Next-gen WP7 phones let users "do things they had never imagined" says Ballmer

Microsoft head honcho Steve Ballmer has been speaking at the 2011 Imagine Cup finals, talking up the “second generation” of his companies Windows Phone 7 handsets.

While Windows Phone 7 was a bold move forwards from the Windows Mobile platform, it still hasn’t put Microsoft at the top of the top of the smartphone market, still trailing behind Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android and RIM’s BlackBerry. Ballmer’s words to the assembled student programmers now suggests that his company recognises the initial failings of the platform, and will striving to iron out the creases with Nokia.

“You know, a year ago we didn’t have a phone in the market. Now, we’re charging forward with Nokia. We have the second generation of our phones coming out this Christmas, and people are starting to do things they had never imagined before,” said Ballmer, before ploughing into the importance of cloud services in the mobile sphere.

“The cloud is, I think, probably a bigger deal still than most people even in our industry think. When you use the word ‘cloud’ some people roll their eyes and say, the cloud is the Internet, that’s not a big idea. The cloud is bigger than that.

“The cloud will also unlock new ways of writing applications. Today we write applications that know about people that we can enumerate, and know about data sets that we somehow control. And yet in the world of the cloud all of the world’s people and all the world’s data is somehow out there.”

The first Windows Phone 7 devices from Nokia are expected to launch at the end of October.

Via: Microsoft