Are you waiting patiently for the slightly more advanced Lumia 900 which is due to arrive on UK shores soon, well you may be interested to know that the date for its arrival looked like it would be in June according to many reports and shots of the carphonewarehouse website.

Unfortunately for the Nokia fiends among you T3 has shown that this page has in fact been pulled and this leaves the UK release date of the Nokia Lumia 900 up in the air again.

Nokia Lumia 900 Specs:

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• Windows Phone Tango Operating System.
• 800 x 480 pixels screen resolution
• 4.3 inch Multi Touchscreen Display with Corning Gorilla Glass
• Size:125.5 x 65.8 x 9 mm.
• 1.4Ghz processor with 1GB RAM.
• Connectiviy:3G,Wi-Fi,microUSB,Bluetooth.
• HD Video recording & playback.
• 16GB of internal memory.
• FM Radio with Recording.
• 3.5 mm jack audio jack

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With the Nokia Lumia 900 getting a release at CES 2012 it was shown to be a pretty sizable beast coming in with a larger 4.3 inch display and an upgraded (we hope) battery, it also brings in 4G LTE support.

Windows Phone 7 still needs a bit of a kick start and while there are growing applications in their own marketplace, they are still leaps and bounds away from Apples offerings or the Android marketplace and I am personally unsure just how many app developers are looking at this alternative currently, my hunch is less than Microsoft would like despite little sweeteners to encourage more to join.

Why are the UK getting a 4G enabled smartphone anyway?

Some were questioning why we the UK would be getting a 4G enabled smartphone when we are so far off even deciding on a date to have the UK 4G spectrum auction, never mind actually roll out a full service to customers.

So it seems likely that the Nokia Lumia 900 handset should get released sometime this year and will be a 3G enabled device, with the Windows phone team getting cocky about the speed with which they can boot up facebook with their Smoked By A Windows Phone Crap….woopty f**ing woo….:)

I wonder if the impressive sounding (kind of) shipping figures will result in actual sales, as I hear mixed reports coming out about these figures.

Do not get me wrong I think Windows and Nokia could be on to a winner here in the long term, I have used a Lumia 800 and feel it makes Android look like one of those crap phones your Mum buys from Tesco/Walmart and claims she has bought an iPhone for £30.

Of course I fully understand their tactics and fair play to them, and good luck.

Ok, we are perhaps a few weeks early on this news but it has come to our attention that Skype will indeed be available on Windows Phone devices in the not too distant future.

And why not?

Microsoft after all own the damn VOIP company anyway, so it does seem slightly odd that they have even taken this long to bring their own technology to their devices.

I wonder if this is Microsoft steadying the networks who must be shi***ng themselves that once the penny drops that all we need is a data connection to connect to VOIP services, we can do away with our phone packages once and for all!

4G could be the death knoll for traditional mobile networks:

I have said this before, it is possibly only a matter of time before we simply have a VOIP type client such as Skype running in the background all the time on our mobile devices with no need to ever use our minutes and have the ability to call anywhere in the world for free or pretty damn cheap.

Is this the reason that the 4G network may well go for much less money than the 3G spectrum sold for, because we will not be prepared to pay the amount of cash we do for minutes if all we really want is data, leaving the obvious question of how to subsidize our shiny new devices up for grabs after per month costs are slashed.

I also suspect Skype as a service will become advertiser funded, where it will be free in principle but you will have to go through a short message for calls or video for using video conferencing, obviously this would go away if you paid a subscription or similar to Skype’s coffers.

Skype will kill networks dead in time:

I think that networks in the UK will look to consolidate and possibly muscle out the languishing Three network and if my predictions do hold true, there will likely be some call from the remaining few to push out far reaching WiFi on “health and safety grounds” as one wise commentator on the guardian blog pointed out:

ImperfectRex:

*After the other networks get rid of 3, expect them to start trying to get rid of wide-broadcast wifi. Either through legislation on health & safety or simply buying/bribing cheap or free wifi providers.

There are talks that Skype will not be fully featured until Apollo late this year but a version may well appear at the MWC in Barcelona next month.

The launch of a Lenovo windows mobile phone is likely to be seen in the second half of 2012 according to sources, though there is no assurance that this release will go beyond a China only roll-out.

China market set to be crucial for Windows:

If Windows can crack the Chinese market with affordable devices running on Tango or Mango (Windows 7+ O/S), then the entry by Nokia to the Chinese market with their Lumia 800, could make for an attractive option to many who are currently out-priced by Android or iOS based phones, and let us not forget that this market is big, and one both companies have their eyes firmly on.

Mango update went well for Windows:

The new release of the Mango update has gone down smoothly, and with the Windows O/S being adopted by more and more manufacturers it looks likely that they have turned a corner now that the Windows 7 mobile operating system has some style and a growing application market.

Windows offers sweeteners to app developers:

In order to make sure that the growing adoption of the Windows Phone operating system by consumers is not met with disappointment when accessing the Windows application market. Microsoft have dished out thousands of Lumia devices to developers in order for them to start looking at the platform as a new means of revenue generation. This has seen a marked increase in the amount of applications available in their own marketplace and is likely to continue to grow.

So it seems like interesting times for both Lenovo and Windows, as both look to offer something new to a rapidly growing marketplace.