Windows Phone 7 sounds promising, but…

Microsoft light on enterprise details of new mobile platform

Industry analysis by expert Joanie Wexler, plus links to the day's wireless news headlines

Microsoft Monday announced its Windows Phone 7 Series, a revamped version of its Windows Mobile platform that the company says organizes Web services, applications and data dynamically around the preferences and priorities of each individual user.

The platform has a simple, streamlined interface with three buttons -- Start, Search and Back. "Start" takes you to six main "hubs", which can be thought of as "super-icons with connections to the Internet," said Joe Belfiore, Microsoft's vice president, Windows Phone, during the launch at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

The best of Mobile World Congress 2010

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Microsoft Monday announced its Windows Phone 7 Series, a revamped version of its Windows Mobile platform that the company says organizes Web services, applications and data dynamically around the preferences and priorities of each individual user.

The platform has a simple, streamlined interface with three buttons -- Start, Search and Back. "Start" takes you to six main "hubs", which can be thought of as "super-icons with connections to the Internet," said Joe Belfiore, Microsoft's vice president, Windows Phone, during the launch at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

The best of Mobile World Congress 2010

The company describes these super-icons as "live tiles" that show dynamic updates about the user's favorite people, applications, mail system and so forth on the phone's home page. The devices, for example, integrate with social networking sites through the "People" hub to reveal a BFF's most recent updates and allow the user to post to social networking sites in one step.

The platform might serve as a fairly respectable integrated personal-work phone, merging the likes of Outlook, SharePoint, Bing, Zune, XBoxLive and other Microsoft software all in one device. And Microsoft is working with a slew of mobile ecosystem partners, including nine handset makers and 11 mobile operators (the top four U.S. operators among them), which theoretically bodes well for coordination between hardware, software and network capacity requirements.

On the other hand, the first Windows Phone 7 handset won't be available until year-end, and Microsoft was light on specifics. In particular, not a word was said about enterprise capabilities and features. CEO Steve Ballmer said that the company would continue to invest in Windows Mobile 6.5, the company's existing mobile platform, but that Windows Phone 7 "is a whole new generation" of mobile platform for the company. So assumptions can't really be made about enterprise mobility management and security capabilities based on the older platform.

Hopefully, we will learn more when Microsoft hosts its MIX10 developers conference in Las Vegas in March.

Read more about wireless & mobile in Network World's Wireless & Mobile section.

Joanie Wexler is an independent networking technology writer/editor in Silicon Valley.