As the global director for terminals marketing at the Vodafone Group, Peter Becker-Pennrich holds decision making powers over a procurement strategy that deals in serious volumes. Vodafone buys between 60 and 70 million handsets each year, spending $8bn across it’s footprint, including affiliates and partner markets. In this exclusive interview Becker-Pennrich offers frank assessments of the different strategies adopted by the vendor community, their chances for success and the nature of the relationship – ever evolving – between operators, vendors and platform developers.

US chipset manufacturer Qualcomm has confirmed full support for Microsoft Windows 8 PCs and smartphones based on its next generation Snapdragon family of processors. The move is of interest as it marks the arrival of an OS designed to span both the PC and mobile device form factors and Qualcomm’s foray into the same area.

Taiwanese handset vendor HTC has previewed two Windows Phone 7 smartphones to consumers across Europe, ahead of the products’ commercial release in October. The Titan and Radar handsets are the first from HTC to run the latest version of WP7, dubbed Mango.

The next version of Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform will finally bear fruit in September when a phone featuring the Mango update will hit Japanese shelves. The software giant has company has now officially signed off on the RTM version off the OS and in a blog post, Terry Myerson, corporate vice president of phone engineering said that this, “marks the point in the development process where we hand code to our handset and mobile that operator partners to optimize Mango for their specific phone and network configurations.”