Top Windows Phone news of the week: Layoffs, Nokia acquisition write-off

This lay-off is Microsoft’s way staying focused more on software and cloud solutions and hence most of the job cuts will be in the phone hardware business.

Quoting “sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans”, The Verge on Monday reported that a market-ready build of Windows 10 is likely to be completed later this week. “I am committed to our first-party devices including phones,” he said.

Microsoft isn’t giving up on mobile phones, but rather is still finding its way. IDC estimates that Windows Phone had a 2.7 percent market share in the first quarter of 2015. Most of these employees are from Nokia, a struggling Finish phone manufacturer that Microsoft acquired past year.

The cuts announced Wednesday come on top of 18,000 jobs that Microsoft trimmed previous year, just months after the company paid $7.3 billion for Nokia in the hope of expanding its footprint in the smartphone hardware business where Apple and Samsung are market leaders. A few days ago he posted a question on twitter that if there’s been a Windows Phone with a front flash yet, to which most of the audience replied with the negative remarks.

Another rumor recently surfaced claiming Microsoft was coming up with inventive new ideas to compete with Android devices, subsequently settling on a front-facing LED flash for the device running Windows 10 Mobile straight out of the box. As part of these preview releases, Microsoft will also release a matching version of the Windows 10 Mobile emulator. Though there’s one feature that Microsoft has activated with this new build, which for now is limited to users who live in the Seattle area.

Jan Dawson, chief analyst with Jackdaw Research, said that Microsoft pretty much is the Windows Phone industry, and any pullback is tantamount to waving the white flag. Users who enroll into the program can get access to early builds of the Windows operating system. Windows 10 will feature a dedicated photos app across devices and also a unified Xbox app that will allow you to chat with your Xbox pals, view your stats, and even offer local streaming between your Xbox and Windows 10 devices. Statistically speaking, most people have never used a Windows Phone, prompting Re/Code’s Lauren Goode to write an article on “what it’s really like to use a Windows Phone”, an excellent read for the curious.