In these days Microsoft is showing in every corner of the world the new version of its own mobile OS, aka Windows Phone Mango.

IDC announces that market shares for mobile OS and hardware worldwide will see Windows Phone surpassing Apple iOS before 2015, in parallel with an increment of the Android Platforms.

Here a table for the market share for mobile OS and related hardware penetration:

IDC mobile OS market share 2011 - 2015

IDC mobile OS market share 2011 - 2015

In particular, the new interesting features of Windows Phone Mango are:

  • HTML5 support with Internet Explorer 9
  • multitasking
  • twitter and facebook seamless integrations with all social and messaging functions
  • Microsoft Office for Mobile + sync and integration with files on other devices
  • Blog interfaces
  • Zune, XBOx Live, market places
  • Bing integration
  • Windows 7 seamless integration
  • Hardware graphics acceleration
  • new partnerships with: Acer, Fujitsu, ZTE


But the really cool features are the programming capabilities offered by this new mobile OS. Take a look in brief to the better ones:

  • background and batch processing
  • new profiler and emulator for testing
  • Silverlight+XNA can be used together
  • Silverlight 4
  • Internet Explorer 9 web control
  • deep linking into apps from notifications and Live Tiles
  • full sensors support (cameras, gyro, gps, etc..)
  • super fast application switching
  • networking libs / sockets for communication
  • local SQL DB for data storage
  • access to calendar and contacts for apps
  • new countries and locales for: Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Hungary, India, Japan, Korea (South), Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, Taiwan

Here a schema of the HW/SW capabilities of Windows Phone Mango:

Windows Phone Mango OS Capabilities

Windows Phone Mango OS Capabilities

Web Resources for developers: