According to WinRumors, based on some close sources, Microsoft may have plans to announce new flexible hardware specifications. Before you get excited and expect better hardware specifications, that’s not the case here. By “flexible” Microsoft has a means of allowing manufacturers to develop cheaper phones to compete with such devices like Google’s Android. The only specifics as of now are that manufacturers will be allowed to use “cheaper components” to bring overall cost down.
Nokia is expected to be the first to adopt these new specifications, as they are expected to release devices later this year. An announcement about these specifications is anticipated at MIX ’11 this week, along with a plethora of other WP7 announcements.
Although there are no clues on what these low-end specifications might be, we can definitely speculate. It’s easy to doubt that cheaper components are all that will be allowed. There are definite possibilities of lower quality camera, no flash, and even smaller screen requirements.
What do you think would qualify as a cheaper Windows Phone 7 device?
Makes sense. Then again, you can get a Samsung Focus for $50. Where’s the 4G “soup to nuts” model? That’s what’s missing. Give me the HTC Thunderbolt running WP7.
I just really hope it’s so low end that it will be allowed to run on my touch pro 2 especially since I overclock the cpu to 787….Don’t get me wrong here the touch pro 2 has very decent hardware so I’m going to keep my fingers and toes crossed on this one….
@Christopher Think of Europe, we can and do buy phones for real market prices not only with a contract.
Really low end? Isn’t bad enough our phones only have a 5mp camera no front facing camera and non compatible to 4g. How is a device lower then that going to compete with the evo, thunderbolt or the upcoming HTC sensation