Windows Phone 7 Will Be GSM-Only Until 2011

Microsoft has announced that Windows Phone 7 will be GSM only in 2010 leaving behind Verizon CDMA customers much like Apple did with the iPhone. The company made the decision to delay the CDMA version earlier this year opting to target the more global GSM market instead.

"We had to make some trade-offs," senior product manager Greg Sullivan told CNET today. "Even Microsoft doesn't have unlimited resources. We had to prioritize doing fewer things, really, really well."


Earlier this week Verizon announced that it would not have a Windows Phone 7 device until 2011. It was thought at the time that this was a setback for Microsoft; however, it turns out that phone was simply unavailable to Verizon.

"For the worldwide market, the vast majority of phones are GSM phones, so we focused on GSM first and then plan to deliver an update that will have great CDMA support in the first half of 2011," Sullivan said. "That's device availability in the first half and we're very confident of that. That's probably a conservative estimate."

"Look, we could do more things, or we could do fewer things really, really well. We chose intentionally to do fewer things really, really well. We absolutely have to build that quality first and then we have to quickly achieve reach and scale," Sullivan said.

Yesterday, Microsoft finalized the Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools and released demos of Twitter, Flixster, Netflix and other popular applications running on the new platform.