Microsoft Unification Effort Across Devices Shows Up In Windows 8

By Author: Ruth Jackson
Total Articles: 51
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Although Google's Android and Apple's iPhone devices currently dominate the smartphone market, there is strong optimism, if one were to go by Steve Ballmer CEO Microsoft statements, about Windows Phone growing fast to become a strong third participant. In order to get the volumes to grow fast tie-ups have been made with Nokia, Samsung, HTC and many others. Microsoft is expected to, going by the reports, to invest more in marketing and advertising around Windows 8 than it has ever historically done for any of its products before. This is primarily because it wants to unify Windows Phone devices, PCs, Windows 8 tablets and its Xbox game console. The biggest benefit of such an ecosystem is the consistency that it brings; avoiding in the process the need to relearn how to navigate. This is precisely the reason why one notices the modern visual style i.e. Metro featuring tiles across all its products. The tiles allow the users to get a glimpse of mails, weather forecasts, photos, media items, web pages and other information. The apps need not be opened for the same. Tiles can be "live," which means they flip around automatically ...
... to show new information. Also, the users can decide which ones are to be updated with live information. Another interesting concept is that of “Hubs” i.e. places where content, apps, and social networking, all come together. A Photo Hub for instance would enable one to see one’s own and friends’ galleries and have access to some photo-editing apps. Thus WP8 comes across as a very good option to be used as a smartphone for a lot of calling, texting, and social networking. Besides, the start screen feature makes it more customizable that any other android or iOS handset.

Part of the reason given for Windows Phone 7 not providing the results as was expected or not standing in comparison to iOS and Android because of the hardware which it was running on. However the problem seems to be addressed with Windows Phone 8. Underneath the familiar interface of the earlier version, WP8 runs on the same kernel as Windows 8, including the NTFS file system. The hardware is at par with iOS and Android devices in terms of screen resolutions, computing power, cameras and the ability to take advantage of advanced network bandwidth known as LTE. The biggest change to Windows Phone 8 development India is the new kernel, which allows Windows Phones to have dual-core processors. On the development side, rather than having to use Silverlight or XNA, third-party developers can write native code. All the WP7 apps is still compatible but the overall offering has much more potential and powerful because it offers more ways of develop apps. The problem though however is that MS did not release the SDK to the developers beforehand. However, Cross-platform development frameworks such as Apache Cordova, Sencha Touch and Xamarin.Mobile are all compatible with Windows Phone 8 with users of Sencha Touch in particular being bullish about Microsoft's new OS.

Windows Phone 8 surely would fall into category of OS which is very high on aesthetics based on the range of interesting features which it offers. Ultimately, to stand in competition against Android and iOS, it will need apps. But there is no doubt about the fact that it offers a good third alternative to consumers and is a big step in the right direction.

Mindfire Solutions has years of experience of having executed numerous projects on Windows Mobile Operating system and on devices ranging from Pocket PCs to Smartphones. Our expertise goes from mobile apps development from Windows CE operating system to Windows Mobile 5.0 to Windows Phone 7.0. Given our background and expertise we can be oyur reliable development partner for WP8 Development.