Stefan Mileschin

At MWC this year, Microsoft announced it was partnering with several new companies to bring additional Windows Phone devices to market. At BUILD, they announced an additional two companies – Micromax and Prestigio. Today, Microsoft used their Windows Phone Blog to announce some of the first of these new entrants with the Micromax Canvas Win W121 and Canvas Win W092.

Neither of these devices could be considered a flagship device in any market, but clearly that’s not the push right now. With the (relative) success of the Lumia 520, Nokia showed that low prices are still important in a lot of markets and can allow for some respectable volumes of devices to be sold.

There were two major changes earlier this year which have led to Windows Phone going from basically three OEMs (Nokia, Samsung, and HTC) to double digit numbers of OEMs pledged to bring devices out based on Microsoft’s smartphone platform. The first is the $0 licensing model for all Windows devices under 9” in screen size. This lets Windows Phone compete head on with Android - at least from a licensing perspective. In fact, with the patents being paid to Microsoft from basically all Android device makers, it’s possible that going with Windows Phone is actually less costly on the licensing end. The other major change was that Microsoft released a Qualcomm reference design for Windows Phone, and both of the Micromax devices are utilizing that to save costs on engineering. This is a big change, and allows OEMs to bring devices to market faster and for much less money than having to design an entire phone themselves.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8178/m...hone-for-india