14 DAY TRIAL // Just months after its launch, Windows Phone 7 received the first taste of an upcoming update designed to kick the mobile platform up a notch.
A select pool of Windows Phone 7 device owners can already download and deploy a refresh for the OS which, as Microsoft promised, offers new capabilities, including copy and paste functionality.
Copy & paste is certainly a missing piece in the Windows Phone 7 puzzle, especially considering that rival platforms such as Android and iOS have featured this option for customers for quite some time.
The last thing that the Redmond company wants is to appear that WP7 is lagging in any aspect compared to competitors, especially as new Windows Phone 7 devices have yet to really gain traction with consumers.
A range of third-party reports indicate that the version of Windows Phone gets pushed up to 7.0.7338.0 from 7.0.7004.0, however, it appears that for the time being only Samsung Taylor Windows Phone 7 devices get the refresh.
The Samsung Taylor is a Windows 7 developer device, and as such it is not commercially available to customers.
Microsoft already pointed to the start of 2011 for the general availability of the update, but offered little additional details to the public thus far.
The software giant is expected to provide more information come CES 2011 in early January of the coming year, but this detail has also yet to be confirmed by the company.
Still, the update is certainly a big step forward in terms of the evolution of Windows mobile platforms.
Prior to Windows Phone 7 users were essentially stuck with the feature-set of a Windows Mobile version until Microsoft delivered a new release. And as a general rule, the company failed to rush in any manner the launch of any fresh Windows Mobile operating systems.
Microsoft should ma;ke sure to make updates such as the early 2011 refresh more of the norm rather than the exception for Windows Phone 7. The company did promise to do just that, and now it needs to deliver.
Catalyzing a fast evolutionary pace for Windows Phone 7, with new features and functionality being introduced regularly, namely at just a few months rather than at over a year’s time, would make the platform stand out from the crowd.
Of course, new functionality in the context in which the core of the platform does not suffer breaking changes, but instead provides a constant to keep the ecosystem of devices and applications running, rather than introduce the level of fragmentation customers can see with Android devices.