Mobile World Congress is one of the biggest event in the mobile industry’s calendar which it is no surprise that Windows Phone made an appearance at the event as well. In fact, Microsoft has organized a press conference at Barcelona last night that focuses on the operating system and sure enough, there were several interesting announcement from the Redmond giant.
Among them is the announcement of nine new partners for Windows Phone. Some of these names are actually might be familiar to many of you guys out there.
These names include Foxconn, Gionee, JSR, Karbonn, Lava (Xolo), Lenovo, LG, Longcheer and ZTE. LG and ZTE are not exactly new to Windows Phone since they have previously developed Windows Phone 7 devices. Since the rest of the field came from China and India, it seems to me that this signals Microsoft’s intention to increase Windows Phone presence in emerging markets. Somehow, Sony is not part of the list despite previous rumours.
Other than that, Microsoft has also announced that the company is working to bring support for Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 and 400 processors. Additionally, there will also be support for dual SIM feature and soft keys. This move apparently will allow Windows Phone manufacturers to use the same hardware as per their Android devices.
Additionally, the company also working on adding new enterprise features to Windows Phone such as VPN, S/MIME support, enterprise Wi-Fi, extended mobile device management and certificate management. Microsoft expects to deliver all new these support in spring alongside new phones although the company didn’t specifically mentioned whether they will come together with the much rumoured Windows Phone 8.1 update or a separate patch altogether.
Well, we expect more details will be revealed at Microsoft Build Developer Conference in early April 2014.
[Source: Windows Phone Official Blog. Dual-SIM and soft keys image: @evleaks]
