Windows Phone 8 Apollo Finally Announced

Microsoft's new mobile operating system has gone through a lot since it was released to the general public nearly two years ago. Though it's nowhere nearly as popular as Android or Apple's iOS, it's nevertheless a pretty great OS, and with Nokia releasing the Lumia 800 and Lumia 900, it looks like things are going to take off shortly. There are already enough good apps on the market to satisfy pretty much everyone, and the games look simply amazing.

The only thing the OS needs is better smartphones - single cores and no multitasking just isn't going to cut it anymore. And Microsoft knows it, that's why they've just announced the new version of the OS - Windows Phone 8, code named "Apollo".

Lot of improvements

Windows Phone 8 brings a lot of improvements, making it a true competitor to Android and iOS. The most important features that will allow phone manufacturers to use the latest and greatest hardware are the support for multiple cores, NFC sensors, multiple screen resolutions, full micro SD card support, and full on-device encryption.

Those are all pretty important points that will make the OS more attractive to the day in day out user, as then as corporations and businesses that need secure devices, which are as well compatible with existing technologies and infrastructures. Windows Phone 8 will have much better support for Exchange servers - something that users have been complaining about Windows Phone 7 ever since it was launched.

The use of the Windows 8 kernel

Thanks to the use of the Windows 8 kernel, which has a long history behind it and is very advanced, Apollo will as well be able to do things better and faster than Windows Phone 7. Its support for networking, security and multimedia is supposed to be unrivaled - the OS will be able to find and connect to wireless networks in less than 3 seconds, playback any video file with hardware GPU acceleration, and more.

At the same time, Apollo will be fully compatible with existing Windows Phone 7 apps, even though developers will probably want to tweak a few things since the new kernel is slightly different. The full version of Internet Explorer is as well present, having the best GPU-accelerated features but, and a sleek and fast interface with support for Adobe Flash, HTML 5 and most of the new Web technologies. The browser is really mature and can easily compete with Android's Chrome or the iPhone's Safari on equal grounds.

Microsoft as well plans to tightly integrate Skype and SkyDrive with Windows Phone 8, giving users something akin to Apple's iCloud or even better.

It as a matter of fact looks like 8 will be the most successful number in Microsoft's history - both the desktop and mobile versions of the OS bring a lot of new features and improvements, and they'll probably be around for around a decade, just like the undying Windows XP. I just hope that the company creates a better marketing strategy, since it seems that people hate their software too much without good reason.