TECH SPECIAL...Windows Phone 8: Brilliant or dud?

Windows Phone 8: Brilliant or dud?

A few days after it announced the Surface, Microsoft dropped the bomb on its upcoming ‘Apollo’ mobile OS -- Windows Phone 8. Now that it’s official, Microsoft has announced a whole bunch of new features as well as support for better and faster hardware in order to keep up with the competition. It didn’t announce any new handsets although you can expect Nokia and HTC to be working on them and perhaps, a Microsoft branded phone as well if we’re lucky. Let’s run through the new feature that matters. New homescreen You now have the ability to resize the live tiles, so you can cram in more tiles on the homescreen. You get to choose between three different sizes as well as different colours, so there are more options to customise. We can also expect higher resolution screens and WP8 now supports up to 720p displays. Support for faster hardware While WP7 was limited to single core CPUs, WP8 has full support for multi-core CPUs and can scale up to 64-cores, if needed. All the new handsets that will run WP8 will have a dual-core as a bare minimum and Qualcomm will continue to be the official supplier of SoCs. There’s also NFC support built-in as well. For the first time, Windows Phone will also support microSD cards, so users can expand the storage. Better app support Since Windows Phone 8 shares the same core architecture as Windows 8, this opens the door to richer apps with full support for their DirectX runtime. OpenGL support does seem to be missing though, which is used heavily by Android and iOS. So, porting those apps/games over won’t be straightforward. Microsoft has promised some exciting games and apps, so let’s wait and see. It has also integrated Havok Technology into the OS, so developers have access to APIs that will allow for more realistic gaming. The same games can also be ported over to the desktop. Enterprise features The whole suite of Enterprise features that was present in Windows 6.5 was taken out in Windows Phone 7, but it seems like Microsoft is adding those features back into WP8. The IE 10 browser built into WP8 features anti-phishing technologies like SmartScreen filter to block malicious websites. IT professionals can also monitor WP8 handsets through remote monitoring tools in Windows 8.

DNA Jun 26, 2012