If you've only been following the movements of the smartphone industry during the last couple of years, you may not have heard of HTC's HD2, but the old relic of a device - which first launched running another antiquated product in Windows Mobile 6.5 - has been modded to run the brand-new Windows Phone 8 ecosystem. That's right, while Microsoft has given Windows Phone 7.x users the sad news that their beloved device won't be upgradeable, the three year old handset designed by the Taiwanese maker has been pictured running Windows Phone 8.
If you are a smartphone fan who prefers to step away from the likes of iOS and Android then this last week will have been an extremely exciting time with Windows Phone 8 hitting the market on some pretty powerful devices, and immediately starting to gain some traction in the smartphone industry. While it's going to take Microsoft a long time in current mobile market to compete on numbers with iOS and Android, the initial reaction to WP8 are generally positive. The Redmond company themselves are now trying to add to the Windows Phone 8 experience with the official preview release of their Skype app for the platform.
Windows Phone 7.x was never considered to be a slow operating system. In fact, considering it only supported single-core SoCs, it was very smooth indeed, but one nagging problem was always the speed of app launching. That issue is never more evident than when compared with the much newer Windows Phone 8, and a video test complied by Winsource shows just how much of an improvement Microsoft has made to its smartphone OS.
Despite having seen a deluge of new smartphones arrive to market in the past couple of months alone, we're always on the lookout for a new gadget to drool over, and if you thought the Galaxy Note II - with its 5.5-inch display - offered an incredible amount of real-estate to play around with, wait until you get a load of what Chinese company ZTE is cooking up.
In an effort to convince existing smartphone owners to switch to Windows Phone 8, Microsoft has released an update to Windows Phone sync tool for OS X. Check it out after the jump.
The software development kit for Windows Phone 8 has been a fairly closely-guarded secret up until this point, but in an announcement at BUILD 2012, Steve Ballmer has confirmed it is now ready to download.
Google may have gatecrashed Microsoft's party by announcing a flurry of Nexus devices along with Android 4.2, but today has always been about Microsoft and Windows Phone 8. Many of the features of Windows Phone 8 have already been revealed over the past couple of months, but the Redmond company has still saved plenty for the long-awaited announcement today.
Microsoft is all set and ready to launch Windows Phone 8 later today, and we can hardly wait. Windows Phone 7.x showed tremendous promise, but lacked in many key areas, and having spent the past twelve or so months meticulously arranging its successor, the wraps are almost ready to be taken off.
Fresh reports from this morning are suggesting that consumers in the United States may not need to wait that long to get their hands on a fabulous new Windows Phone 8 powered smartphone, with pre-orders for the first wave of handsets looking likely to begin in the next couple of weeks starting on October 21st.
Announced back in mid 2011 and publicly previewed earlier this year, Windows Phone 8 is the next major release of Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform. We’ve seen a smorgasbord of new features demoed and exciting new smartphones announced from companies like Nokia, Samsung, and HTC, but until now we didn’t have a confirmed release date for the OS or the new phones that come based on it.
