BARCELONA—In an afternoon round table here at Mobile World Congress, Microsoft executives said that richer multi-tasking will be coming to Windows Phone 7, said their new Web browser beats Apple's Safari and made some details of the Microsoft-Nokia arrangement a tiny bit clearer.
A major update to the platform later this year will bring many new features and options, most notably multitasking and Internet Explorer 9. While Microsoft has only shown a few aspects of multitasking on Windows Phone, corporate vice president Joe Belfiore said that there will be more multitasking available – we'll just find out about it at the MIX conference in April.
"We're going to wait until MIX to go through the technical details of how this works," he said.
The picture on IE9 is clearer. Belfiore showed a demo where IE9 on a Windows Phone easily outran the performance of Safari on an iPhone when doing an HTML5 test involving a whole bunch of animated fish swimming around on the screen. Hardware acceleration means that complex Web sites will run more smoothly on Windows Phones than on today's iPhones, Belfiore said.
"The Safari browser without hardware acceleration can't produce the same smooth frame rate as IE9 with hardware acceleration," he said.
While a few new features will come to Windows Phone within the next month, the major update with IE9 and multitasking is scheduled for sometime this year. Expect the next big wave of Windows Phone hardware to appear at the same time as the update, Microsoft group product manager Greg Sullivan said.
"Mostly you'll see refreshed hardware in conjunction with the update," he said. "We imagine a wave of stuff coming together."
It's in Nokia's interest to encourage other companies to build Windows Phones, because Nokia will make money from services on all manufacturers' Windows Phones, Sullivan said.
For instance, Nokia could take a cut of location-based advertising on Samsung or HTC Windows phones that use Nokia's mapping technology.
"We'll be using their map technology, and they'll have opportunities to monetize their location based services," he said. "There's a range of possibilities in terms of how they can monetize this, and those possibilities are increased if the ecosystem is larger and more robust."
If you're still a little confused about the details of the Microsoft-Nokia deal, for instance in terms of how much Nokia will be able to customize Windows Phone, that's OK. The details haven't been completely finalized yet, Sullivan said. But Microsoft is looking at ways all its manufacturers can do a little more editing of the Windows Phone platform.
"Will there be new ways that Nokia and other OEMs can differentiate and build some uniqueness to their offerings? Yes. Will the UI on those products still obviously be the Windows Phone UI, and will the platform APIs be consistent? Yes," he said.