So, what does it mean? In Windows Phone, Microsoft tried to offer functionality as built-in features giving faster and more convenient access to those features accordingly. While Apple through the iOS offers functionality as an app. However, this approach has been used by Apple since the first time iPhone launched. And seems that Apple has been doing great job on this if we looking at the App Store.

Well this fact really gives an impression as if Windows Phone has better features set overall compared to iOS. But at the end, it’s the market who will judge which one has the better offer.  So, who do you think is better?

[via: winphone7.info]

Facing Apple’s iOS and App Store successful assistance in helping iPhone and iPad to gain shares in the smartphone, tablet PC and even PC market, while Google has also been working aggressively on developing operating systems and establishing its own supply chain alliance, Microsoft plans to copy its branding strategy from product lines such as Xbox 360, Zune, Kin smartphone and TV, to compete in the tablet PC segment.

Microsoft which has been known for it’s success in PC-related markets also own self-branded products like Xbox 360, Zune media player, Kin smartphone and own-brand TVs. However, among those products, Xbox 360 is probably the only one that has achieved success.

Well, it’s really interesting to see what Microsoft can do to compete with Apple and Google in tablets market especially the hardware design and the OS it self. Is it going to adopt it’s Windows Phone 7 UI design similar to Google does with Android, or it’s going to be completely new things.

Microsoft officially announces the Skype acquisition for $8.5 billion on Tuesday. With this acquisition, Microsoft will bring Skype integration to Microsoft devices including Xbox and Kinnect, Windows Phone and other Windows devices. Microsoft also will continue to support clients on non-Microsoft platforms.

Skype which is currently has 270 million users will be a new business division within Microsoft with the Skype CEO Tony Bates as the president of the Microsoft Skype Division.

Read the full press release of Microsoft Skype Acquisition.

REDMOND, Wash., and LUXEMBOURG – May 10, 2011 – Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: “MSFT”) and Skype Global S.à r.l today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Microsoft will acquire Skype, the leading Internet communications company, for $8.5 billion in cash from the investor group led by Silver Lake. The agreement has been approved by the boards of directors of both Microsoft and Skype.

The acquisition will increase the accessibility of real-time video and voice communications, bringing benefits to both consumers and enterprise users and generating significant new business and revenue opportunities. The combination will extend Skype’s world-class brand and the reach of its networked platform, while enhancing Microsoft’s existing portfolio of real-time communications products and services.

With 170 million connected users and over 207 billion minutes of voice and video conversations in 2010, Skype has been a pioneer in creating rich, meaningful connections among friends, families and business colleagues globally. Microsoft has a long-standing focus and investment in real-time communications across its various platforms, including Lync (which saw 30 percent revenue growth in Q3), Outlook, Messenger, Hotmail and Xbox LIVE.

Skype will support Microsoft devices like Xbox and Kinect, Windows Phone and a wide array of Windows devices, and Microsoft will connect Skype users with Lync, Outlook, Xbox Live and other communities. Microsoft will continue to invest in and support Skype clients on non-Microsoft platforms.

“Skype is a phenomenal service that is loved by millions of people around the world,” said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. “Together we will create the future of real-time communications so people can easily stay connected to family, friends, clients and colleagues anywhere in the world.”

Skype will become a new business division within Microsoft, and Skype CEO Tony Bates will assume the title of president of the Microsoft Skype Division, reporting directly to Ballmer.

“Microsoft and Skype share the vision of bringing software innovation and products to our customers,” said Tony Bates. “Together, we will be able to accelerate Skype’s plans to extend our global community and introduce new ways for everyone to communicate and collaborate,” Bates said.

“Tony Bates has a great track record as a leader and will strengthen the Microsoft management team. I’m looking forward to Skype’s talented global workforce bringing its insights, ideas and experience to Microsoft,” Ballmer said.

Speaking on behalf of the investor group that sold Skype to Microsoft, Egon Durban, managing director of Silver Lake, said: “We are thrilled with Skype’s transformation during the period of our ownership and grateful for the extraordinary commitment of its management team and employees. We are excited about Skype’s long-term future with Microsoft, as it is poised to become one of the world’s most dynamic and comprehensive communications platforms.”

Founded in 2003, Skype was acquired by eBay in September 2005, and then acquired by an investment group led by Silver Lake in November 2009. Skype has made impressive progress over the past 18 months under Silver Lake’s leadership, increasing monthly calling minutes by 150 percent, developing new revenue streams and strategic partnerships, acquiring the intellectual property powering its peer-to-peer network, and recruiting an outstanding senior management team.

Other members of the selling investor group led by Silver Lake include eBay International AG, CPP Investment Board, Joltid Limited in partnership with Europlay Capital Advisors; and Andreessen Horowitz.

The acquisition is subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. The parties hope to obtain all required regulatory clearances during the course of this calendar year.

About Skype
Skype is communications software whose purpose is to break down barriers to communication. With an Internet-connected device, families, friends and colleagues can get together for free with messaging, voice and video. At low cost, they can also call landlines or mobiles virtually anywhere in the world. Skype has recently introduced group video, allowing groups of more than two people to do things together whenever they’re apart.

Founded in 2003 and based in Luxembourg. Skype can be downloaded onto computers, mobile phones and other connected devices for free.

Microsoft will held a Windows Phone event on May 24th, 2011 in New Your City. On the invitation sent out to the press, it’s clearly said that Microsoft will unveil the next major release of Windows Phone handsets. So we’ll likely to see some new devices from previous Windows Phone 7 manufacturers like Samsung, HTC, LG or Dell. However, i doubt that Nokia will be one of them. A similar event will also be held on the same date in London.

Some other sources believe that Microsoft will also make the “Mango” or Windows Phone 7.5 official during this event. As many of you know that lately there have been many sites talking about changes and improvements including new features Microsoft will bring to the Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango” updates. Those are include Internet Explorer 9 with an integrated Twitter expereience, better multitasking and some new apps like Angry Birds, Skype and Spotify.

The other features that Microsoft will likely add to the updates are the new Bing features like Bing Audio for identifying music, Bing Vision for scanning bar codes, and voice-guided turn-by-turn navigation with Bing Maps.

Last but not least, there’s also info that Microsoft is on the process to acquire Skype for $7 billion which supposed to be announced officiallly today. So, this May 24th event is going to be big and glorious for Microsoft and Windows Phone 7 fans.

Mobile apps store no doubt is a multi-million business and the growth still doesn’t seem to stop yet. Apple with it’s App Store and Google with it’s Android Market are two of the leaders on this market. While others including Microsoft are still continuing to grow as more apps coming to their store. And many efforts have been taken in order to leverage the number of apps in their markets.

For example BlackBerry, instead of encouraging developers to build new apps for BlackBerry products, they built some kind of tools or system which enable Android Apps to run on BlackBerry PlayBook Tablets. At the other side, Microsoft released a new iPhone/iOS to Windows Phone 7 API mapping tools along with complete guides. So, if you’re an iPhone developers but don’t have expertise in developing apps for Windows Phone 7, you can still expand your apps by using these tools and guides.

You can find all these stuffs at http://windowsphone.interoperabilitybridges.com/

There are couple of things available on this package:

A New iPhone/iOS to Windows Phone 7 API mapping tool – with this tool, you as a developer can grab your apps, pick out the iOS API calls, and quickly lookup the equivalent classes, methods and notification events in WP7. This also comes with C# sample codes and API documentation for both platforms.

Window Phone 7 Guide for iPhone Application Developers – this white paper consists of 90+ pages guides organized in 8 chapters and likely to be growing later on.

A Series of “developer stories” – here you can see developers sharing their experience porting iPhone applications to Windows Phone and the story behind that.

A compilation of the key resources you need to get started.

So, if you’re an iPhone developers doesn’t matter your apps are free or paid, popular or not, i guess these tools and resources are worth to try and who knows the Windows Phone 7 version of your apps would be better than the iPhone version.

[via: WindowsPhone Blog]

Looks like Microsoft is now working their best efforts to compete with Android. After joined forces with Nokia few months ago, now Microsoft together with RIM announced a strategic mobile partnership. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer today at BlackBerry World 2011 announced that future BlackBerry devices will use Bing and Bing Maps as default mobile search and mapping solutions.

Well, Bing is not a bad search engine at all and surely some people even prefer it over Google. However, this probably not a good news for some BlackBerry users who prefer Google especially if RIM don’t give an option to switch between them if they really want.

The latest update from Windows Phone team said that the Windows Phone Marketplace now host more than 9,000 apps and games from over 32,000 registered developers and continue delivering an average of 100 new apps every day. Not a huge number though, but surely it shows a consistent growth and soon will reach the 10,000 milestone. Along with this update, the Windows Phone team also announced a new Global Publisher Program as well as few policy shift.

If you compare these numbers with the statistic on WP7Applist website, more or less it shows similar result. WP7Applist currently tracking 9485 apps with 129 apps are updated on average each day. It also reported that 32% of the apps are available for free while the average price is $2.16.

The Windows Phone Team also shared couple of facts related to Trial Use and Ad Control on apps. According to the team, Trials result in higher sales which generates 10 times more revenue compared to paid apps that don’t include trial functionality. While on the other side the Ad Control also has been a good success for developers in making ad supported Windows Phone 7 apps.

In this conditions, Windows Phone users will get the same browsing experience with the Desktop users including great HTML5 support that takes full advantage of the hardware for great performance. With the same core engine, it’s also a great news for developers as they will no longer worry on coding for desktop and mobile separately.

During the event, Joe Belfiore from Microsoft also showed the popular Fishtank demo on Windows Phone 7 which runs HTML5 code compared to the iPhone 4 Safari. The result clearly showed that the IE9 on Windows Phone 7 ran the HTML5 codes extremely smooth compared to the iPhone 4.

Moreover, Dean Hachamovitch, Corporate Vice President, Internet Explorer on IE9 Mobile also said the following statement.

Quality, hardware-accelerated HTML5 on mobile devices will make the mobile Web significantly better. Developers will be able to use the same markup to deliver great interoperable HTML5 experiences on mobile—a for example H.264 video on Windows, iOS, and Android devices, and great CSS3, SVG, Canvas, ECMAScript 5, and WOFF support. Consumers will be able to enjoy these great experiences with great hardware-accelerated performance as well as security and privacy, using Tracking Protection on their Windows Phones.

So, this will be another slaps for Apple to make better improvements on their next products. I just wonder why Microsoft made the comparison with iPhone instead of Android. Any idea how this Fishtank demo performs on Android?

[via: IEBlog]

Microsoft is expected to unveil the second batch of WP7 smartphones at the upcoming MWC 2011 trade fair with the showcase including Asustek Computer’s first WP7 model, the E600, the sources noted.

Currently HTC, Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics (LGE) and Dell are few of manufacturers that have already launched Windows Phone 7 devices. And in order to expand their market and increase the demand, Microsoft is now soliciting China-based manufacturers including Lenovo, Huawei Technologies and ZTE to make WP7 devices targeting the China Market.

[via: Digitimes]

This update is reportedly will be bigger and bring a lot of new features and improvements making it such a Windows Phone 7.5 OS.

The Mango update is supposedly bigger than the January and/or February update, according to my sources. Mango is more like a Windows Phone OS 7.5 — and may even be named that when it debuts.

According to the source, the Mango update will bring Silverlight run-time and HTML5 support to Windows Phone 7 including the browser plug-in, Far Eastern language support and other features and functionality.

What we had earlier, the copy and paste will come first while during the socond update Microsoft will introduce enhanced developer controls for applications, access to programming interfaces that will allow for greater multi-tasking, in-app downloads and better customization.

So if all of these stuffs are just a “minor” updates, we really excited to see what the “major” updates will be. As for you, what kind of features would you like to see on the next Windows Phone 7 updates? Shall Microsoft follow Android or iPhone as their benchmark?

[via: ZDNet]