Microsoft finally announced its much awaited Windows Phone 8 at an event in San Francisco, though the announcement came with a disappointing news for the current crop of Windows Phone users that their devices would not be upgradable to Apollo, but only to WP7.8.
One of the biggest highlight of the presentation was the announcement that WP8 would share core code with Windows 8 which would increase the number of devices and apps available for WP8.
Although not many features of Windows Phone 8 were revealed, but a few of them. Firstly, the new customizable tile home screen is impressive which will allow you to change the size of each app tile based on your individual preferences. Besides WP8 will support dual core processors and NFC as well. Nokia Maps will be the default navigation app on Windows Phone 8.
The new phones will be made by Nokia, Samsung, HTC and Huawei on Qualcomm’s dual-core chips and will also support voice commands and Skype calling as well.
Well, talking about the existing Windows Phone, those will be upgradable to WP7.8 which would bring in WP8’s new start screen UI. Besides, other features include DLNA support, Nokia Music 3, usage tracking and Scalado based new camera features and improvements. Importantly, the WP7.8 update would only be available for select devices which would most likely be Nokia’s flagship device i.e. the Lumia 900 among few others.
We must admit that Microsoft’s decision of not upgrading the current Windows Phone 7.5 devices to WP8 has received a lot of flak in the tech circles and would definitely lead to a drop in the sales of the current Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) devices. Nokia’s Lumia line is set to suffer a major setback following the announcement.
Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in its mobile platform as smartphones and tablets are regarded as the future of computing. Still they only own about 2% of the total market share, while the majority of the chunk is owned by Google’s Android followed by Apple’s iOS.
Microsoft has not indicated as to when WP8 or Apollo devices would be launched in the market, which we believe would be launched only after Windows 8 is in October later this year.
