Microsoft said that they will be charging for Windows Phone 7 Series operating system, when it is released, according to toptechnews.com. Despite Google providing its Android operating system for free, Microsoft announced it will charge a small fee, per phone.
Strategic Analytics predict the mobile operating system will cost roughly between $8 and $15 per phone, an added cost for manufactures that want to produce a Windows based phone. Although Microsoft never officially announced how much it would be selling the software for, Steve Ballmer did mention it would not be free:
"I think there"s something clean and simple and easy to understand about our model," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said. "We build something, we sell that thing ... I think it"s not only in our best interests, but it"s a simple model that"s easy for developers, handset manufacturers, and our operator partners to deal with, to understand, and to build from."
More details of what Windows Phone 7 Series will include will come later this year, as Microsoft hasn’t unveiled all of the details about the operating system just yet. Microsoft will also be supplying built-in applications like Office Hub, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, an added feature that other phones don’t supply.
More so, Apple supplies their operating system with their own hardware, where Google does have the Nexus One, but also supplies their OS to other smartphones in the market for free. Microsoft has yet to release their own smartphone hardware.