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Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is known for playing around with all kinds of mobile tech, even if it competes with iOS devices. Wozniak recently bought Nokia's new Lumia 900 Windows Phone, and shared some of his thoughts on Microsoft's Mobile platform in a podcast interview with The Report. (The Verge first picked up the interview). Overall, Wozniak says he prefers the look and feel of Windows Phone apps over Android and iPhone apps. He also likes Windows Phone better overall than Android. We had similar feelings towards Windows Phone apps when we reviewed the Lumia 900. Many apps such as...

AT&T and Verizon Wireless want Windows Phone smartphones to succeed in the U.S., partly to provide leverage against Apple's demands for subsidies and other concessions required for selling the popular iPhone. AT&T recently began selling the Nokia Lumia 900 with the Windows Phone 7 operating system for a competitive $99.99 price. Meanwhile, Verizon Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo recently told Reuters that Verizon is "really looking at the Windows Phone 8.0 platform because that's a differentiator." Both carriers need a strong competitor -- like Windows Phone -- to go up against the iPhone and Android phones, analysts said. The wireless...

Sales of Nokia’s Lumia smartphones haven’t been stellar so far. Perhaps that’s to be expected when a company switches its main smartphone platform seemingly overnight. Perhaps that’s to be expected because the operating system powering these devices is quite young. Though for a company of Nokia’s former size and prowess, the 500-700K Lumias sold in the fourth quarter of 2011 are nothing to write home about. While the first quarter of 2012 will surely improve on those numbers, it appears that Q2 of this year is when Nokia’s Windows Phone sales will really start picking up. That’s when Compal expects...

The iPhone 4S may look identical to the iPhone 4, but that's where the comparisons stop. Under the hood, the iPhone 4S is full of hardware and software innovations that help Apple catch up with its rivals. Here’s how Apple’s iPhone 4S stacks up against its Android, Windows Phone 7, and BlackBerry competitors when it comes to specs.

HTC said Windows Phone devices make up 30 percent of its sales, as Microsoft begins gaining ground in the mobile market. The Taiwanese phone maker is betting Microsoft’s platform will be a big part of its future plans and expect the number of Windows phones sold to go up. “We believe that Windows Phone 7 will eventually be better than other platforms and will give Android a run for its money,” said HTC’s manager in Singapore, Melvin Chua. Microsoft believes its platform has made good progress since its launch last year, and the Mango update builds on that success. Mango...

Yesterday, I had an experience that shows why Microsoft should kill the Windows Phone brand and name its new phones something fun like Mango. I went to Radio Shack to buy a cheap audio cable. The clerk was excited because it had just become an official Verizon outlet as well -- the front of the store had a special Verizon awning, and there was Verizon advertising all over the place. As I paid, the clerk and I began talking about phones. He said he used to work at the Apple Store, and was well-informed about the upcoming iPhone 5 and...

Microsoft allegedly tracks the location of its mobile customers even after users request that tracking software be turned off, according to a new lawsuit. The proposed class action, filed in a Seattle federal court on Wednesday, says Microsoft intentionally designed camera software on the Windows Phone 7 operating system to ignore customer requests that they not be tracked. A Microsoft representative could not immediately be reached for comment The lawsuit comes after concerns surfaced earlier this year that Apple's iPhones collected location data and stored it for up to a year, even when location software was supposedly turned off. Apple...

Look down a list of Windows Phone 7 smartphones being offered without a contract and you’ll notice the price hovers around the $300-$400. There are some $200 models, but they are few and far between and make a few feature compromises to achieve the lower price point. The price of buying a smartphone outright is clearly high, but Microsoft has stated that is about to change, and come 2012 you will be able to pick up a Windows Phone 7 smartphone for around $100. That revelation was announced to a crowd of people attending the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2011...

The Windows operating system for smartphones is expected to gain market share in the next few years thanks to Nokia, eventually leapfrogging the iOS system used on Apple's iPhone. But Google Android will remain atop the field. That's according to International Data Corporation's latest Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker report. IDC predicts Android will have 43.8 percent of the market in 2015, followed by Windows Phone at 20.3 percent. Apple's iOS will trail at 16.9 percent. The future projections would be a significant improvement for Windows Phone, which will account for just 3.8 percent of the market by the end...

Microsoft has made little headway in reclaiming its lost smartphone market share in the six months since the debut of Windows Phone 7. According to Gartner's latest numbers, Microsoft sold only 1.6 million Windows Phone 7 devices during the first quarter of the year, leaving it just ahead of HP's anemic webOS numbers (categorized by Gartner as "other"), but behind every other major platform. Microsoft has fumbled through the early months of 2011 with Windows Phone 7, which has seen delayed system updates, software glitches, and problems arising from the long-delayed updates. Microsoft is prepared to make a major WP7-based...

Gartner, Inc., one of the world's most respectable market research firms, has announced [press release] that its research supports our hypothesis that Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) Windows Phone 7 smartphone OS will become the market's second largest player when the phase-out of Nokia Oyj.'s (NOK) Symbian OS is complete. In a research report released this week, it estimates that this year the platform will only rise modestly from 4.2 percent market share in 2010 to 5.6 percent in 2011 (still behind Symbian, in fifth place). But by 2012 it will jump to a 10.8 percent, switching places with Symbian. And three...

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today, Microsoft previewed a Wndows Phone 7 upgrade and continued to tout its new deal with Nokia. Among the new features coming to the mobile platform later this year will be a “dramatically enhanced” version of Internet Explorer 9, broader multitasking capability and the addition of Twitter to the “People” hub–one of the main areas of the WP7 interface, divided into subject-specific areas. The first significant update–copy-and past-functionality–will be added in the next month. The upgraded IE9 browser will arrive in the second half of 2011. In a keynote address, Microsoft CEO Steve...

Microsoft and Nokia have tied the knot. At least for the near future, Nokia will use Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 software as the basis for its smartphones. How does this affect the industry? Well, it's good news for Microsoft, as it now has a major partner which actually has some skin in the game -- something it didn't really have yesterday. But it's probably bad news for Nokia, as it's unlikely to return the company to glory. CLICK HERE to flip through the biggest winners and losers from the Microsoft-Nokia deal

Nokia (NYSE:NOK) CEO Stephen Elop appears poised to announce an alliance with his former employer, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), to put Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 platform on Nokia phones, according to multiple reports. Elop reportedly will formally unveil the company's new strategy at an investor conference in London Friday. The reports--in the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which cited unnamed sources familiar with the matter--said Elop approached Microsoft and Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) about an alliance. However, according to BusinessWeek, the talks with Google to put Android on Nokia phones likely won't result in a deal. Representatives from all of the companies involved...

There increasing chatter on the Street that Nokia (NOK) next week will unveil a deal to adopt Microsoft’s (MSFT) Windows Phone 7 as the operating system software for at least some of its smart phones. Wedge Partners analyst Brian Blair weighed in the possibility this morning, asserting in a research note that such a move “would address the key concern we have had about Nokia for the last several years: terrible software.” He adds that a pairing of the two companies “could be a powerful combination in the smartphone war and put Nokia on solid footing for the first time...

On the heels of a Canalys report that said that Android had overtaken Symbian to become the top smart phone platform in the world, NPD reported later Monday that Android now owns over half (53 percent) of all U.S. consumer smartphone sales in Q4 2010. That's not just a leading market share, it's enough to prevent a runoff in some elections. What's good for Android is bad for Windows Phone however: that same report noted that Windows Phone was outsold by creaky, dying Windows Mobile in that quarter. Some of that might be attributable to the fact that Windows Phone...

Microsoft isn't ready to disclose how many Windows Phone 7 handsets are in the hands of customers, but it's happy to talk about how many it has shipped. Greg Sullivan, a senior product manager at Microsoft, says Microsoft shipped 2 million Windows Phone 7s last quarter, in an interview with Ina Fried at All Things D. Last we heard from Microsoft it had shipped 1.5 million in the first six weeks Windows Phone 7 was on the market, which suggests it shipped 500,000 handsets to close the quarter.

More than 1.5 million cell phones carrying Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 operating software have sold in the first six weeks of launch, meeting what the company called "realistic" expectations. Achim Berg, vice president of business and marketing for Windows phones, released sales numbers for the nascent platform for the first time in an internally conducted interview posted on Microsoft's website. (Msnbc.com is an NBC Universal-Microsoft joint venture.) Windows Phone 7 was unveiled in October and marked the software maker's expansion into a smart phone arena dominated by Apple and Google. Analysts say it could be Microsoft's last chance to establish...

Things always get bad when the analysts come out to play, and indeed, for Microsoft and Windows Phone 7, the gloom and doom has begun. Goldman Sachs analyst Sarah Friar wrote in a research note that Microsoft's market share will continue to go south next year, falling to 7 percent in 2011, down from 12 percent this year. The problem, Friar argues, is that despite a decent variety of phones (including the HTC Trophy, HTC Surround, and HTC HD7), Microsoft hasn't figured out a strategy for tablets. She writes: "A tablet response is still not forth-coming and our early read...

Despite entering a crowded market, Microsoft’s brand-new Windows Phone operating system seems off to a healthy start. Nonetheless, the estimates aren’t impressing cynical tech journalists. “The anemic sales number does not include the 89,000 Microsoft employees that will be given free Windows 7 phones,” Moritz quips. CNET reporters added their bleak perspective based on the performance of a single AT&T store in San Francisco (where every hipster in sight is already fondling an iPhone), which sold fewer than 20 Windows devices by midday. “If Microsoft hopes to get back in the smartphone game, it had better hope that Windows Phone...