The announcement was timed to coincide with the world's largest mobile phone conference to be held this week in Cannes, France. The smart phones Microsoft will help launch before the end of the year are tiny, yet very powerful, phone computers with relatively big colour screens. They function as diaries, contacts databases, and can also play music and videos. Microsoft hopes the first phones will be launched ahead of similar products with rival software. Some souped-up mobile phones can already browse the Web, receive email or download pictures, but data speeds are slow and the phones have limited capabilities compared with the superfast and small smart phones that will be launched later this year.
Smart phones are smaller than PDAs and are designed to make calls.
None of the world's largest cell phone makers, such as Finland's Nokia, U.S.-based Motorola, Japan's Matsushita and Sweden's Ericsson have committed themselves to Microsoft smart phone software. Microsoft acknowledges that some of these phone makers see a formidable competitor in the U.S. software company, which says that most of the future value of the mobile phone industry is in software and services, much like the PC industry. Nokia and Ericsson have made clear in the past that they will be active as software and services developers themselves. Common to the Microsoft business model is that it puts operating software and application software into the terminal, in this case a mobile phone. These applications are then updated with contacts, calendar changes, Web information or pictures.