14 DAY TRIAL // Redmond-based software giant Microsoft has been rumored quite a few times before to plan launching on the market its own mobile phone, running, of course, on its own mobile operating system, and now the rumors are back, with new details on the matter, it seems. The company unveiled at the beginning of this week a new version of its mobile client, called Windows Phone 7 OS, and it seems that we'll see a Microsoft phone running under the platform launched in 2011.
According to a recent article on thestreet, Microsoft has teamed with computer maker Asus for the manufacturing of the device, and the duo is expected to come to the market with a candybar touchscreen-enabled handset in 2011. The news site notes that the info comes from “Northeast Securities analyst Ashok Kumar, who talked with Microsoft's suppliers and design partners,” and that the handset was expected to arrive this year, but it has been pushed back to early 2011.
The first mobile phones running under the new Windows Phone 7 OS will arrive on shelves before the end of the ongoing year, though this is not the case with the device made by Microsoft and Asus, it seems. There are no details on what caused the delay, but the mobile phone should arrive as “the next Apple iPhone killer or Google Android annihilator,” and there are chances that the issues were related with the software on the handset.
“Like Google and Apple before it, Microsoft obviously sees the fast-growing mobile phone market as a land-grab opportunity that's far too important to watch from a distance,” the news site notes. Indeed, powerful companies like Google and Apple stepped up on this road, and most of you should know by now that they are successful already. Google's Android OS is pre-loaded on a wide range of devices on the market, and the company even started selling mobile phones itself, via a web store.
However, Microsoft said plenty of times before that it did not intend to launch its own handset, and that it was only in the licensing business when it came to the mobile phone industry, so these rumors might prove false in the end. Not to mention that the company already stated that it would be involved more in the manufacturing process of Windows Phone 7 Series devices, and there are chances that the same applies to the Microsoft-Asus collaboration, especially since Asus already brought to the market phones running under the Windows Mobile OS.