Microsoft coming up with Android beam like feature?

Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 running smartphones are slowly managing to catch up with the market all thanks to the Mango update. But unfortunately, these changes have come a little too late to make any impact on the strong Android base.

Android as most of you might know has grown into a major player today with constant updates that deal with bug fixes and what not. Also, Google has been quick in implementing certain vital features for Android while others were still left thinking. The Notifications Tray is one fine example of that.

With the announcement of the Galaxy Nexus this past October, Google showed off a rather neat feature. This feature also called the Android Beam, helps the users to share almost anything from their Nexus/ICS device to another such device. This feature makes use of the NFC capabilities of the smartphone. All the user has to do is tap against the other device and almost everything can be shared. Even Nokia has implemented this feature with the new range of Belle smartphones.

And now, according to a rumor sparked from Twitter, Microsoft could be looking to bring the Beaming feature to Windows Phones. It must be noted that Beaming is not new for Microsoft since a certain “Squirting” feature existed when the Zune came out. Squirting was nothing but sharing files between Zune devices on Wi-Fi.

There isn’t much info available about when or how exactly Microsoft plans to roll out the new Beaming feature to WP devices, but it is expected to come out with future Windows Phone updates like Tango or Apollo (Windows Phone 8). To make things even more interesting, there’s a video which shows this particular feature in action. Windows 8 or Windows Phone 8 is said to roll out in the second half of 2012. So it makes sense for Microsoft to come up with something like that by then.