Yesterday we saw an alleged leak of Microsoft’s 2012 Windows Phone roadmap. It offers an eyebrow-raising view of a company that is trying to invade the smartphone market from the bottom up (starting with low-end phones). Today we have a new report that further materializes Microsoft’s near-term plans for Windows Phone 7.
The big news, which will apparently be officially announced at CES, is that there will be several LTE Windows Phone devices in 2012 — and they will all be on AT&T. The three phones — the Nokia ACE, HTC Radiant, and Samsung Mendel — will ship by the middle of the year. The ACE, specifically, is set to launch on March 18.
The LTE phones will probably all run Windows Phone 7.5 Mango, as the previous roadmap leak points to the Tango update, which is aimed towards low-end phones, coming earlier in the year. The Apollo update, which will support high-end handsets, won’t show until the fourth quarter of 2012.
A final detail of the new leak has Nokia’s Lumia 710 launching on T-Mobile on January 11, and on Verizon in April. The Lumia 710 will launch in the US before the Lumia 800, making Americans’ first impressions of the Nokia/Microsoft alliance that of a mid-range phone that doesn’t dazzle like the Lumia 800.
While the Microsoft/Nokia bottom-up strategy seems illogical, it could have something to do with the release of Windows 8. Though Windows 8 and Windows Phone 7 are two different operating systems, the Metro UI will bring them together on a cosmetic level. In the eyes of most customers, that may be enough to create a positive association and let Windows Phone ride Windows 8′s (expected) buzz. The strategy could fizzle, but it also may be a smart gamble.
* Note that the above image is a visualization: no Windows Phone marketing materials were part of the leak.
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