The Redmond giant is trying to regain its lost popularity among smartphone users

 It seems that Microsoft is preparing to deliver new and improved services and products for the mobile devices market, according to recent rumors. People close to Microsoft’s development plans reported that the company is prepared to release services that will focus on delivering better experience with multimedia tasks.

This is quite news, as the Redmond giant is well-known for having business oriented applications, as the main feature of Windows Mobile has always been its ability to cope with Exchange mail servers. Microsoft was one of the first companies to enter the smartphone software market, in the days when people considered these devices only as business tools.

With time, though, smartphones have become more powerful and more versatile and therefore, both users and developers realized that these devices are actually capable to handle multimedia tasks, too. This statement proved to be true when Apple released the iPhone, which was the first true multimedia smartphone on the market.

The fact that Apple tripled its share on the mobile device market, from three percent to nine percent, in little time shows that users are doing more with their phones, not only email and web browsing.

It is expected that Steve Ballmer, CEO at Microsoft, will deliver a keynote speech on February 17 during the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Ballmer will allegedly speak about the company’s new sync service between Windows Mobile-powered phones and a web server.

The web-based service, called My Phone will automatically update multimedia content on the phone, such as pictures and videos, to the user’s account on the website. Each user will have 200 MB of space, according to recent reports on tech websites.

 The service is similar to Apple’s Mobile Me, but it seems that Microsoft will offer it for free, instead of Apple’s $99 yearly subscription.

Other rumors say that Microsoft is developing a marketplace where users will be able to browse through all Windows Mobile 3rd party software in one place. Again, this move might be regarded as a reply to Apple’s App Store, which proved to be hugely popular among users.

Microsoft has been losing some of its share in the mobile market during the last few months, so it is clear that Steve Ballmer has all the reasons to rejuvenate the Microsoft brand among smartphone users. In order to do this, the company will also release Windows Mobile 6.5, which will not be entirely new software, but a significant upgrade of the 6.1 version.

Screenshots of the new version of Windows Mobile leaked on the Internet a few days ago. If the photos prove to be real, it looks like the new version of the mobile operating system will be more intuitive to use and it will have some new features.