Windows Mobile

Nokia's big push to re-establish itself in the modern smartphone world appears to be paying early dividends The company may have shipped as many as 1.3 million units of its Windows Phone Lumia handsets last year, says Bloomberg.

Surveying the usual range of analysts, Bloomberg found that forecasts varied from 800,000 to 2 million Lumia phones, with only one person estimating less than 1 million, resuling in an average of 1.3 million.

But those numbers refer to the number of units shipped to mobile carriers and retailers rather than actual sales to consumers. Sales to smartphone … Read more

Windows Phone buyers eyeing the Nokia Lumia 710 can now pick one up for free at Wal-Mart, with the usual two-year contract thrown in, of course.

The only Nokia Windows Phone currently available in the U.S., the 710 is being carried by T-Mobile, which has been selling it directly for $49.99. T-Mobile customers can choose from an assortment of plans with a variety of data options, ranging from 200 megabytes to 10 gigabytes per month.

Equipped with a 1.4-gigahertz Qualcomm processor, 512MB of RAM, a 5-megapixel camera, and 8GB of storage, the 710 offers a 3.7-inch … Read more

Betting heavily on Microsoft to revive its fortunes, Nokia is in a position to sell as many as 37 million Windows Phone handsets this year and 64 million in 2013, says a Morgan Stanley report cited by AllThingsD.

Of course, much of that forecast depends on just how hard Microsoft will work to promote its partnership with Nokia.

The two companies already reportedly plan to spend $20 million to market their new lineup. Nokia has been pushing its Lumia phones, with the 710 now available through T-Mobile, the 800 selling in Europe, and the LTE-compliant 900 sailing to the U.… Read more

Microsoft's Windows Phone will be the linchpin to drive a recovery for Nokia throughout 2012, says Credit Suisse analyst Kulbinder Garcha.

In an investor's note out yesterday, Garcha said that Nokia's focus on Windows Phone as its core OS will boost earnings and steady the company's market share.

Nokia has been the top handset seller for years. But its share of the smartphone market has slumped over the past year from around 33 percent to just 14 percent, trailing Apple and Samsung by a huge margin.

A boost from Windows Phone will help Nokia hang onto … Read more

Microsoft seems to have solved the mystery of the disappearing Windows Phone keyboard.

Just rolling out to select phones yesterday, the latest update to Windows Phone 7, known as build 8107, resolves a variety of issues, according to Microsoft. Chief among them is a fix for the vanishing keyboard, which has vexed many users of Windows Phone 7.5, aka Mango.

First spotting the glitch in October, users complained that their keyboard would either vanish in the middle of an e-mail or text message or simply fail to pop up when activated. At the time, Microsoft told CNET that it … Read more

Move over Siri. Windows Phone now has its own voice assistant, dubbed Ask Ziggy, and it seems to be a hit.

Except for some negative comments here and there, many reviewers on the MarketPlace page for the free app christened it with 4- and 5-star ratings, resulting in an average of 3.5 stars.

"Off to a great start," said one commenter. "As a proof of concept it's funny to see how Apple's 'amazing' interface can be rivaled by a single developer. Looking forward to future updates."

I ran a quick, informal competition between … Read more

Nearly a year and two months after its launch, Microsoft's Windows Phone Marketplace has hit a new milestone.

The collection of apps and games that run on Microsoft's Windows Phone devices now sits north of 50,000 applications, according to a count by the blog All About Windows Phone. More than a third of those were added in the past three months, and nearly 16 percent within the past 30 days, the site said.

In actuality, users have access to fewer than the 50,126 items on the store as of today, with about 6,000 apps having … Read more

Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system is trailing far behind Android in sales, and a former Redmond employee believes he knows why that is.

Charlie Kindel, a former Windows Phone honcho who left Microsoft earlier this year to launch his own startup, wrote in a blog post yesterday that "Windows Phone is superior" to Android. However, the issue for Microsoft is that it has an "impedance mismatch with the carriers and device manufacturers while Google's approach reduces friction with carriers and device manufacturers at the expense of end users."

Rough translation: Microsoft is … Read more

Next year is one of those years that can't come soon enough for Microsoft.

It's not that 2011 was a particularly difficult year. The company posted record revenue for the fiscal year that ended June 30. And its 2-year-old PC operating system, Windows 7, hit 500 million copies sold, further embedding it as the most widely used operating system in the world. But 2011 had few big product launches at the company, Office 365 and Internet Explorer 9 notwithstanding.

Next year will be altogether different. Microsoft is prepping the big kahuna of its product arsenal, Windows 8. The … Read more