Microsoft announced that its next Windows Phone 7 update, which will add cut-and-paste, will be delayed until the second half of March.
Microsoft is
delaying a major Windows Phone 7 update until the second half of March,
according to the company. That long-awaited tweaking, which will add
cut-and-paste functionality and faster application loading, was originally
slated for the first two weeks of this month.
"After careful
consultation with the team and our many partners, we've decided to briefly hold
the March update in order to ensure the update process meets our standards and
that of our customers," a Microsoft spokesperson wrote in a March 10 e-mail to
eWEEK. "As a result, we will plan to begin delivering the update in the latter
half of March."
The
announcement doesn't come as a complete surprise. Earlier this week,
a French Website owned by Microsoft suggested
that the update had been pushed back to the second half of March. However,
Microsoft waited until March 10 to officially confirm that adjusted time frame.
"I've decided
to take some extra time to ensure the update process meets our standards, your
standards and the standards of our partners," Eric Hautala, Microsoft's general
manager of customer experience engineering, wrote in a March 10 posting on the
Windows Phone Blog. "This short pause should in
no way impact the timing of future updates, including the one announced
recently at Mobile World Congress featuring multitasking, a Twitter feature and
a new HTML5-friendly version of Internet Explorer Mobile."
Those updates are
expected to arrive sometime in the second half of 2011.
In February,
Microsoft introduced a Windows Phone 7 update designed to help future updates.
Within a day of that update's rollout, however, a small number of users began
complaining it stalled their smartphones.
As those
complaints found their way onto online forums, Microsoft shifted into full
damage-control mode, claiming in a corporate blog posting that only 10 percent
of users' smartphones had stalled because of the new software. Nonetheless, the
company temporarily suspended the update for Samsung phones until it would work
out the underlying issues.
In the wake of
that snafu, Microsoft seems more cautious about how it proceeds with the next
software update.
Microsoft
claims its Windows Phone ecosystem has grown to 9,000 applications, with a base
of 32,000 developers. While that doesn't compare to Apple's App Store or
Google's Android Marketplace, which respectively boast hundreds of thousands of
applications, Microsoft executives nonetheless point to Windows Phone's growing
number of applications as a sign of the platform's increasingly robust health.
"There are
many ways to measure the vitality of a marketplace and I'm pleased to report
that we're seeing strong results across several fronts," Todd Briz, senior director
for Microsoft's Mobile Platform Services Product Management, wrote in a March 8
posting on
The Windows Phone Developer Blog, "from the
number of available apps and popularity of our tools, to more tangible
developer benefits stemming from monetization opportunities that drive
downloads and sales."
But consumer
adoption of Windows Phone 7 remains an open question. In a new report, research
firm comScore suggested that Microsoft's share of the U.S. smartphone platform
market dipped 1.7 percentage points between October 2010 and January, from 9.7
percent to 8.0 perfect. That period overlaps with Microsoft's launch of the
platform, which saw its European debut in October 2010 and its U.S. launch
early the following month.
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