Steve Ballmer talks Windows Phone 7 future during MWC keynote

For those who know the Windows Phone platform the initial part of Steve’s talk was a bit of a sleeping pill.

Reason was that he was just pretty much demonstrating the same stuff as he did a year ago on the very same stage. It was hubs this and hubs that, less clicks here and less clicks there…

Then after a while he started letting us know what was planned for the future, and so did Joe Belfiore when he later took the stage.

New functionality coming in “Mango” (or sooner or later?)

There was some ambiguity as to when these updates are expected to be hitting our devices, but some of them will be in the large revision like update that is planned to be released in the later part of 2011. Other functionality might slip out sooner than that, information is to be released partially too and the next update is going to be during MIX 2011.

The List of impending improvements:

• Integration of the SkyDrive and the Office hub for easier storage of documents in the cloud
• Twitter integration in the people and picture hubs
• New web browser based on IE9, supporting hardware graphics acceleration, HTML5, canvas etc (no mention of Flash though)
• Multitasking of applications, even third party Apps. Question is if all Apps will be eligible for this or just select ones?

And there is talks about more items on the list for the Mango update that was not disclosed today, most likely it will be an update in of the version number of the product as well to 7.5 or 8.

Looks like the fall update will be the interesting update this year.