Microsoft's announcements at MWC 2015

[Guest James Norton]

At the now traditional early Monday morning Microsoft event, formerly hosted by Nokia, we had a preview of some more features which will be coming in Windows 10 as well as the announcement of the Lumia 640 range. This is a new Microsoft and despite some interruptions from another press conference in the same part of the conference centre, it was a confident and bold pitch from Stephen Elop and the others involved today.

Stephen Elop strode on stage and confidently delivered quite a pitch for Windows 10. He told us that Microsoft are on a journey to empower every person and organisation on the planet to achieve more. Whilst recognising that mobile is at the heart of that bold ambition, for Microsoft it is all about the experiences.

Windows 10 has some unique offerings with Skype, Cortana and Office built in to every Windows device in an expanding ecosystem that now also includes other platforms such as Android and iOS. This is very much the new Microsoft in action.

Since the release of the Windows 10 preview, 2.8 million people have signed up to be Insiders and according to Elop, there have been 900,000 pieces of feedback about the new operating system. This is a huge level of pre-release engagement, all happening under the One Microsoft banner.

We were then treated to a series of demos of what Windows 10 can do across devices. Most of these demos show the power of Microsofts new cloud integrations with Cortana searches, map locations, reminders and some notifications syncing rapidly across devices. The demo was impressively run by Neil Broadly who also showed us some new features on his Lumia 930 running Windows 10 with my personal favourite being a list of recently installed apps at the top of the list of apps installed on your Windows phone device.

Amusingly, Neil switched to a Lumia 630 to show some new messaging features and the all too familiar loading indicator showed up when opening the app. There is now a unified approach to messaging with Skype being baked in to the experience.

The new Project Spartan web browser was shown off to good effect. It has a nice reading mode which is similar to many other products, but well integrated and syncing between your Windows 10 devices. The UI is quite different to previous Windows Phone Internet Explorer versions but all the usual controls are there.

Some universal apps were demonstrated as well including Maps, Excel and Word. I would be hard pushed to tell they were universal rather than versions of the app written for a specific platform but the universal apps principle will help developers.

Windows 10 for phones looks very nice but seems to have swapped much of the uniqueness of Windows Phone for a little more speed and responsiveness. Whether this is a good compromise remains to be seen. The operating system shares a number of UI paradigms with Android including the hamburger menu.

Alongside the various product demos, a new range of Lumia phones were announced, the Lumia 640 and Lumia 640 XL available in various versions. The 640 is a 5" HD screened device with a 2500mAh battery and 8mp camera while the 640 XL has a 5.7" screen, 3000mAh battery and a 13mp camera. Both variants run on the venerable Snapdragon 400 SoC.

There are dual sim, 3G and LTE versions of both devices including dual sim LTE models. They arrive with Windows Phone 8.1 but will be receiving the Windows 10 update when it is released. As usual with Lumia devices, a range of bright colours are available including the welcome return of cyan!

Pricing is very competitive with the 3G Lumia 640 starting at €139 with the 640 XL LTE coming in at €219.

The final noteworthy announcement was that Microsoft plan to bring Windows 10 to all Lumia devices that run Windows Phone 8.1 though there may be some differences in features for different devices.

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