A report on Smartphone and Windows Phone

Windows Mobile is a discontinued family of mobile operating systems developed by Microsoft for smartphones and personal digital assistants.

By February 2010, Microsoft announced Windows Phone to supersede Windows Mobile with a more modern take on the industry.

Android is a mobile operating system based on a modified version of the Linux kernel and other open source software, designed primarily for touchscreen mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.

Third-party apps available on Google Play and other app stores can extensively re-theme the home screen, and even mimic the look of other operating systems, such as Windows Phone.

Symbian is a discontinued mobile operating system (OS) and computing platform designed for smartphones.

Stephen Elop was appointed the CEO of Nokia in September 2010, and on 11 February 2011, he announced a partnership with Microsoft that would see Nokia adopt Windows Phone as its primary smartphone platform, and Symbian would be gradually phased out, together with MeeGo.

Mobile devices, with mobile communications abilities (e.g., smartphones), contain two mobile operating systems – the main user-facing software platform is supplemented by a second low-level proprietary real-time operating system which operates the radio and other hardware.

Microsoft announces Windows Mobile 6.5, an "unwanted stopgap" update to Windows Mobile 6.1 intended to bridge the gap between version 6.1 and the then yet-to-be released Windows Mobile 7 (later canceled in favor of Windows Phone 7). The first devices running it appeared in late October 2009.

Originally Microsoft had established a major partnership with Nokia in 2011, in which the company exclusively produced smartphones using the Windows Phone platform, and promoted Microsoft services on its feature phone products (including Bing search).

Defunct Windows families include Windows 9x, Windows Mobile and Windows Phone.

However, in 2014, Microsoft admitted losing the majority of the overall operating system market to Android, because of the massive growth in sales of Android smartphones.

As a result, in 2010 Microsoft revamped their aging flagship mobile operating system, Windows Mobile, replacing it with the new Windows Phone OS that was released in October that year.

While a large majority (at least 75%) of them do not run any version of Windows Phone— those other phones are not categorized as smartphones by Gartner – in the same time frame 8 million Windows smartphones (2.5% of all smartphones) were made by all manufacturers (but mostly by Microsoft).

She also stated that one of the goals for Threshold was to create a unified application platform and development toolkit for Windows, Windows Phone and Xbox One (which all use a similar kernel based on Windows NT).

Universal apps can be designed to run across multiple Microsoft product families with nearly identical codeincluding PCs, tablets, smartphones, embedded systems, Xbox One, Surface Hub and Mixed Reality.

Introduced in November 2011, the line was the result of a long-term partnership between Nokia and Microsoft—as such, Lumia smartphones run on Microsoft software, the Windows Phone operating system; and later the newer Windows 10 Mobile.

Windows 10 Mobile was designed for use on smartphones and phablets running on 32-bit ARM processor architectures.

In July 2014, Microsoft's then-new CEO Satya Nadella explained that the company was planning to "streamline the next version of Windows from three operating systems into one single converged operating system for screens of all sizes", unifying Windows, Windows Phone, and Windows Embedded around a common architecture and a unified application ecosystem.