Microsoft's Aaron Woodman: New features will be coming at a faster pace to Windows Phone

Techradar have posted the result of an extensive telephone interview with Microsoft’s Aaron Woodman, director of Microsoft’s Mobile Communication Business in which he promised to deliver hardware and software innovation faster, if it made sense.

New features like NFC and wireless charging and other advancements will come faster now that the operating system is more mature, says Woodman. “Even a year ago when we first brought the product to market we still had some key gaps that we had to cover to get competitive and that’s taken a lot of time. I feel like we’re there now, so that frees up resources to look at those innovative pieces.”

“We’ve decided to focus our energy on hardware optimisation. On a single core, I feel like we have better performance than a great deal of the dual core devices out there without having to sacrifice or balance things like battery life.”

“If you look at Android, you see the greatest time to market advantage, just because there’s greater flexibility in some of what the OEMs can do, but it doesn’t always execute as great quality. The first several dual core devices actually didn’t even use the second core.

“They didn’t really expose that second core to ISVs and even today not a lot of ISVs actually optimise for dual core systems. But they sure as heck put it on the back of every box and on the placard and consumers make choices [based on that].

He promised NFC when the software to support it is complete.

“… the question will be what we do in software to bring that to life. That will be a highly curated design and it will be high quality and it will be consistent with the user experience,” he said.

He did not however think 3D screens were that useful.

“You can expect us to do great innovation at the hardware level and at the software level and at a faster pace but we will still come back to prioritising something that’s meaningful to end users and not just shoot for the new. I saw an Android phone that has a ‘3D without glasses’ screen. Well, that’s definitely cool!” he said.

“There’s no doubt about it. I’m not sure how useful that is especially in a model where you still have to touch the device and now you have a 3D thing and that makes it difficult to build a user interface – but it’s really neat. So we’re focused on trying to find the centre of those pieces.”

It seems Nokia will both drive and enable the faster implementation of hardware features.

“And Nokia has now said ‘all of my innovations that I can think of that will differentiate me at the hardware level will be focused on this platform’; that’s going to bring a great amount of innovation.”

“It’s going to push us to start to prioritise some of those innovations with hardware that we might have deprioritised because we weren’t sure whether we would see a hardware partner take advantage of it in that time frame.”

Regarding the recent Update brouhaha he insisted nothing has changed for the negative.

“Folks got a little alarmed by the blog post but there is no change in policy. We have always worked with carriers to test updates.

“There’s no change in how we’re doing it – and our track record is pretty darn good. The fact that there are multiple packages coming, some of which are firmware specific to a given device and we’re having all these more pops… For the maintenance releases that we’ve got coming it didn’t make sense for us to continue to maintain this big table.”

“We solved that underlying problem in the Mango timeframe and now, especially because we’re going to these maintenance releases – some of which apply to your phone and some of which don’t – it doesn’t make any sense to keep updating the table.”

Read a lot more at TechRadar here.