WindowsPhone7.5: How it has been changed to the revolution…

Microsoft released Windows Phone 7.5 smartphone OS at the end of last September and it has been designed to make revolution in smartphone world. Although according to eMarketer, smartphone holds 38% of the mobile users, it is a major competitive area in the business and technology world. In today’s context, people are so much interested about the OS of the smartphone rather than the hardware specifications of it when they buying new smartphone. Therefore, there is a great war between the major mobile OS venders such as Apple, Google and Microsoft. With introducing Windows Phone 7.5, Microsoft is going to make big challenge to the Google Android and Apple iOS.

International Data Corporation (IDC) released its latest data for world’s smartphone operating system market share using the Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker. This data express the current market share of smartphone OS and the some forecasts about the future of it. At the end of 2011 Android holds 38.9% of market share while Windows Phone holds 3.8% of it. However in the 2015 Windows Phone will increase market share by 16.5% and Android will increase it only by 4.9%. As you can see in following table Windows Phone is going to keep annual growth of over 82% and this numbers tell us the future revolution of the smartphone OS market that Microsoft going to make. The mango or the Windows Phone 7.5 should be a first step of that and there is no doubt about that Windows will be the top of the mobile platform too in the near future.


It’s very interesting study about how Microsoft prepare for this huge challenge and I’m going to discuss them in the rest of this article with the technology as well as business aspects.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer had announced next Windows Phone OS update includes over 500 new cool features before few months to the release of Windows Phone 7.5. As he said, it has come with really new features which have been missed to Google and Apple when design their latest versions of Android and iOS. Tie Messaging with threads, Multitasking and App Suspension, Office and SkyDrive and Visual Voicemail are the some of the really interesting features which are introduced with Windows Phone 7.5.



Tie Messaging with Threads
With mango you can now tie contacts Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts to their address book listings, and so all communications with those contacts via the popular social networking services are available in one central location, along with texts and e-mail messages.

Multitasking and App Suspension
Windows Phone Mango is finally adding some multitasking features, and it looks good. Mango presents background application as scrollable cards that actually show a screenshot of the app as it was when last used. Furthermore, Windows Phone 7 will suspend and instantly resume apps in the background. This is a real improvement for Microsoft as users would previously have to relaunch apps each time.

Office and SkyDrive
In Windows Phone Mango, users will have the option of accessing cloud documents in SkyDrive right from the Office hub. The excellent native Office suite will allow users to edit and synchronize their files on the device.

Visual Voicemail
In Mango, user will have a new column in the Phone app called voicemail where each message is available for listening. Since this is also part of the Windows Phone system, it has a familiar UI that most users will be comfortable with. That’s certainly more than we can say for most of the carrier-specific solutions

Since these features enhance user mobile experience and they make life easy, Window Phone will close to the smartphone customers with 7.5 version of it.



Mobile Application Market has widened while smartphones are becoming so popular. Therefore, it is good idea to look at in developer’s perspective how Microsoft has changed Windows Phone with mango to make things easy for mobile phone application developers. Microsoft released Windows Phone SDK 7.1 to develop application to the Windows Phone 7.5 and it provide new APIs and tools which give access to all the cool features of Windows Phone Mango OS to developers. Multi-targeting and App Compatibility, Multitasking, Fast Application Switching, Live Tiles, Silverlight and XNA Integration, Sensor API and Visual Basic Support are some of new enhancement in Windows Phone SDK. In addition this with mango Microsoft is not only improving the way we merchandise apps within their Marketplace, they are also exposing apps as a part of their customers everyday experiences and they introduced more ways for consumers to find app such as dynamic app search with Bing. These new feature definitely will help to popular mango among developers.

While doing this kind of technical enhancements in Windows Phone OS, Microsoft is making business background to achieve their target. Partnership with Nokia will be the one of major fact that ensures the market growth of Windows Phone and ownership of Skype also will help them to make mango popular. Moreover, three new hardware manufacturers have signed on to build Windows Phone 7.5 devices, including ZTE, Acer and Fujitsu while HTC, Samsung and Dell are also Windows Phone partners. Therefore, these business strategies also will support to Microsoft for making revolution in the smartphone OS market.