Microsoft Pays $44 Million To Samsung and Nokia For Mango Marketing

CSHARP123 writes "Ballmer opened up the company's coffers to Nokia and Samsung for a holiday blitz of Mango marketing. Hold onto your hats though, it's no carte blanche access to Redmond's Gringotts. According to a report on Mobile Magazine, inside sources claim MS has set aside £28 million (about $44 million) for the endeavor, with about £20 million of that reserved for Nokia's first Windows Phone 7.5 handset. This joint marketing effort is reportedly a broader extension of the cooperative agreements all parties agreed to, ensuring future WP devices get the media saturation they deserve. Samsung is also due to unveil a major Christmas ad push for the Omnia W with an estimated £8m spend. Maybe this is what Samsung gets for making a deal on patents to cover Android OS? Not a bad deal for Samsung."

Re:Huh? What's "mango"?

[TechLA]

Windows Phone 7.1 and later. And if you have looked at N9 from Nokia, you'd be ignorant to notice how great it is. Both at hardware side from Nokia, and from software side from Microsoft. I was going to buy iPhone before, but now I just want to wait for what Windows Phone 7 mobiles Nokia comes out with.

Re:Huh? What's "mango"?

[TechLA]

I actually have an HTC phone with the old Windows Mobile currently. Yes, after iPhone and Android it sucks ass, but they weren't available back when I bought it. But it sure as hell was better than Symbian and anything else we had back then.

Nokia isn't a newbie. They have a history of making the best mobile devices on the planet, hardware wise. They suck with software. Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 is actually great OS to new phones. Combined with Nokia's experience with hardware and their history in mobile technology, I think they will actually go far.

Of course this is Slashdot and people here generally hate Microsoft and want to see them fail just so they can post haha comments.. But I think the whole Nokia+MS partnership was great idea for two companies that weren't doing good, both in the different areas of the industry. They basically combined their good sides to let go off their bad sides.

Windows Phone 7 & Wi-Fi SSIDs

[ppanon]

I was setting up an Internet/Wi-Fi router for a friend this weekend to replace an old flaky DLINK, and I set it up with a hidden SSID as well as a moderately secure WAP2 PSK. Then I reconnected all their devices to the new setup WiFi access point (laptops, iPod, BlackBerry, my Android phone). All except for the phone running Microsoft Windows Phone 7, because apparently there is no way to specify an unadvertised SSID in WP7. Not even if you turn on advertising the SSID, connect the phone, a disable SSID advertising again. That might not be an issue for some people who don't run unadvertised Wifi at home or work, but I wouldn't want to invest in software that encourages less secure configurations.