Microsoft Prepares to Push Windows Mobile for Phones
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Microsoft is ready to expand its marketing for Windows Mobile. On Wednesday, the company said it has hired Todd Peters as corporate vice president of marketing for its Mobile Communications Business (MCB).
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Microsoft on Tuesday will announce new mobile management server for wireless access, management and security, while Palm and others will announce compatible Windows Mobile devices.
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With all the grumbling over Windows and its many shortcomings, why would anyone want Microsoft&#39;s computer operating system to run their cell phone?
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Norwegian browser specialists Opera Software announce a version of their browser for Microsoft&#39;s Windows Mobile platform is forthcoming.
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Microsoft Corp. plans a launch this spring of its next- generation operating system for wireless devices, Windows Mobile 6, which is important for the company's efforts to grab market share beyond the desktop.
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Microsoft recently disclosed details about its new Windows Mobile 6 operating system for smartphones, which will be formally introduced at the 3GSM telecommunications conference in Barcelona this coming week. Major advances over earlier versions of Windows Mobile include better security, more accurate search capabilities, and more desktop-like functionality. Enhancements include the ability to edit Office documents, which can be especially important for business users on the go.
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Microsoft&#39;s new Mobile Device Manager faces a shortcoming because it is exclusive to Windows Mobile devices, but that might change, an executive said on Tuesday.Scott Horn, general manager at Microsoft&#39;s mobile and embedded device group, left the door open to potential future support for non-Windows Mobile devices.&quot;Today, we have nothing to announce,&quot; he said. &quot;But we&#39;re looking at it, we&#39;re thinking about it. Who knows what the future brings?&quot; Horn spoke during a press lunch at the CTIA Wireless IT and Entertainment conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.He mentioned that Microsoft has in the past licensed ActiveSync as a way to extend services to non-Microsoft devices.Microsoft introduced System Center Mobile Device Manager&#160;at the conference. The software lets IT administrators manage and secure Windows Mobile phones. Unlike some other management products on the market, including Nokia&#39;s Intellisync, it is compatible only with phones running the Windows Mobile operating system.AT&amp;T, which is supporting Mobile Device Manager, said there is inertia among IT administrators. IT managers are worried about security and management issues, said Mike Woodward, vice business marketing for AT&amp;T. He thinks that the software as well as the services from a new company,&#160;Enterprise Mobile, will spur more enterprise use of mobile phones. Woodward could not offer specifics about how it will support Mobile Device Manager or how exactly it will work with Enterprise Mobile.For now, the new software and the services from Enterprise Mobile, which help enterprises deploy and manage mobile phones, are designed for large businesses. Mobile Device Manager, expected to come out next year, could support as many as 5,000 users. Enterprise Mobile doesn&#39;t expect to begin thinking about serving smaller businesses for another 12 to 18 months because it will be focused on making sure it knows what large enterprises need, said Steve Moore, president of Enterprise Mobile.
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Microsoft built a custom Windows Mobile user interface for a new phone that T-Mobile USA expects to announce on Monday, evidence that Microsoft may be getting more serious about pursuing the consumer mobile market.The phone, built by HTC, will be the first in a line of phones from T-Mobile using the new Shadow brand, said David Sholkovitz, marketing manager at T-Mobile.While Microsoft has worked with operators to help modify the operating system to fit their needs, this project represented a new level of partnership, said Doug Smith, director of marketing for Microsoft&#39;s mobile communications business. &quot;I&#39;d say this was one of the deeper partner involvements we&#39;ve had on a new product,&quot; he said.The Shadow, which will hit stores on Wednesday, features a home screen that looks very different than other Windows Mobile phones. Users slide a wheel to navigate through icons on the screen that take them directly to e-mail, their music player and photos. The idea was to make it easier to use increasingly complicated phones, said Sholkovitz.The operator approached Microsoft about ways to alter the home screen in order to simplify it and prevent &quot;feature fatigue,&quot; he said. &quot;We wanted to create a product with the feature set that Windows Mobile products have but deliver it in a simple fashion that was user intuitive and icon based,&quot; he said.T-Mobile, Microsoft and HTC began working on the new user interface in November of last year. &quot;I think this was rare for [Microsoft],&quot; said Farah Houston, product development manager, T-Mobile. &quot;We had access to a lot of resources I don&#39;t think they normally make available. Microsoft is trying to show they&#39;re serious about the consumer market and this is what they&#39;re willing to do.&quot;Windows Mobile, which works in tandem with Exchange to push corporate e-mail to the phones, has a reputation primarily as an enterprise tool. T-Mobile hoped to avoid that image with the Shadow and the keyboard design is meant to help. &quot;When users see a full keyboard they think business and productivity,&quot; said Sholkovitz. &quot;So we made it a hidden slide-out keypad.&quot;During a keynote speech at the CTIA I.T. and Entertainment conference in San Francisco last week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer described what Microsoft thinks will attract consumers. &quot;Consumers will want phones that span all of their life personas,&quot; he said. &quot;My work life, my personal life, my life with my family, my life with my friends. People don&#39;t want to pull out multiple devices.&quot;Another Microsoft executive echoed a similar thought. &quot;We can do multiple things in parallel,&quot; said Scott Horn, general manager of Microsoft&#39;s mobile group, also speaking at CTIA. &quot;We can do both consumer and enterprise... You will see more devices appeal to the consumer side.&quot;The talk of consumer needs shows how the iPhone is likely affecting Microsoft&#39;s strategy, one analyst said. &quot;There&#39;s no doubt the success that Apple had with the iPhone in terms of appealing to the mainstream end user market as opposed to the business market has not gone unnoticed,&quot; said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Jupiter Research. &quot;Microsoft has built these devices to service and solve business needs but Microsoft understands the intersection of business and consumer.&quot;The declining price of Windows Mobile devices will make them more appealing to consumers, said Smith. The Shadow, as an example, will retail for $150 with a two-year voice and data contract. It will work with a new data plan from T-Mobile that costs $20 per month and includes unlimited data use and Wi-Fi access at T-Mobile hotspots.The phone will be displayed in T-Mobile stores along with other lower cost feature phones, not with the higher end smartphones, said Houston.Neither Microsoft nor T-Mobile would comment on intellectual-property ownership for the new software interface on the Shadow.
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U.S. software giant Microsoft  is  aiming to get its audio and video software into mobile phones  before it is beaten to the 650-million-handsets-a-year market  by rivals like Apple.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft Corp. said it has boosted the security mechanisms built into its newest mobile phone operating system, responding to the needs of business customers who will use the phones to access sensitive corporate data. One new feature inÂ Windows Mobile 6.0, the latest version of the software introduced on Monday, allows users to remotely wipe their device if it's stolen. Via a secure connection to their corporate Microsoft Exchange server, users can remotely delete content on the phone, including data stored on a removable storage card. Previously, only an IT administrator could schedule a remote wipe, said Marianne Roling, director of mobile embedded devices for Europe, Middle East and Africa for Microsoft, atÂ the 3GSM conferenceÂ in Barcelona. In addition, Windows Mobile 6.0 supports Windows Mobile Updates, a new policy similar to the security updates sent to PC Windows users. If a mobile virus surfaces, Microsoft will build a fix and work closely with operator partners who will send a message to users informing them that there's a security update. The message will ask users to approve the update before downloading. Most such security updates would be small files but it's up to the operator to decide if they'll charge end users for the bandwidth required to download it, said Roling. "If you are a customer of Vodafone and all your company's data is on your phone, guess how your customer loyalty will improve if Vodafone provides you with this." So far, few viruses have targeted mobile devices and those that have surfaced have failed to become widespread. However, mobile industry experts worry that as more users buy smartphones and begin downloading more online content, hackers may begin to target phone users. Microsoft's update service could work even for individuals who buy an unlocked phone independently of their operator, she said. That's because the operator can often detect remotely what type of phone the user has and so would be able to identify Windows Mobile users. Windows Mobile 6.0 also supports some new rights management features. Now, users will be able to view e-mails that are sent with protection that allows recipients to view but not print or forward the messages. Previous versions of the software prohibited users from reading such protected e-mails, said Roling.
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Microsoft's CEO shares his big plans in mobile software, and why he thinks the iPhone is "quite nice."
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The Palm 500 runs on Windows Mobile and likely will be sold by Vodafone.
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Windows Mobile will continue to power smartphones produced by Microsoft partners, Gates says.
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Microsoft is releasing a new application for delivering &quot;snippets&quot; of data to Windows Mobile devices, one of several announcements planned for the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Monday.Microsoft plans to announce that it will offer software for Windows Mobile users based on MSN Direct, a service it developed to deliver data snippets to watches. The new application displays small bits of information like weather, stocks and news on the home screen of the phone. &quot;This is an innovative take on how to get information in a glanceable way on handsets,&quot; said Brian Arbogast, vice president of mobile services at Microsoft.Windows Mobile users can download the application, which will initially be offered as a beta.Microsoft and its competitors Yahoo and Google are jockeying for lead position in the mobile market. Each is working to draw mobile users to their services in hopes of ultimately establishing a revenue stream from mobile advertising. So far, the market is relatively open.Microsoft also said it is offering a new software development kit that will give developers access to additional Microsoft mobile services protocols. With the new tools, Microsoft&#39;s software vendor partners will be able to build richer clients that access additional Windows Live for mobile capabilities. For example, a developer could make an application that lets a user click to record a voice clip and send it to an MSN Messenger buddy, even if the sender is using a Windows Mobile phone and the recipient has a Nokia S60 phone.&quot;These are rich and fun and engaging features in Messenger that we had on some of our top-end platforms that are now opened up through this protocol,&quot; said Arbogast.Microsoft also introduced a new program, Windows Live @mobile, aimed at making it easier for operators to quickly begin offering Windows Live and MSN mobile services across their device portfolios.While Windows Mobile has been seen primarily as a product for business users, Microsoft is increasingly trying to push it into the consumer market. &quot;This is about us really extending our focus to be, instead of predominantly on the work part of life, to be about delivering phones for your entire life,&quot; said Arbogast.Microsoft also recently hired a new marketing executive tasked with positioning Windows Mobile to appeal more to consumers.Still, Microsoft isn&#39;t shifting away from its business customer focus. It is stepping up its efforts to sell mobile products to small businesses. Through a new partnership, Brightstar and TechData will sell Windows Mobile phones to small and medium businesses in Europe. The companies will offer a portfolio of products and services to customers, including servers, devices, services and support.In the U.S., Microsoft said that Cbeyond, a provider of communications services for small businesses, will offer a new hosted Exchange e-mail service that supports mobile devices for small and medium businesses.
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Microsoft is considering opening up Mobile Device Manager to support devices that don't run the Windows Mobile operating system.
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In an effort to show wide support for its newest Windows Mobile operating system, Microsoft Corp. is highlighting several announcements from handset makers on Monday at 3GSM in Barcelona.
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Yahoo Inc. has added mobile  phones running Microsoft's Windows Mobile software to a growing  list of handsets from device makers who feature its services on  their phone screens.