Unveiled at Microsoft’s Windows Phone Summit in San Francisco, Windows Phone 8 will accompany the main PC and tablet operating system Windows Phone when it launches in October.
The support from a range of device manufacturers including HTC and Samsung will reassure app developers who had been fuelling the growth of Google’s Android and Apple's iOS at the expense of Windows Phone.
But it will present a further challenge to troubled BlackBerry because a host of the new features for Windows Phone 8 aim squarely at the corporate market. Nokia and Huawei will also be among the companies that help to launch Windows Phone 8 in 180 countries.
New features include security based on the same model as full desktop software because Windows Phone and Windows will share the same core ‘kernel’, as well as improved support for corporate email and integration with Microsoft’s suite of Office products. The Windows maker hopes that these will appeal to IT buyers previously keen on BlackBerry's platform.
The changes will also mean that developers will be able to write programmes once, but see them run on Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and Xbox. Microsoft hopes that support for three screen resolutions will allow it to simultaneously make progress in the battle for users living rooms, laptops, tablets and phones.
Other changes include an update to the main ‘Start Screen’ interface to allow more of the screen to be taken up with the ‘Live tiles’ that Windows Phone users press to access apps, and which also show live information. For the first time, developers will also be able to design their own large tiles, a feature previously limited to Microsoft itself and manufacturers. Overall, the screen will appear substantially busier, which could lead users who praised the previous ‘clean’ interface design to be less enthusiastic.
Existing Windows Phone users will not, however, receive the upgrade to Windows Phone 8 free. Instead they will be offered a version called Windows Phone 7.8, which will offer some of the major interface improvements. The full version, however, will be accompanied by new devices offering improved hardware which will be unveiled nearer the launch.
Previous versions of Windows Phone lacked support for the multicore processors that increasingly power top of the range smartphones such as the quad-core Samsung Galaxy S3 and HTC One X. Now Windows will theoretically be able to support up to 64 mobile phone processor cores.
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