A tweet from the Microsoft Australia twitter account @msau has just confirmed that Lync client will be out on all major mobile phone platforms within the next 4 weeks.

Source https://twitter.com/#!/MSAU/status/139169075128573952

In my previous post I compared all the major out of the box features of the upcoming Windows Phone “Mango” release vs the upcoming “iOS5”. Now I have decided to focus a little more specifically on the social media features of each of the phone operating systems out of the box.

I do realise that a lot of the features that iOS is lacking out of the box can be done using an “App”. However having an integrated experience in the phone with these does make it a lot easier for the end users.  I would also argues that Apple knows that having an integrated experience is much better for the user as this is exactly why they are adding inbuilt features such as Twitter to iOS platform.

Clearly the winner here as to what phone is the better “Social” device is Windows Phone. Even when you compare the current NoDo release with iOS there is much better social integration out of the box. This table also shows that Windows Phone “Mango” is definitely the closet thing a consumer can have to having a truly native “Facebook” phone.

Update: I have updated this table to include the new features with iOS5.

Update #2: Now that Mango and iOS5 is out i have update the table again.

One of the major differentiators that Microsoft pushes when talking about Windows Phone is that the overall  experience with there phone is less about jumping in and out of apps and more of just glance and go device. Therefore as part of the Mango update that is coming Microsoft has continued to add a lot more functionality to further enhance the glance and go experience. A good example of this is the ability to take quickly photos/videos with the camera button while under lock and the new search under lock feature that is coming in the Mango update. This is compared to the iPhone (iOS) platform that pushes “apps for everything” mantra to say that if the phone can’t do it then just get a free (or paid) and app that can add the functionality and just have the user jump in and out of apps to do what they need to do…

To show the difference in the philosophy of both Windows Phone Mango and iOS devices I have made a list of general features comparing the built in functionally of each OS as compared with the additional apps to get the same functionality. As you can see the gap that needs to be made up with additional apps on the Windows Platform is far less than on iOS devices.

What Microsoft seems to be doing is providing a great out of the box experience for their users rather than just push them to a massive market place full of hundreds of thousands of apps when they want to do something more on the phone. This would certainly appeal to feature phone users that probably don’t want or even know how to download an app for their phone. It also appears that having more functionality out of the box is a pre-requisite for Nokia being able to convert some their feature phone users to a smartphone platform.  In doing this Microsoft is targeting the majority of mobile phone users users that do not already own smartphone by offering them a device with many features out of the box rather than go after the users that already have a smartphone device. Certainly if Microsoft are going to have any chance of gaining significant market share this will be the tactic they need to take…

Feature Source The Great Windows Phone Mango Feature List