I know many of you also want to know about our global rollout plans for services like Marketplace and Xbox LIVE.
As we announced last month, starting this fall youll be able to buy apps from Windows Phone Marketplace in 35 countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, United Kingdom, and the United States. (The specifics of how you buy an app and which apps are available in Marketplace do vary by country.)
This fall youll see a significant increase in the number of new countries where the Xbox LIVE service for Windows Phone is available. The Zune Marketplace for music, video, and podcasts is also expanding to more markets. Were not quite ready to announce specifics just yetexpect to hear more later this summer.
Finally, we get many questions about specific phone featuresespecially ones related to searching and mapping and where theyll be available. Heres a list of ones we hear about most:
◦Bing search (accessed from the phones hardware Search button) is available in 33 countries: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, United Kingdom, and the United States. (Elsewhere, handset and mobile operators can configure the hardware search button to a locally-relevant search site).
◦Local search results show up in 6 countries: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, United Kingdom, and the United States.
◦Maps is supported in 19 countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and the United States.
◦Voice-to-text and Voice-to-dial is available in 6 countries: France, Germany, Italy, Spain, United Kingdom, and the Unites States.
◦Voice search is supported in 4 countries: France, Germany, United Kingdom, and the United States.
The future
While I hope youll agree that Mango is a step forward, Im all too aware that theres still much to do. Two areas were working hard to address in future releases are languages with complex scripts and extending services to more markets. Let me briefly explain.
Complex scripts are used to write languages such as Arabic and Hindi, where the displayed character depends on its neighbor (contextual shaping), and languages written right-to-left such as Hebrew and Urdu. Many of the controls used in Windows Phone require enhancement to properly display such scripts.
Youll see the first fruit of this work in Mango: text messages will render properly in Arabic and Hebrew. Clever programmers can also create apps in some of these languages. But Internet Explorer Mobile, email, and the copy and paste feature can still become confused by complex scripts in Mango. The good news is we understand the problem and know what needs to be done.
Extending services such as Marketplace or Xbox LIVE to more markets, on the other hand, is a very different type of challengeas much legal and organizational as it is technical. But were working hard to scale up our engineering effort from a couple dozen countries to the entire world.
I hope to write about both challenges, and how were addressing them, in future blog entries. In the meantime, Id love to hear what you think.