Microsoft’s President of Windows Phone, Mr. Andy Lees , just wrapped up a various interview with Ina Fried at AsiaD, wherein he took the possibility to brag on Nokia’s behalf in regards to the impending launch of its big range of WP7-based smartphones. Moreover, he proudly responded to claims that WP7 sales had been suboptimal by clarifying that Windows Phone 7 sold more in its first yr in the stores than did Android. Granted, the smartphone market was entirely more prepared for an additional entrant when Microsoft arrived, but we digress. He also held no punches when asked to opine on Andy Rubin’s swings at Windows Phone from last night’s interview , noting that “Android is extremely techy,” and that it is a great OS for a undeniable population. He stated that Android hits you “with a grid of apps,” as opposed to taking a “people approach,” which WP7 presumably has. Needless to say, we know how The Social went over …
All jesting aside, he responded to Ina’s questions surrounding hardware choices with this: “We needed to prevent issues of fragmentation, so we’ve locked plenty of things down. We would like partners to feature value, but not in a technique that’s chaotic. As an illustration, we do hardware acceleration of the browser — irrespective of which WP device you select, all of it works in a consistent way. Some things in 2012 will extend that.” Moving directly to more competitive questions (surrounding Siri, mostly), he affirmed that users can indeed seek advice from their Windows Phone handsets, but that the type of implementation seen in Siri isn’t “super useful.” He also — oddly, we must say — noted that WP7′s voice implementations depend on Bing, which harnesses “the total power of the web, instead of a undeniable subset.” Last we checked, Siri and Wolfram Alpha were connected to the net, but we get his point — in theory, at the least. He confirmed that talking to one’s phone was practical in places like motorcars, but he appeared to imply that barking commands to a phone in public wasn’t something that Microsoft was inclined to invite its users to do.
On a hardware-related note, Andy affirmed that NFC chipsets will indeed ship on WP7 devices inside the next year, and while Microsoft’s not interested by competing with Google and so on from a platform standpoint, it’s very pleased to enable mobile payments via services that exist already. To cite: “Microsoft is providing technological building blocks so payments could be done at the phone — we’re not competing with folks providing services. We’ll have a platform approach.” Finally, he also alluded to the inclusion of LTE because the infrastructure behind WP evolves, leaving us to wonder whether it will become Apple (or another individual entirely) because the final 4G holdout.
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