It’s all been happening in the past few days in Barcelona, at the Mobile World Congress 2011. HTC have unleashed enough mobile phones to keep us going for years to come, Nokia and Microsoft got together much to many people’s disappointment, and now Windows Phone 7 has had the treatment with a slew of announcements for new features coming soon.
For the socialites, Facebook is being joined by Twitter in being integrated into Windows Phone 7 at the OS level in the People hub. For the business folks, SkyDrive storage is coming to the Office application on the phone. Networks such as Sprint and Verizon in the US will be able to carry WP7 devices when CDMA network support is added; and for everyone who’s currently got a device, the first major update has been given a release date: early March.
From a developer’s point of view, there’s also a couple of interesting enhancements planned for Windows Phone 7 through 2011. First of all, IE 9 will be making an appearance on the platform. Microsoft are claiming that the standards support we (finally) see in IE 9 on the desktop will be pushed out to Windows Phone 7. On top of this, the hardware acceleration features will also be moved over - this means we may see a performance boost on mobile similar to what we see on the desktop with the IE 9 trials.
Microsoft also took the opportunity to have a bash at the iPad browser, WebKit, and – it seems – any browser with nightly builds on their IE blog.
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