Fear not, Windows Phone fans. If you were a bit disappointed with Microsoft’s unveiling of certain features in Windows Phone 8, don’t fret; apparently that was just a handful of the features the Redmond-based company has in store for the upcoming OS.
Senior product manager Greg Sullivan has revealed that much of the information provided so far had to be revealed early to excite developers and please IT managers, many of whom can’t wait until the last minute and needed to know about such features ASAP:
“We showed a lot at the Sneak Peek event, in San Francisco, if you were a developer or an IT pro,” Sullivan told us in an interview. “Of the end-user consumer visible features and capabilities, we showed a minority of features at the event.”
Rather unlike Apple, Microsoft has a wide range of hardware and software partners to work with, which makes it difficult to be ready “hours after” the OS is announced.
This is very good news, and it seems early impressions of the new OS may have been conservative. In addition, Sullivan said he doesn’t expect to have to repeat the same upgrade path in the future that Windows Phone 8, which is incompatible with Windows Phone 7 hardware, had to. Microsoft offered an upgrade to Windows Phone 7.8, which provides some WP8 features on legacy hardware.
“The way we are thinking about this is that Windows Phone 8 is a generational shift that has an associated discontinuity that we don’t expect to happen again soon,” he said. “The headroom that we get from this new architecture is so significant that it provides us room to grow for a long time.”