Last week at the Mobile World Congress, Microsoft® announced its plans for the 2011 Windows® Phone 7. We were thrilled to hear about the new developments and wanted to share some of the features that we are most excited about.

IE9 Mobile

Microsoft announced that IE9 will be available for Windows Phone 7 in the latter half of 2011. The addition of IE9 with hardware graphics acceleration support means that Windows Phone 7 will have what Microsoft calls a more superior mobile web experience. IE9 has HTML5 support and allows developers to use the same tools to create a rich user experience for both the web and mobile spaces. IE9 uses hands-off processor-intensive work to the GPU, or graphics processor, to proved accelerated support. This speeds up the performance from the GPU to help performance and battery life. A release candidate version of IE9 is currently available for download on your PC and has gotten great reviews from those that tested it in Beta.

Copy and Paste Functionality

This is a big improvement and one that many Windows Phone 7 users have been anxiously awaiting. However, as a colleague pointed out today, it is sad that the copy and paste functionality is an update to the OS; it should have been included from the beginning. Nevertheless, it is planned to be available for users this year.

Twitter™ Integration into the People Hub

The Twitter integration into the People Hub will be similar to the way Facebook is currently integrated, giving users instant access and live updates. Currently Windows Phone 7 has a Twitter app, but the integration into the People hub will make communication with friends and organizations even easier and faster. Twitter integration makes sense with Smartphone user’s emphasis on social media and their desire to stay connected to current news and events. I believe that as mobile application developers begin to see the benefit of Windows Phone 7 Hubs, more custom Windows Phone 7 applications that integrate with Hubs will become available.

Support for Office Documents in the Cloud

The last feature that we are excited about is Microsoft’s announcement that there will soon be support for Microsoft Office Documents in the Cloud. This is a feature that is already included as part of Office 2010 desktop productivity suite. Microsoft built the free Office Web Apps into Windows Live SkyDrive, with the service being closely integrated with other Windows Live properties, including Hotmail for example. On Windows Phone 7 this feature is said to be available through the Office Hub and will allow users to make changes to documents and share them with other friends or colleagues. As a custom mobile application company that works with clients all over the country we see the value of working virtually and being able to share information back and forth between colleagues.

We look forward to these new features and other developments from Microsoft over the next year. If you need any advice or are looking for a Windows Phone 7 mobile application development partner, we are always available to discuss your options.