Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system, launched in October of last year, is due to get a major update this fall codenamed Mango. Some of the new features it’ll bring to the table are a new web browser based on the same code used to build Internet Explore 9 for Windows, multitasking support for third party applications, an improved search application that can perform queries based on images and sound clips, and more. According to the official Windows Phone Blog there’s one other feature that’ll come that should have many of our international readers happy, and that’s support for additional languages; 17 in total: Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian (Bokmål), Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Swedish. And of course with new languages come new keyboards, with a total of 20 additional keyboards being added to Mango. Continuing on this theme of international expansion and eventual world domination, Windows Phone applications will now be available for purchase in a total of 35 countries.
All of this still doesn’t change our mind that the platform isn’t being adopted because consumers just don’t see the point. If you’re someone who spends all day online, there’s a likely chance that you use Google services and thus want a device running Google’s Android operating system. If you’re addicted to gaming or have a painting of Steve Jobs hanging in your bedroom, then there’s no point to get something other than iOS. Windows Phone is different just for the sake of being different, and as fancy as that Metro UI is … being different doesn’t necessarily translate into sales. You have to bring something compelling to the table, and Bing Maps sure as hell isn’t going to do that.
Are you a Windows Phone user? What do you like best about the platform and why did you opt to go for it versus something else? Sound off in the comments below.