14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft's upcoming Windows Phone 7 operating system is gradually turning into one of the most anticipated mobile product of the year. The platform was announced officially during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and should land on devices during the fourth quarter of the ongoing year, with rumors suggesting that October would be the closest time frame. We already had the chance to take a look at some of the most important features of the platform, but it was only recently that the most comprehensive Windows Phone 7 video walkthrough emerged.
Greg Sullivan, Senior Product Manager for Windows Phone over at Microsoft is the one to walk us through the long list of features the upcoming mobile operating system should arrive on the market with. According to the guys over at pocketnow, who brought to light the four videos embedded below (25 minutes in total), all of these features are being demonstrated on a Samsung Taylor handset, one of the developer devices that started shipping to application builders around the world last week.
It seems that the operating system would indeed arrive on the market with a series of customization features, though handset vendors won't be able to modify the entire interface, just as they did before with Windows Mobile. Basically, this means that HTC would indeed be able to add its own customization elements within Windows Phone 7's interface, just as it promised recently, though we should not expect for the familiar HTC Sense solution to be included into the mix. Moreover, it seems that the customizations that OEMs would be allowed to make do not refer only to the Windows Phone 7 UI.
Each device running under the platform would have to have a minimum of hardware specs, but handset vendors would be able to add higher capabilities so as to make the phones more appealing. “You can't break out promise to customers about what it means to be Windows Phone but you can add a whole bunch of stuff,” is what Greg Sullivan says, and what Microsoft announced before. As previously said, this lower limit Microsoft imposed for upcoming devices should result in a wide range of high-end, highly-appealing Windows Phone 7 devices launched on the market.
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