Lining up nicely with previous reports, Microsoft has officially announced their latest mobile OS, Windows Phone 7, at MWC.
The name change isn’t by any means trivial as it also reflects the new direction the company is taking with regards to their new mobile platform. Apart from the aesthetic changes, Windows Phone 7 is now based on a completely new Windows CE kernel with the goal of making it more apt for the touchscreen phones of today. It’s now more finger-friendly and is compatible with capacitive touchscreen displays with multitouch support as well.
The OS is basically organized into six hubs focusing on different areas of interest – people (social networking), pictures (sharing images with others), games (Xbox live experience), music and video (Zune experience), and marketplace (app store).
Here’s a video showcasing these six hubs and its role in the new UI:
It also comes with a new Internet Explorer that’s now based on the code used for the desktop version of IE. They’ve also decided to include a dedicated hardware button for Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. Here's a video of the other new features you can expect from Windows Phone 7:
Don’t be surprised though if the upcoming Windows Phone 7-powered devices are all similar in features as Microsoft has laid down specific hardware requirements for manufacturers who wish to have this new OS as the star of the show on their products. Also a bit of a turn-off, the initial version of Windows Phone 7 doesn’t allow skins like the HTC Sense and Samsung TouchWiz overlay to be applied on it and neither is Adobe Flash support available as well. These are definitely points against it, but nonetheless, Windows Phone 7 should delight those who have been waiting for the longest time for a completely new mobile OS to be unveiled by Microsoft camp. You can read the entire press release here.
Now that Windows Phone 7 is official, the next big question is when can we expect the first batch of Windows Phone 7 devices to hit the market? A specific date wasn’t mentioned, but they did go on to reveal that the first batch will roll out during the 2010 holiday season. That’s a pretty long waiting, but on the bright side, at least that gives us more than enough time to get leaks of these new devices before they officially hits store shelves across the globe.
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