Microsoft has announced that the hardware requirements for Windows Phone 7 will be lowered. The mobile operating system will in the future also work on smartphones with only 256 MB of memory ? though not without certain limitations. Some apps requiring a lot of memory will not work on the slimmed down Phone 7 mobiles and users won?t be able to multitask between different apps.Users of a device with 256 MB must also do without the automatic uploading of photos to Microsoft?s online storage Skydrive. Podcast subscriptions cannot be managed on the smartphones and video podcasts cannot be watched. HD videos (1280 x 720 pixels) meanwhile will be scaled down to 800 x 450 pixels to be shown on the devices.
One of the first Phone 7 devices with the slimmed down hardware is the Nokia Lumia 610, which will come out in the second half of the year.