BROWSING: Windows Phone 7

Microsoft appears to have grown itself a sense of humor, with the firm’s COO Kevin Turner declaring in a speech at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference that Apple’s iPhone 4 “might be their Vista,” owing to the plethora of problems the device faces.

Nowadays, with smartphones becoming the “must-have” devices for anyone under the age of 40 in the developed world, the distinction between enterprise phone and consumer phone is blurring and so are the distinctions between which operating systems are business focused and which are more for personal use.

HTC is seeing its strategic alliance with Google pay off, quite literally, with the firm reporting an incredible second quarter in which its revenue jumped up 58% and profits soared 33% year on year.

Sometimes, when a company wants people to know it has something big up its sleeve, the best and most subtle way to announce it is via job posting, and a recent Microsoft listing leads us to believe the software giant is mulling cross platform pastures for its Office Mobile 2010 suite.

Today Microsoft revealed the policies governing the marketplace on its upcoming Windows Phone 7 series devices via a post on its Windows Team blog. Amongst the announcements, no adult content allowed.

At the Microsoft ReMix event in Paris this week, Nicolas Petit regional director for the firm’s mobile division said the company hoped to have shifted 30 million Windows Phone 7 handsets by the end of 2011. Petit’s expectations were based on IDC predictions for handset sales in the coming year.

HTC is churning out new devices at such speed that it’s seeing its presence spread like wildfire. The Android based HTC Wildfire was announced today and leaked specs of the first HTC Windows Phone 7 phone have also tipped up.

Skype’s Dan Neary, VP for Asia Pacific, said the firm would not be developing a mobile version of its software for the Windows Phone 7 platform, although he was “hesitant” to explain why that was the case.

It seems like an age since Microsoft announced Windows Phone 7 at MWC back in February, and one could almost have forgotten about it until some screenshots of the new OS tipped up online.