Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 platform has long been the underdog in the smartphone market. This may be because of their under-specced phones, small marketshare and relatively small ecosystem. This has caused Microsoft to work on a new major release of the operating system under the name Windows Phone 8. Microsoft has announced Windows Phone 8 and some of its new features at today’s Windows Phone press event.
As far as speed and hardware features go, you can tell that Microsoft is really trying to step it up when it comes to hardware support. Microsoft has announced that Windows Phone 8 will finally have support for multi-core processors (up to 64 cores!), NFC, MicroSD cards and higher resolution screens. Microsoft said that they will be supporting three different types of screen resolutions: WVGA (800×480), WXGA (1280×768) and ‘true 720p’ (1280×720).
Microsoft is working with carriers on a ‘Mobile wallet’ application for Windows Phone 8. Their first launch partner will be Orange with more carriers to come soon. Windows Phone 8 will also support file sharing over NFC.
Windows Phone 8 will also share the same core as Windows 8. This will make developing for Windows Phone 8 easier and will be attractive to IT professionals who have to deploy these phones in Windows-based companies.
Finally, Microsoft also showed benchmarks of Internet Explorer 10, which will ship with Windows Phone 8. The benchmarks showed that Internet Explorer 10 running on a test device beat the Samsung Galaxy S III, HTC One S and the iPhone 4S, which was running iOS 6 beta.
Source: Engadget, The Next Web
Image Credit: The Next Web
