Microsoft to Buy a Maker of Consumer Smartphones
92131
Microsoft said it would acquire Danger, a maker of consumer smartphones, an indication that the software giant is quickly moving to expand its mobile strategy.
95309
Microsoft built a custom Windows Mobile user interface for a new phone that T-Mobile USA expects to announce on Monday, evidence that Microsoft may be getting more serious about pursuing the consumer mobile market.
279059
Longtime foes palmOne and Microsoft on Tuesday announced a licensing deal that will allow the next generation of palmOne&#39;s Treo smart phones to work directly with Microsoft&#39;s Exchange e-mail system.
422333
Microsoft said Wednesday it will buy a small Chicago-based technology company and add its group-chat software to a broad vision for integrated office communications programs.
660999
Microsoft built a custom Windows Mobile user interface for a new phone that T-Mobile USA expects to announce on Monday, evidence that Microsoft may be getting more serious about pursuing the consumer mobile market.The phone, built by HTC, will be the first in a line of phones from T-Mobile using the new Shadow brand, said David Sholkovitz, marketing manager at T-Mobile.While Microsoft has worked with operators to help modify the operating system to fit their needs, this project represented a new level of partnership, said Doug Smith, director of marketing for Microsoft&#39;s mobile communications business. &quot;I&#39;d say this was one of the deeper partner involvements we&#39;ve had on a new product,&quot; he said.The Shadow, which will hit stores on Wednesday, features a home screen that looks very different than other Windows Mobile phones. Users slide a wheel to navigate through icons on the screen that take them directly to e-mail, their music player and photos. The idea was to make it easier to use increasingly complicated phones, said Sholkovitz.The operator approached Microsoft about ways to alter the home screen in order to simplify it and prevent &quot;feature fatigue,&quot; he said. &quot;We wanted to create a product with the feature set that Windows Mobile products have but deliver it in a simple fashion that was user intuitive and icon based,&quot; he said.T-Mobile, Microsoft and HTC began working on the new user interface in November of last year. &quot;I think this was rare for [Microsoft],&quot; said Farah Houston, product development manager, T-Mobile. &quot;We had access to a lot of resources I don&#39;t think they normally make available. Microsoft is trying to show they&#39;re serious about the consumer market and this is what they&#39;re willing to do.&quot;Windows Mobile, which works in tandem with Exchange to push corporate e-mail to the phones, has a reputation primarily as an enterprise tool. T-Mobile hoped to avoid that image with the Shadow and the keyboard design is meant to help. &quot;When users see a full keyboard they think business and productivity,&quot; said Sholkovitz. &quot;So we made it a hidden slide-out keypad.&quot;During a keynote speech at the CTIA I.T. and Entertainment conference in San Francisco last week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer described what Microsoft thinks will attract consumers. &quot;Consumers will want phones that span all of their life personas,&quot; he said. &quot;My work life, my personal life, my life with my family, my life with my friends. People don&#39;t want to pull out multiple devices.&quot;Another Microsoft executive echoed a similar thought. &quot;We can do multiple things in parallel,&quot; said Scott Horn, general manager of Microsoft&#39;s mobile group, also speaking at CTIA. &quot;We can do both consumer and enterprise... You will see more devices appeal to the consumer side.&quot;The talk of consumer needs shows how the iPhone is likely affecting Microsoft&#39;s strategy, one analyst said. &quot;There&#39;s no doubt the success that Apple had with the iPhone in terms of appealing to the mainstream end user market as opposed to the business market has not gone unnoticed,&quot; said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Jupiter Research. &quot;Microsoft has built these devices to service and solve business needs but Microsoft understands the intersection of business and consumer.&quot;The declining price of Windows Mobile devices will make them more appealing to consumers, said Smith. The Shadow, as an example, will retail for $150 with a two-year voice and data contract. It will work with a new data plan from T-Mobile that costs $20 per month and includes unlimited data use and Wi-Fi access at T-Mobile hotspots.The phone will be displayed in T-Mobile stores along with other lower cost feature phones, not with the higher end smartphones, said Houston.Neither Microsoft nor T-Mobile would comment on intellectual-property ownership for the new software interface on the Shadow.
554572
Nokia said Thursday that it had reached an agreement with Microsoft to integrate Windows Live Search into its phones, meaning consumers would be able to access the service via both Nseries and S60 phones.
546414
The chip giant has announced plans to buy a developer of digital-media creation software and services.
66509
Nokia said Monday it will buy the U.S.-based mobile advertising company in a bid to expand its role in Internet services.
311243
Mobile phones play an important role in Microsoft&#39;s software plus services vision, CEO Steve Ballmer said Tuesday.Microsoft&#39;s software strategy a few years ago revolved around software that was either embedded on devices or burned onto CDs and shipped to users, he said. Today, however, software works in tandem with the Internet, which can back up and update the software.&quot;There&#39;s no better way then the cell networks of the world to make this model happen,&quot; he said, speaking during the opening presentation at the CTIA Wireless IT and Entertainment conference in San Francisco. He envisions a time when software is wirelessly updated and works in tandem with services hosted on the Internet.But the software plus services concept won&#39;t be different for the PC and the mobile phone, he said. At the top of Microsoft&#39;s innovation agenda is unifying a variety of devices and applications. Microsoft is focused on enabling developers to create single applications that take advantage of phones, desktop computers, the enterprise environment, and the online environment, he said.Microsoft is enabling that in part by offering a consistent platform that developers can use to create applications for the PC and mobile phones. For example, a developer can write a thin client for mobile phones using HTML, Ajax, and, in the future, Silverlight. Microsoft&#39;s .Net and Visual Studio can be used to write rich applications for mobile phones. Microsoft also offers a compact version of SQL so that developers can write applications for Windows Mobile phones for database manipulation.The phone is particularly important in achieving Microsoft&#39;s unified view, he said. &quot;The PC is the most powerful device, but the phone is the most popular,&quot; he said. Particularly in the developing world where PC&#39;s may be cost prohibitive, cell phones may be more widespread.Microsoft is focused on providing software for partners to use and it is working carefully not to compete with them, he said. Unlike Google, Microsoft won&#39;t be participating in the upcoming 700MHz spectrum auction. &quot;What would it buy us to own a piece of spectrum?&quot; he said. &quot;It would probably do a lot to alienate the telecom industry. It does not do a lot to advance our goal, which is to take some exciting technology and spread it.&quot;Windows Mobile is a big opportunity financially for Microsoft from two perspectives, he said. If Windows Mobile runs hundreds of millions of devices, that&#39;s a great business for Microsoft, he said. &quot;Also, I don&#39;t think we can serve our customers&#39; broad desire to bring together desktops, devices, enterprise, and online if we ignore the mobile area,&quot; he said.
222943
Microsoft  has struck a deal  with MTS , Russia's largest mobile phone operator, to  offer services and laptops installed with its Vista operating  system on subscription as it reaches out to small businesses.
372676
Microsoft Corp. said Wednesday it will acquire a Chicago-based provider of enterprise group chat software to bolster the messaging capabilities of its Office Communications Server and Office Communicator products.
616329
Microsoft Corp.  introduced  software on Monday to manage advanced mobile phones much like  personal computers, taking aim at a business dominated by  Research in Motion's  BlackBerry.
190773
Microsoft Corp. introduced software on  Monday to manage advanced mobile phones much like personal  computers, taking aim at a business dominated by Research in  Motion's BlackBerry.
188328
US mobile phone giant Motorola has announced plans to buy technology infrastructure group Symbol Technologies in a 3.9 billion-dollar deal.
113919
Blog: The Finnish cell phone manufacturer announces that it has bought the Redmond, Wash.-based start-up, which specializes in multimedia sharing.
23049
In its clearest sign yet that it is serious about the consumer cell phone market, Microsoft says it is buying the maker of the T-Mobile Sidekick.
185833
Microsoft announced plans to buy Danger, a company that makes the software behind T-Mobile's Sidekick.