Windows Phone 8

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, corporate vice president of mobile communication products at Asus, Benson Lin has revealed that the company is indeed considering Windows Phone. Unfortunately the employee also noted that such hardware has no timeline on when they'll be released to consumers. For Asus to be building Windows Phones would further add to the foundations of the platform.

You like puzzles, I like puzzles, and we all like puzzles. So here comes one from a new Windows Phone job posting. There’s a new team within the Windows Phone department forming around a very new technology – for smartphones at least. Microsoft is looking for a Senior Software Development Engineer in Test to work on UEFI for Windows Phone.

But what for?

Could LG be releasing some new Windows Phone 8 hardware this year? According to the Korea Times, citing a senior executive from one of LG’s local partners, the answer is ‘yes’.

The paper reveals the tidbit under the bigger news of LGs ambitions for 2013, including the goal of selling 75 million handsets, which is no small feat even with Android seemingly doing so well.  

LG famously had cold feet with Microsoft last year over the new OS and although they were initially expected to release new hardware they backed out. That was even after Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer reportedly try to persuade the massive Korean company otherwise.

While some people debate the aesthetic value of Windows Phone 8, with some noting it’s “boring” compared to Android, most people do take notice of its unique design in the mobile world. We’ve seen nominations and awards in the past so it should be of no surprise to see The Design Museum in London giving a nod to Microsoft’s mobile solution.

Augmented reality is both fun and a useful way for software to interact with what's presently visible in the real world. It's advanced technology that really brings hardware to life. A perfect example of use is Nokia's own City Lens app that enables users to look up POI (points of interest) while walking down any given street. All locations are displayed on-screen as the camera is panned across. But where has augmented span from?

We've just got word from a Windows Phone Central reader that the Portico update is pre-installed in a Lumia 920 which was received from Dutch retailer KPN. According to the tip the build presently listed on the device (8.0.10211.204) matches what we've previously reported on when talking about the latest Windows Phone 8 update.

As we've mentioned before, the People Hub has always been a pain for Chinese Windows Phone devices, because what's called "People Hub" in the Chinese version of the OS simply doesn't have any social functions. To put it mildly, the module has been nothing but an unnecessarily complicated phone book. The reason for this is quite simple: Microsoft yanked out all the social services blocked by China's national Great Firewall (Twitter, Facebook), and removed the ones that practically have no user at all in China (LinkedIn), without giving any replacements. Finally this is going to change, today.

The Consumer Electronics Show continues to give us some hints about what’s coming up for 2013. Lenovo senior executive JD Howard has spilled the beans on their plans to produce a Windows Phone 8 device as early as this year.

Microsoft and Lenovo are tight business partners and the ThinkPad brand is heavily favoured by business and enterprise customers. At present Lenovo have some Android devices on the market but it’s not difficult to see how having a Windows Phone offering may help them sell a more complete Microsoft package.

While Sprint has announced they would be adding two Windows Phone 8 devices to their lineup this summer, they were rather vague as to which Windows Phones. Sprint did say HTC and Samsung would be the manufacturers but could it be the HTC 8X and Samsung ATIV S?

Today at CES 2013 Sprint tried to shed a little light on the subject but left us with more questions than answers. Ryan Sullivan, Sprint's Director of Device Delivery, said that the wireless provider will introduce "current" Windows Phone 8 devices. Okay, so what does current mean?