14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has gone to Europe this week, to attend the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, where it has already made a series of announcements related to its Windows Phone platform.
Two of the company’s partners announced new mobile phones today, namely Nokia and ZTE. The handsets, Nokia Lumia 610 and ZTE Orbit, will arrive on shelves in the second quarter of the year.
The new devices are meant to bring Windows Phone to new market segments (the Lumia 610 is priced under EUR 200), and were made official with a new version of the mobile platform on board.
Microsoft calls this new operating system release the “enhanced Windows Phone 7.5 Mango,” but it is, in fact, none other than the Tango platform that we’ve all been waiting for since fall.
To ensure that applications offer compatibility for handsets running under Tango, which can feature only 256MB of RAM, Microsoft also made available for download an updated version of its Windows Phone SDK.
It is only a technical preview at the moment, but it should provide developers with the possibility to start changing their applications to offer support for more devices than before.
Additionally, Microsoft announced the availability of its Windows Phone Marketplace in 23 new consumer markets. The total number of countries in which the app store is available went up to 63.
“We recently enabled Windows Phone Marketplace in Argentina, Indonesia, Malaysia, Peru and the Philippines,” Joe Belfiore, VP, Windows Phone product management, explains in a blog post.
“Today we’re announcing that in the coming month we plan to extend Marketplace to customers in 23 more markets, including; Bahrain, Bulgaria, China, Costa Rica, Croatia, Estonia, Iceland, Iraq, Israel, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Thailand, Turkey, UAE, Ukraine, Venezuela and Vietnam.”
Overall, the expanded availability of the Marketplace translates into an increase of around 60 percent in the total addressable market for Windows Phone, Belfiore continues.
The Redmond-based software giant also works with partner companies to ensure that developers in markets where the App Hub is not yet available could publish their apps in the Marketplace via the Global Publisher Program.
There are also the said enhancements that Windows Phone has seen, which translate into “a great customer experience on lower cost phones,” as Belfiore puts it.
“For instance we improved our paging support to enable apps to automatically take advantage of more memory than is physically on the device. Our approach is balanced to provide the greatest amount of application compatibility with the least possible overall performance impact,” he notes.
Also today, Microsoft has announced the availability of a beta flavor of their Skype for Windows Phone application. The final release is expected to become available in April.
