The Windows Phone Summit is happening in San Francisco this year, and Microsoft has officially announced the launch of Windows Phone 8, with a lot of new user features and also with better NFC Capabilities and also interestingly, Internet Explorer 10.
The much awaited Windows Phone summit happened today at San Francisco, and it was an event that many Microsoft lovers would like. The company officially unveiled their next major version of mobile operating system, the Windows Phone 8. The new OS comes with a whole lot of new features and here are some of the highlights of the features that are coming to Windows Phone 8 this fall!
Shares Core Code with Windows 8
Microsoft’s head of Windows Phone, Joe Belfiore, was the one who took stage to reveal the new Windows Phone 8 today, and he revealed that the new OS shares a lot of code in common with Windows 8. The Windows Phone 8 is sharing a lot of code from the Windows 8, and at heart, both the OS are sharing the same code from Windows NT Kernel.
Microsoft is calling it Shared Windows Core, which is an extension of the entire file system architecture, the internal base algorithm, explorer code, and much more which are shared across these platforms. This would help the developers and Microsoft streamline the development of the entire Windows ecosystem, across various devices. Unlike the iOS, developers can now deploy apps for mobile and desktop environment.
This is not all. The Shared Windows Core now shares the Internet Explorer 10’s core code across the devices. And now, the Enterprise users will be able to enjoy a different and professional version of Windows Phone 8. Along with the Windows Phone 8 comes the Secure Boot and BitLocker technologies. There are also some special enterprise features that the company is bringing to the users!
Supports Multi-Core CPUs (Upto 64 Cores)
With Windows Phone 8, the company leaps into support the Multi-Core features and besides supporting the dual-core processors in their operating system. The operating system now supports upto 64 cores, which would enable the OS to run on a variety of hardware configuration. And also, with the Shared Windows Core feature, the developers can write their own drivers for different devices.
Support for HD Media and SD Card Storage
This has been one of the most requested feature from the users of Windows Phone. Previously, the users did not support the high resolution displays and the maximum support was provided for just 800×480 display resolution. But with Windows Phone 8, this is changing. The OS now supports upto 1280×768 resolution, which is great, and also this is the most widely used large screen display in the market.
Moreover, Microsoft also heard our shout to bring the SD Card reading and writing capability to Windows Phone. The Windows Phone 8 would now support the reading and writing of content to the SD Cards and the maximum amount of memory it can handle is still unknown.
Internet Explorer 10
This is something interesting that Microsoft unveiled at the Windows Phone Summit. They are bringing the Internet Explorer 10 for the mobile devices with desktop class content delivery. As we told earlier, the core share from Windows NT was the key to bringing this to the Windows Mobile devices. The IE10 has borrowed a lot of its features that its known for, from the desktop version, and one feature that we loved watching was the SmartScreen anti-phishing filter that’s coming along with the Windows Phone 8.
The JavaScript engine has been re-written and the company is now promising a 4x faster performance than the previous version! With this release, Microsoft is slowly and steadily closing the gap between the mobile and the desktop version of the browsers. The speeds are blazing fast when compared to the Samsung Galaxy S III on the HTML5 performance.
NFC Sharing
With Windows Phone 8, Microsoft wants to pose a heavy competition to Apple and Google. And it is predominantly seen with this release, and Windows Phone gets matured with the new release which is coming this fall. The company announced that they are bringing the NFC Payments and Loyalty Cards to Windows Phone devices, to bring the most powerful yet simple payments to mobile devices to bring the users a complete wallet experience.
The company strongly believes that NFC are the most secure and quick payment methods currently available. Microsoft is also trying to coordinate with a variety of NFC payment gateway providers to widen the support for NFC payments. The software would come in Windows Phone 8 by default, and the users will be able to use them wherever the NFC payments are supported.
New Nokia Maps and Turn-by-Turn Navigation
Here’s another announcement from Microsoft about Windows Phone 8. All the Windows Phone 8 devices would not have an in-built Nokia Maps application that is capable of providing turn-by-turn navigation to the users. The new Maps application will also come with Nokia Drive, which would enable users to use it while driving, hands-free.
But what makes Microsoft stand out with the new Maps application? Well, the app would alert when there’s a new coffee house near, that has a discounted price available. This looks interesting, isn’t it?
A new Start Screen
Besides all the new feature additions, the Windows Phone 8 comes with a UI Beef-up. The new OS would now feature a completely redesigned Start Screen, taking advantage of the entire real-estate of the screen and also brings some brilliant customization options. If you loved the current start screen in Windows Phone 7, then you’d probably love this more. And the entire start screen is lively with live tiles.
The users can now resize a tile by dragging them across with the arrows that are present at the corners of the tiles. The new Start Screen also allows you to choose between medium, small and large tile options. All the apps that are being developed will automatically adjust to these tile sizes when deployed on the mobile device. Thew new Start Screen is really thought-out concept that has come out from Microsoft.
In-app Purchases
Starting from the next update, Microsoft is all set to provide the in-app purchases for the customers. The users will be able to extend their purchases from within an app using the new in-app purchases. This works very similar to how iOS App Store and the Google Play Store works for in-app purchases. But to enhance the safety, the purchase would require a PIN, in-order to perform an in-app purchase.
Deeper Skype Integration
And now, remember that Skype was acquired by Microsoft months ago? And there’s been a deeper integration of the VoIP service on Windows ever since this acquisition. But with Windows Phone 8, Microsoft is bringing this Skype integration to mobile devices. Starting with the new OS, the Skype calls would appear as a normal cellular calls. Users will also be able to enable a variety of phone features to Skype, like call waiting, call forwarding and other features in Skype. But we knew that Skype would not run in the background until today in Windows devices, but Microsoft has put their effort in bringing seamless Multi-tasking power to Windows Phone. We’ll take a look at this in a while!
True Multi-tasking
Microsoft demoed yet another improvement and much needed feature of any smartphone, the multi-tasking. The new OS would bring seamless multi-tasking to the mobile devices. And the company demoed VoIP and Location services multi-tasking on stage. Microsoft is also opening up the multi-tasking APIs to the developers, which would bring some great apps to the Windows Phone devices in the future.
Voice Recognition
This is the hot topic that ANY major smartphone would want to have. And Microsoft did not exempt the Windows Phone from this feature. The Windows Phone 8 would have deeper voice integration using Audible, which excels in Voice Recognition technologies on mobile devices. The users will be able to launch apps, play music tracks, skip chapters in podcasts and other tasks that Siri would do on an iPhone 4S and new iPad. And guess what? This feature is coming to Windows Phone 7.5 and up, this fall!
Compatibility and Upgrade Path
This was a major let down to a lot of Windows Phone users after the exciting feature announcements that were made today. The company revealed that the current Windows Phone devices would not run the new Windows Phone 8. Instead, they would get a new ROM cooked for these legacy devices, which is coming this 28th!
The company is calling it Windows Phone 7.8. The apps that are developed for Windows Phone 8 would not run on Windows Phone 7.8, but the vice-versa would happen. The Windows Phone 7.8 is not bad though. It has some of the new features that were announced for Windows Phone 8.
Your Opinion
This is what we had in today’s Windows Phone Summit 2012, where Microsoft revealed the information about Windows Phone 8. What do you think? Are you happy with the features? And are you hurt that your device will not run Windows Phone 8, but a three year-old iPhone 3GS would run the latest iOS6?