Microsoft has just announced an avalanche of new details surrounding its Windows Phone 7 Series due to launch this year, including that the phone will support multi-touch and that Pandora, Foursquare, Seesmic, Netflix and the AP are among its development partners.

The new information, revealed during Microsoft’s presentation at Microsoft’s MIX10 conference in Las Vegas, focuses on the tools developers will have at their disposal when creating apps for Microsoft’s marketplace. Most of what will be available has become standard on smartphones due to the iPhone and Google’s Android OS: accelerometer, GPS, push notifications, hardware-accelerated video, camera/mic support, Internet streaming capabilities and multi-touch. The last one is interesting because Google only recently added multi-touch to Android.

As you might expect, Windows Phone 7 will run Silverlight, Microsoft’s rival to Adobe Flash, and feature Silverlight features for building games and applications. The company also said that developers of Windows 7 Phone apps can download a tool package for app development, including Visual Studio 2010 for Windows Phone, XNA Game Studio 4.0 and the Windows Phone 7 Emulator.

The most important part of this announcement may be the development partners already on board; Pandora, Netflix, Foursquare, the Associated Press, Shazam and Seesmic will all have applications on the Windows Phone 7 Series marketplace and are working with the company to build apps for it. It will need the support of these developers if it’s to have any chance of competing with the iPhone or Android.

In the end, the success or failure of Windows Phone 7 depends on the user experience and developer adoption. Without an interface that rivals Apple or Google’s mobile platforms, Microsoft will fail. The same is true if it cannot court developers and get them to make great apps. Today’s announcements show that Microsoft is serious about making Windows Phone 7 a contender in the mobile app space.

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Reviews: Android, Foursquare, Google, Pandora, Seesmic, Shazam, Windows

Tags: foursquare, microsoft, Mobile 2.0, pandora, seesmic, shazam, sling, windows phone 7, windows phone 7 series

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