiles, each of which can be customized to show content about a person, photos or information from a program running in the background.

The people hub allows the user to track information relating to people from a number of sources, indexing email, social networking site such as Facebook and phone messages into one location. A new start page allows you to assign tiles on the page to people, so you can track several sources of information on people without having to start off any other applications.

The Pictures hub is where you share and view photos. The new OS includes built-in synching to upload photos to the Internet, and synch them with a PC. The nature of the photos will depend on the camera included with the phone; it does not look like Microsoft will be selling any phones themselves, like Google has done with the Nexus One.

The new OS will offer support for playing Xbox Live games through the Games hub, a first for a cell phone. These games will be tied in with the users Xbox gamer profile, and scores and other information will be synchronized across devices.

The Music & Video hub is where the music, video and other media on the device will be stored. The interface and software is based on Microsoft's Zune HD.

The Marketplace is where software will be purchased, rather like Apple's App Store. At the moment, Microsoft is being somewhat vague about how this will be structured or what the rules of this might be: they describe it as offering "certified applications and games", but they did not clarify what this means. It does mean that applications will have to be approved before they can be sold through the Marketplace, though.

The final hub is Office, where Microsoft will be offering access to versions of their own Office, OneNote and SharePoint packages.

The new OS is a complete rewrite: applications for previous versions of Windows mobile will not run on the new Windows Phone 7 Series OS. Part of the reason why Microsoft is announcing the OS now is to give software developers time to rewrite their applications for the new OS and to get them ready for the launch of phones running the new software that will be released later this year.

Microsoft will not be selling Windows Phone 7 Series devices themselves; instead, the phones will be manufacturerd by cell phone companies such as Dell, HTC, Samsung and others. Microsoft is not completely hands-off with these devices, though; they will ahve to meet a series of minimum specifications to run the new OS, including offering a capactivie touch screen that supports multitouch, an aceelerometer and an FM radio. Thye will also be benchmarking new phones to ensure they are able to run the OS, but they are not setting minimum specifications for processor and memory.

You won't be able to buy a Windows Phone 7 Series device until later this year; Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said that they would be available "by the holidays", but did not set a specific date for availability.