Andrew Tech Help

UPDATE: For The Windows 8 & Windows Phone 8 Feature Availablity Matrices: Visit This New Article.

Back in January I wrote an article titled the "Windows Phone 7 Feature Availability Matrix". This article was essentially a chart describing the feature availability in different countries around the world where Windows Phone 7 handsets are sold. That article is currently my most popular article to date with 10,000 more views than the article in 2nd place, which shows that this is a very important issue for many Windows Phone users around the world who are outside the United States. At the MIX '11 developers show this year in April, Microsoft made some announcements regarding expanding the countries where the Windows Phone Marketplace would be established as well, as new languages to support these countries in time for their 'Mango' update which was made available on the 28th of September 2011 (Australian Eastern Standard Time). So I decided to update this chart again to reflect the new feature availablity for the Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) release and have continously updated this chart all throughout this Winter (Summer in Northern Hemisphere). Now that Windows Phone 7.5 has been officially released, I now believe that this chart is at a finished (or very near finished) stage for this release. The features detailed in my two charts are what will be available in your country, if you buy a handset running Windows Phone 7.5.

A Quick Recap/Explanation

So to quickly recap on why I wrote this series of articles in the first place. I was lucky enough to visit Leo Laporte in the TWiT cottage in January when my favourite TWiT show was on: 'Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott' (and now Mary Jo Foley too) and was briefly explaining to Leo about not having Zune & Bing Local services available in Australia when Paul joked that Microsoft should pay him NOT to create a Matrix of what Windows Phone 7 features were available in each country. So I decided to make such a matrix, because it's REALLY frustrating to live in a country which doesn't have access to most of these services.

For those of you who have never used a Windows Phone before (and I recommend you try one out soon), the phone is very different to an iPhone or Android device because it uses a number of Microsoft based cloud services to provide data & features to the phone. It uses the Windows Phone Marketplace service to deliver apps & games, the Zune Marketplace service to deliver Music, Video/Movies/TV & Podcasts, the Xbox Live service to allow you to play games which earn achievements & gamerpoints to an Xbox Live profile with an Avatar and Bing Local services to provide contextual, location aware search to the phone. Unfortunately due to multiple factors (population, record companies, legal requirements, incentive by Microsoft) the majority of the world does NOT have access to all of these services, which means they're buying a Windows Phone but are unable to get the full experience.This particularly affected me because I'm in Australia where we have access to the Windows Phone Marketplace & full Xbox Live experience, but only partial access to the Zune Marketplace (only movies, not music or podcasts) and no access to Bing Local Search (Bing Local Search has been added to Australia in Windows Phone 7.5). So that's the story behind why I wrote the original article in the first place.

Windows Phone App & Zune Marketplace

So when Microsoft first made Windows Phone handsets available in October 2010 there was a whole list of countries where you could apparently buy Windows Phone handsets, but they weren't technically launched there, so you couldn't even use the Windows Phone Marketplace to download apps (not even free ones). Well in the Mango release, Microsoft is launching the phone in 19 more countries, so the large majority of countries that were in that category of having hardware available, but no App Marketplace launched no longer have that issue, which is great news. The other major change is now Microsoft supports many more languages on the handset (one of the reasons why they're expanding the launched countries), but I'll talk about that more soon. Unfortunately the only announcement that Microsoft has made about the Zune Marketplace this year is that Canada will officially get the Zune Music Marketplace & Zune Pass on October 3 and that Australia will get the Zune Pass on November 16th.

On the 24th of August, Microsoft shipped the Zune 4.8 software (which is required for syncing with a Windows Phone Mango device). This version of the software officially enables the Windows Phone App Marketplace for all the new markets that Windows Phones are shipped in and also enables Zune Movie Marketplace Rentals for Denmark, Finland, Japan, Norway & Sweden. In this release for a number of Northern European countries, about 6-10 movies were added to the purchases pivot, all from a studio named Screen Media, so I've added these to the chart, but by no means is this really a proper addition of movie purchasing in these countries. Although they are NOT present in this new version of the software, there's also still small indications that for the Zune Music Marketplace will be made available in Australia and a select number of other countries at some point and that the Zune Podcast Marketplace will be made available outside the US at some point too (the blue crosses). (Update: Zune Music Marketplace & Zune Music Pass have been confirmed to be coming to Australia on November 16th 2011 :D)

x = Service Was Available Alongside The Initial Release Of Windows Phone (Version 7.0)
x = Service Has Been Officially Confirmed For This Country In Windows Phone 7.5 And Is Enabled & Working In The Zune PC Software
? = Service Has Been Officially Confirmed For This Country In Windows Phone 7.5 And Is Still Disabled Or Not Working In The Zune PC Software
x = Service Has NOT Been Officially Been Confirmed BUT There Are Small Pieces Of Evidence Suggesting This Service May Role Out In This Country Soon.
* Certain Artist Metadata such as Artist Biographies are only available in the US.
** The Windows Phone App Marketplace no longer appears in the Zune PC Software as Of April 24th 2012. This chart now refects the ability for these countries to access it on the phone.

Bing Local, Xbox Live & Misc Features

At The Windows Phone 'Mango' VIP Preview event held on the 24th/25th May (depending on Time Zone), Microsoft made some big announcements specifically around Bing Search. Nearly ALL of these announcements will require that a country has the full Bing Local Search service enabled to function correctly as well as voice recognition for a number of features too. I've been able to use the Windows Phone Emulator to test the phone in each country's local configuration and this second table is all of the Bing, Xbox & other non Zune features that will ship in Windows Phone 7.5. I've then compared what I've found in the emulator to the Official Feature Availability List on Microsoft's website and found some interesting trends. There's a number of features that are not officially available in a country and yet the user is still able to use them (mainly voice related), so that's pretty cool Microsoft. The other thing is that there's a country or two where a feature that is supposed to be officially available is currently not available,h opefully this is only temporary and this will be fixed soon.

Feature/Service Availability Has Been Officially Released By Microsoft Here: ( http://www.microsoft.com/windowsphone/en-au/howto/wp7/basics/feature-and-service-availability.aspx )
x = Feature/Service Was Available On The Initial Release Of Windows Phone (Version 7.0)
x = Feature/Service Has Been Officially Confirmed For This Country In Windows Phone 7.5 And Is Enabled & Working
? = Feature/Service Has Been Officially Confirmed For This Country In Windows Phone 7.5 And Is Still Disabled Or Not Working
x = Feature/Service Has NOT Been Officially Been Confirmed For This Country In Windows Phone 7.5 & Still Is Available/Is Working Anyway
* = The Bing Vision feature will scan QR Codes, Microsoft Tags & Text (for translation) whereever the feature is available, but scanning of Barcodes, Books, CDs & DVDs is limited to these countries marked with the *.
** = This country's official language isn't available for Windows Phone yet, but the country is available in the Windows Phone regional settings. Therefore another officially recognised language (e.g regionally recognised language) was chosen OR in the case of no other officially recognised languages being available, English is used.

New Display & Keyboard Languages

Microsoft has also made significant improvement in the display languages supported by Windows Phone by increasing the current 5 (English, French, Italian, German & Spanish) to 21. The following display languages will be available in the 'Mango' update: Chinese (simplified and traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazillian & Portugal), Russian, and Swedish. Microsoft also announced that they're going to support 20 new keyboard languages. These include keyboards for all the new display languages mentioned above and also for Indonesian, Malaysian, Turkish & Ukrainian. This is great news and is also probably a major part of the reason why the Windows Phone App Marketplace will be expanding to 35 countries.

Concluding Thoughts

From what I can see, the release of the Windows Phone 7.5 has opened a lot of new Windows Phone services up to a number of new countries (as well as opening up the platform to many countries for the first time). As I said at the end of the last version of this article, I REALLY hope Microsoft continues to bring the missing Zune & Bing functionality to those countries (such as mine, Australia) which have gaps in the matrix, so that the Windows Phone 7 experience is consistent across everyone country it's available in. It's important people know what's available on the phone in their country before they buy it. Here is a few key trends that I have noticed while analyzing all this data:

• While only a few extra countries have been given additional functionality, there are lots of small signs that things are changing in the backend services that will pave the way for the Zune Marketplace to expand to many more countries (hopefully soon!)
• The Bing Search app officially is available in most countries (although not available in a few that Microsoft says it is officially available in) and that every country which has access to the Bing app also officially has access to Bing Vision Search & the Bing Image Search pivot. Unfortunately, the best parts of Bing Vision (Book, CD, DVD & Barcode scanning) are only available in the US and selected European markets for now.
• Bing Music Search is officially available in all countries which have access to the Zune Music Marketplace.
• It also appears Microsoft can remotely turn off & on Zune & Bing functionality without updating the phone, as Bing Music Search disappeared from the 7712 build even though it had been available and working for months and that emulator build wasn't changed in any way between it working and not working.
• While Bing Voice Search & Voice to Text Messaging is officially only available in a small number of countries, it appears that Microsoft has continued to allow these features to work unofficially in all countries that speak English, French, German, Italian & Spanish, which is a very neat thing to do (Well Done Microsoft!)
• Bing Local Scout is only available in the US, UK, France & surprisingly Australia. This simply must be because of deals that Microsoft was able to get with local directory services in those countries. The Bing Local Search pivot also works in those countries plus Germany & Canada. I suspect Bing Local Scout to launch in those countries too soon.
• Not everything has expanded though, with the US still officially being the only country to have Bing Quick Cards, Bing Traffic & most shockingly (this one should be easy to fix, so shame on Microsoft for not addressing this) Clickable Phone Numbers & Addresses.

Finally - please don't see this as my way of attacking Microsoft. It's actually quite the opposite. I'm so impressed with the features and services demoed to be available on the phone at the US launch events and on the Windows Phone Blogs, that I just want to be able to do the same things myself and share the FULL experience with people who ask me about buying a Windows Phone. The more features Microsoft adds to countries worldwide, the easier it is for them to sell their phones (more selling points for each phone in each country) and the easier it is for me to convince people to buy it here in Australia. This article is fueled by my love of the Windows Phone platform, not a hatred of it - that needs to be made VERY clear. The Internet allows news to travel instantly and so you can no longer keep "secrets" from the rest of us, we all know what you can do in the US. We understand that there are significant roadblocks in the way which are delaying some of these features, but the issues raised here need to be made a number 1 priority. I have heard the Tango update (the next update to Windows Phone) will be all about expanding Bing services to more countries, so I'll be definitely covering that as it happens!

Note: If you want to be notified each time I update this table, follow me on Twitter (username @andrewtechhelp). I apologise, this Twitter account contains a lot of Australian content (and the ocasional retweet with some coarse language), but this is my personal account so obviously I tweet about things that go on where I live. :)