Microsoft?s Mobile Strategy Takes Aim at Apple, Google

Microsoft on Tuesday announced new features for its upcoming mobile platform Windows Phone 7, including over-the-air Wi-Fi syncing and a feature to track a missing phone. The real message: “Suck it, iTunes and Android.”

When Windows Phone 7 becomes available later this year, customers will be able to download and sync content (such as music, video and photos) wirelessly, using a Wi-Fi connection to Zune software running on their PCs, according to Microsoft’s Aaron Woodman.

Additionally, Microsoft will launch Windows Phone Live, a free website for Windows Phone 7 customers to automatically publish their photos and sync their contacts, OneNote notes and other data.

“[Windows Phone 7] integrates experiences by consolidating common tasks and services around shared hubs that put the focus on what you want to do rather than putting the onus on you to move in and out of various apps,” Woodman wrote in a blog post. “All the stuff you’d expect is right where you expect it — and that goes for content and services that live outside the phone.”

The new Windows Phone Live site will also host a Find My Phone service, which will allow people to find and manage a missing phone with the ability to find the phone on a map, make it ring, lock it and erase its contents, all from their PC. This is comparable to a feature Apple offers through its MobileMe service for an additional fee; Microsoft says it will offer it for no charge.

With these moves, Microsoft is emphasizing Windows Phone 7’s over-the-air “cloud” strategy to compete with other mobile platforms. Many tech companies are offering online services to wirelessly manage content over the web. Google, for example, provides web services services for customers to automatically sync their e-mails, contacts and calendars over the internet to their phones.

However, Microsoft will have to move fast to stay in the smartphone game. Its once dominant Windows Mobile OS currently holds just 13.2 percent of the smartphone market and has been been steadily losing market share to competitors — most notably Google’s Android. The longer Microsoft takes to get Windows Phone 7 out, the more difficult it will be for it to regain the ground it has lost.

When Microsoft introduced Windows Phone 7 in February, CEO Steve Ballmer said the platform would blend personal media with Xbox Live gaming and third-party apps served through the Zune marketplace.

The company with a relatively weak cloud strategy is Apple. Critics have slammed the iPhone and iPad for still relying on a USB connection to sync content with iTunes. And Apple’s web service MobileMe has received criticism for being expensive ($100 per year) compared to Google’s free web services. Steve Jobs said his company was “working on it” during a recent All Things Digital Conference on-stage interview, suggesting that iTunes might soon receive a reboot with a focus on streaming media.

“You can sum up the most frustrating thing about being an Apple customer in three little words: ‘Connect to iTunes,” said Matt Buchanan, a writer of Gizmodo.

It’s clear the software giant is shooting at the cloud in order to target a major weakness of Apple and a major strength of Google. Microsoft is offering consumer-oriented cloud services that Apple lacks, while providing enterprise features, such as remote wiping or locating a missing phone, that are not built in to Android.

“Microsoft’s activities in the cloud are really key in terms of its competition versus Apple and of course Google,” said Ross Rubin, a consumer technology analyst at NPD Group. “While there’s certainly a lot of overlap with Google in terms of the places where they’re competing head-on — photo sharing, e-mail services, etc. — Microsoft has really integrated part of what Apple has sought to make a premium offering with MobileMe.”

Gadget Lab will soon receive a Windows Phone 7 prototype for testing. We’ll keep you posted on our impressions this week. Follow @gadgetlab or @bxchen on Twitter to stay plugged in to the news.

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