Microsoft details Windows Phone update features

Microsoft has revealed some of the features that will be added to Windows Phone this year, during a presentation at Mobile World Congress.

At the Barcelona show on Monday, Microsoft chief Steve Ballmer said that the "first update will be delivered in just a few weeks, in early March". However, the new features that were demonstrated belong to another, more major update that is due at some unspecified point later in 2011.

"We're going to let consumers and small business users get to their documents on SkyDrive," Windows Phone program management chief Joe Belfiore said, promising that some Sharepoint-like functionality would be extended down to non-corporate users.

Belfiore also demonstrated Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) for Windows Phone, which shares the same core browsing engine as its soon-to-be-released PC equivalent. Belfiore said this shared nature meant developers creating sites for the PC would also see those sites "work well on Windows Phone as well".

In an onstage graphics demo comparing IE9 for Windows Phone with Safari on an iPhone 4, Belfiore showed Microsoft's browser to be significantly faster than Apple's, due to the browser's use of hardware acceleration.

Other improvements coming in the major update include multitasking for third-party apps — at the moment, only Microsoft's own apps enjoy this support — and the ability for third-party music apps to keep playing in the background when the user is doing something else.

Finally, Belfiore ran a video showing people using Windows Phones to join in an Xbox game with a Kinect user.

At no point in the presentation did any Microsoft executive mention cut-and-paste, although Ballmer and Belfiore did promise that further features would be revealed closer to the update's release.