Microsoft Promises Me-First Experience With Windows Phone 7

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For Ballmer and Microsoft, the new Phone 7 is a bold gamble: a completely reworked mobile OS for which Microsoft essentially went back to the drawing board from previous mobile OS platforms.

Traction in the smartphone OS space has become something of a white whale for Microsoft, which has steadily lost ground to a number of platforms, including Apple, with its juggernaut iPhone, and Google, whose increasingly popular, open-source Android OS is now seen on a small galaxy of hot smartphones and other mobile devices. According to researcher Canalys, Microsoft had a 5.5 percent share of the smartphone OS market, while Apple and especially Android have both continued to make gains.

A Look At The Latest Devices

The Windows Phone 7 interface combines large text and tile-like buttons, much like what appears on Microsoft's Zune media player. What users will find is a series of "hubs," which loosely organize how users store contacts, information and functions in specific areas, including for people, for business, for pictures and for games. The functionality within each is smart, explained Joe Belfiore, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Windows phone program, who demonstrated everything from search functions activated by voice, to command upload of pictures to Facebook, to a quirky, one-touch function that lets users tell fellow meeting attendees they're running late, to a customizable avatar.

Belfiore said that "hundreds of thousands" of developers were at work on apps for the Windows Phone 7 devices. He added that copy-and-paste will come to Windows Phone 7 in early 2011.

"Everybody should be able to look at a Windows phone and say, 'I can represent me with this device,'" Ballmer said.

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