Andrew Lees, President of Microsoft Windows Phone Division, took the stage at the 2011 Worldwide Partner Conference to talk about the future of Windows. Of course, being EverythingWM.com we will bring you the details that matter most about Windows Phone. Below we provide some great snippents of Andrew Lees’ presentation at the WPC 2011.
And, in fact, if you look even at the price of smartphones, a year ago all smartphones cost over $400 when they left their hardware manufacturer. Today, they’re down to about $200, and next year, a smartphone that can run something like Windows Phone 7 will actually be down to $100 to $150. So, you’re seeing a dramatic price reduction.
Andrew Lees states the above after mentioning how, when they showed off the new motherboard that will run Windows 8, you can have an entire computer system on a single chip now. Those same chips will not only be used in computers and laptops, but because of their small size will also be used in smartphones and more. The reduction of size in the chips and less material use will bring reduced prices of components all across the board. With a system on a single chip you pay much less than for a system that involves various pieces of hardware.
You see if you looked at the update that we’re providing to Windows Phone this year, we include a new browser. It’s Internet Explorer 9. It’s the same technology that we have on the PC. It’s not similar. It’s the same. So, we can take the advantages that we provide on the PC and immediately leapfrog and provide those across different types of devices.
So, for a phone the strategy here is not to provide a business phone, or a consumer phone, but to have them all be the same thing. There’s only one thing. And so there’s a few key things that we’re delivering with our phone strategy. The first one is that we need to provide what end users desire and what they require. These personal scenarios like music and games, and communications, personal communications, social networking, build them into the phone, but also enabling a line of business solutions, business productivity, getting access to information inside of your company. And we may need to make sure that it works with the existing infrastructure and we provide the same tools for you to provide solutions to customers.
Lees then continues, referring to the common user interface across devices that will be provided to the customer. With Windows Phone 7 being the pioneer software, Windows 8 will build on it as well as Xbox and other future devices. All with a common interface, all with a common experience and sharing capabilities. Microsoft is also making it their number one goal to provide what the customer desires first then build on it.
Continue reading to find out about new Windows Phone devices coming this Fall at different price points, including some reveal images. These new reveal images include new Samsung, ZTE, Fujitsu and Acer devices.
There will be a whole new range of phones that are available this fall around “Mango” at different price points, with different features, particularly from the partners that we have already been working with, Samsung, HTC, and LG. But I’m also very excited about the partnership that we announced in February with Nokia, and this is where they’re going to move to exclusively rely on Windows Phone as their platform.
Just to put this context, they sold 100 million smartphones over the last 12 months. And they’re going to transition that from Symbian over to Windows Phone. They’ve announced that the first phones are going to be available this year, and they’re going to move into huge volume into 2012. So, having them 100 percent dedicated to Windows Phone for their smartphones is an important milestone.
And yet, also, OEMs are continuing to line up behind Windows Phone. We recently announced that Acer, Fujitsu, and ZTE are providing Windows Phones this fall. They will, again, fill out different countries, different form factors, and different price points. So, to take a look at some of those devices in a sneak peek, but also to take a look at the vast array of different devices, I would like to introduce Steve Guggenheimer, who is going to take us through the world of Windows that you’ll be seeing this year.
You can jump over to the Microsoft article which contains a text version of Andrew Lees’ entire presentation.
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