Blackberry, Windows Phone 7 | featured news

The US Army is near finishing a largely successful test of smartphones on the battlefield. In an interview this week, project director Michael McCarthy told CNN the six-week trials in Fort Bliss, Texas and White Sands, New Mexico were 'encouraging' in gauging the effectiveness of Android, iPhone, and Windows Phone hardware for communicating information in the field. They had also been testing iPads as well as unspecified Dell and HP tablets.

"Mango," the next major update to the Windows Phone mobile operating system, will include several notable enhancements for consumers, including turn-by-turn navigation, built-in barcode scanning, voice-to-text speech input, on-device podcast support and a music identification service similar to the popular mobile application Shazam, but available within Bing. Mango, also known as Windows Phone 7.5, is due out this fall.

If you've held off on buying a fancy new phone this year, you should cop one of these.

Here's the thing about 1.5 million Microsoft Windows Phone 7 phones sold in six weeks - it doesn't mean 1.5 million people have bought Microsoft phones... Now that we know there are 1.5 million Windows 7 phones on the shelves there can be one or two possibilities. One, consumers could buy them. Or two, they pile up as inventory in warehouses. Judging by the sputtering start, the later scenario seems likely.

The first three US phones running Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 OS go on sale today, with the Samsung Focus (4 stars) and HTC Surround (3 stars) debuting on AT&T and the HTC HD7 (3.5 stars) becoming available on T-Mobile. All three phones cost $199 with ...

Garmin is working on a Windows Phone 7 smartphone, could launch late 2010, early 2011. Also working on Google Android smartphone for early 2011

Microsoft's February announcement that it would exert more control over the phones that use its upcoming mobile software, Windows Phone 7, would seem to be a challenge for HTC. After all, the Taiwan-based smartphone maker has made a name out of layering inventive software on top of other companies' mobile platforms.

Windows Phone 7 is inching closer to market. Microsoft has sent the operating system for its brand of mobile phones to the labs of carriers for testing, as well as to developers of applications for the phones, which are expected to reach the market in ...