News on Mobile Phone :Big week for Microsoft – Launch partners confirmed and more

This week the mobile wars has started to get even more interesting as Microsoft begin to gain momentum with it’s all or nothing approach to refocusing its mobile arm.
To start they have just revealed a …

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This week the mobile wars has started to get even more interesting as Microsoft begin to gain momentum with it’s all or nothing approach to refocusing its mobile arm.

To start they have just revealed a total of no less than 5 initial manufacturers to launch WP7S handsets for launch, Greg Sullivan announced today the confirmed hardware partners. HTC are there, as are Samsung, LG, Asus and Dell. One of the launch devices is a QWERTY slider and there’ll apparently be five handsets from each one of these manufacturers by the end of 2010.

During a chat with “LG Pacific” Greg commented on the opposition:

We will offer the best aspects of Android and the best of the iPhone, giving users the flexibility of different form factors, but with the rigidity of apps that are guaranteed to work on every device that is out there. By the time we will launch, we won’t have to worry about stealing customers from other operating systems, there will a new wave of smartphone users to embrace for us to still be successful

Now at this point you may think Microsoft are easily the weakest int he game, but with the folding of the Kin project and the backing of the world largest software company they certainly know how to turn things around (just look as Windows 7).

There are talks that th first handsets will ship with Qualcomm’s snapdragon chips running at 1.5Ghz, which is dual core, proper multitasking. Interested yet?

Finances

You’d be excused for thinking that Microsoft are not doing well in the entire software / mobile phone world with Apple stealing the limelight at every possibly opportunity however yesterday they posted 22% increase in revenue on the same quarter this time last year.

This quarter’s record revenue reflects the breadth of our offerings and our continued product momentum,”

said Peter Klein, chief financial officer.

The revenue growth, combined with our ongoing cost discipline, helped us achieve another quarter of margin expansion

Things have never looked better at Redmond.

Mobile Evangelism

There is also talk that Bullmer is taking a unique approach at breeding on the ground real world users, and quickly and organically creating a large and diverse application library.

All 90,000 Microsoft employees will be given a Windows Phone 7 Series  mobile phone before launch day, totally free of charge. The idea is viral is best and just word of mouth and general brand awareness will lead to an increase in sales.

There could be something in this.

However a few strings are attached, yesterday a memo was leaked from mobile chief Andy Lees which sets out Redmond’s expectations that employees should “evangelize” the product at every single opportunity, setting aside spare time before launch to develop apps. It’s not compulsory, but they’d really appreciate it. And I think that may work, after all they really appreciate their jobs too.

Interesting to say the least.

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