Windows Phone 7 | featured news

Nokia and Microsoft joined forces to make the Lumia 900, a top-of-the-line device. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that people will flock to it.

As AT&T gets ready to launch a new wave of Windows Phones to the pubic, independent analysis of Microsoft's app store reveals more than 80,000 applications have been submitted.

Nokia is getting back into the U.S. smartphone business with an entry-level model powered by Microsoft's latest Windows software and sold by T-Mobile USA. The Lumia 710, one of two models that Nokia has launched in Europe, is slated to go on sale Jan. 11 for $50 after a rebate and a two-year contract. The Lumia 710 retails for €270 ($351) in Europe.

The Windows Phone Marketplace continues to grow at a steady rate. In little over a year, the Marketplace now has over 40,000 published apps according to an estimate from All About Windows Phone. This number is not the total available to consumers, but the total number that has been submitted to the online store. An estimated 5,500 apps are no longer available to consumers because they were removed by Microsoft or the developer.

Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth thinks Ubuntu Linux has a shot to be a contending operating system for future phones and tablets. It'll be a tough go -- Apple iOS and Google Android dominate the field now, with new Windows Phone 7 also making a play.

The US Army is near finishing a largely successful test of smartphones on the battlefield. In an interview this week, project director Michael McCarthy told CNN the six-week trials in Fort Bliss, Texas and White Sands, New Mexico were 'encouraging' in gauging the effectiveness of Android, iPhone, and Windows Phone hardware for communicating information in the field. They had also been testing iPads as well as unspecified Dell and HP tablets.

"Mango," the next major update to the Windows Phone mobile operating system, will include several notable enhancements for consumers, including turn-by-turn navigation, built-in barcode scanning, voice-to-text speech input, on-device podcast support and a music identification service similar to the popular mobile application Shazam, but available within Bing. Mango, also known as Windows Phone 7.5, is due out this fall.

If you've held off on buying a fancy new phone this year, you should cop one of these.

Here's the thing about 1.5 million Microsoft Windows Phone 7 phones sold in six weeks - it doesn't mean 1.5 million people have bought Microsoft phones... Now that we know there are 1.5 million Windows 7 phones on the shelves there can be one or two possibilities. One, consumers could buy them. Or two, they pile up as inventory in warehouses. Judging by the sputtering start, the later scenario seems likely.

The first three US phones running Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 OS go on sale today, with the Samsung Focus (4 stars) and HTC Surround (3 stars) debuting on AT&T and the HTC HD7 (3.5 stars) becoming available on T-Mobile. All three phones cost $199 with ...