Windows Phone

Windows Phone (WP) is a family of mobile operating systems developed by Microsoft for smartphones as the replacement successor to Windows Mobile and Zune. Windows Phone features a new user interface derived from Metro design language. Unlike Windows Mobile, it is primarily aimed at the consumer market rather than the enterprise market. It was first launched in October 2010 with Windows Phone 7.Windows Phone 8.1 was the last public release of the operating system, released to manufacturing on April 14, 2014.

History

Development

Work on a major Windows Mobile update may have begun as early as 2004 under the codename "Photon", but work moved slowly and the project was ultimately cancelled. In 2008, Microsoft reorganized the Windows Mobile group and started work on a new mobile operating system. The product was to be released in 2009 as Windows Phone, but several delays prompted Microsoft to develop Windows Mobile 6.5 as an interim release.

Windows Phone was developed quickly. One result was that the new OS would not be compatible with Windows Mobile applications. Larry Lieberman, senior product manager for Microsoft's Mobile Developer Experience, told eWeek: "If we'd had more time and resources, we may have been able to do something in terms of backward compatibility." Lieberman said that Microsoft was attempting to look at the mobile phone market in a new way, with the end user in mind as well as the enterprise network.Terry Myerson, corporate VP of Windows Phone engineering, said, "With the move to capacitive touch screens, away from the stylus, and the moves to some of the hardware choices we made for the Windows Phone 7 experience, we had to break application compatibility with Windows Mobile 6.5."

Windows Phone 8

Mobile network operator

Windows Phone 8 is the second generation of the Windows Phone mobile operating system from Microsoft. It was released on October 29, 2012, and like its predecessor, it features a flat user interface based on Metro design language. It was succeeded by Windows Phone 8.1, which was unveiled on April 2, 2014.

Windows Phone 8 replaces the Windows CE-based architecture used in Windows Phone 7 with the Windows NT kernel found in Windows 8. Current Windows Phone 7 devices cannot run or update to Windows Phone 8 and new applications compiled specifically for Windows Phone 8 are not made available for Windows Phone 7 devices. Developers can make their apps available on both Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 devices by targeting both platforms via the proper SDKs in Visual Studio

Windows Phone 8 devices are manufactured by Microsoft Mobile (formerly Nokia), HTC, Samsung and Huawei.

History

On June 20, 2012, Microsoft unveiled Windows Phone 8 (codenamed Apollo), a third generation of the Windows Phone operating system for release later in 2012. Windows Phone 8 replaces its previously Windows CE-based architecture with one based on the Windows NT kernel, and shares many components with Windows 8, allowing developers to easily port applications between the two platforms.

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows (or simply Windows) is a metafamily of graphical operating systems developed, marketed, and sold by Microsoft. It consists of several families of operating systems, each of which cater to a certain sector of the computing industry. Active Windows families include Windows NT, Windows Embedded and Windows Phone; these may encompass subfamilies, e.g. Windows Embedded Compact (Windows CE) or Windows Server. Defunct Windows families include Windows 9x and Windows Mobile.

Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985, as a graphical operating system shell for MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal computer market with over 90% market share, overtaking Mac OS, which had been introduced in 1984. However, since 2012, because of the massive growth of smartphones, Windows sells less than Android, which became the most popular operating system in 2014, when counting all of the computing platforms each operating system runs on; in 2014, the number of Windows devices sold were less than 25% of Android devices sold. However, comparisons across different markets are not fully relevant; and for personal computers, Windows is still the most popular operating system.

Windows Phone Store

Windows Phone Store (previously Windows Phone Marketplace) is a digital distribution platform developed by Microsoft for its Windows Phone platform that allows users to browse and download applications that have been developed by third parties. Like much of the new Windows products, it features "Metro UI"; the UI is presented in a panoramic view where the user can browse categories and titles, see featured items, and get details with ratings, reviews, screen shots, and pricing information.

The Windows Phone Store (replacing Windows Marketplace for Mobile) was launched along with Windows Phone 7 in October 2010 in some countries. It was reported on 4 October 2010 that the Windows Phone SDK was downloaded over half a million times. At the end of February 2013, the Marketplace had more than 130,000 apps available. With the rollout of Mango (Windows Phone 7.5) the online web Marketplace was unveiled by Microsoft; it offers various features like silent, over the air installation of apps to the user's device.

App store

An app store (or app marketplace) is a type of digital distribution platform for computer software, often in a mobile context. Apps provide a specific set of functions which, by definition, do not include the running of the computer itself. Apps are designed to run on specific devices, and are written for a specific operating system (such as iOS, Mac OS X, Windows, or Android). Complex software designed for use on a personal computer, for example, may have a related app designed for use on a mobile device.

Such a mobile app may offer similar, if limited, functionality compared to the complete software running on the computer. Apps optimize the appearance of displayed data, taking into consideration the device screen size and resolution. Besides providing continuity of functionality over two different types of devices, such apps may also be capable of a file synchronization between two dissimilar devices, even between two different operating system platforms. App stores typically organize the apps they offer based on these considerations: the function(s) provided by the app (including games, multimedia or productivity), the device for which the app was designed, and the operating system on which the app will run.