I feel like we are returning to the dawn of the good old Windows Mobile devices. Windows Phone 8 is coming this month! We are glad HTC and Microsoft still have a good partnership (though not good enough for a spotlight in the tablet market), one that will surely bring my fellow HTC fanatics back where it all began for HTC. But it is a new era, one with a new name, Windows Phone; and a new logo, all squared and stuff.
HTC has announced a special event in New York for later this month and chances are we are going to see a brand new Windows Phone 8 smartphone.
Windows Phone 8 will revitalize Microsoft’s shot in the mobile market and will hopefully pick up some ground on its competitors, Android and iOS. This may very well be the point in the life of the OS where it ditches the training wheels and stands up on its own to rise in popularity like we saw Android over the last couple of years. While not fully comparable to Android or iOS, Windows Phone has reached a certain level of maturity that will definitely gain a new follower-ship and breathe fresh air into the current community of Windows Phone fans.
The reason we are comfortable saying this is, because this new operating system is not just a mobile OS; it is part of an ecosystem with a bigger brother, desktop version as well as a few other variants out there like Surface and Xbox integration.
Back to the phone, Windows Phone 8 is coming in a few short weeks and it packs a plethora of new features, specifically in the “sharing” department. With the new OS, users can create a virtual space, called a “Room” for friends and family to collaborate different bits of information like:
- Calendar events
- Photos (media in general?)
- Notes
These virtual spaces can be shared privately and totally dependent on who you decide to share it with. Groups for “Friends” and “Family” have been added to the People hub to keep it all organized for you.
We hope this is not a cheap gimmick like another Android manufacturer recently developed for sharing content only with friends who have the same device, because that would leave the rest of us Android, HTC fans a little disconnected from our Windows Phone buddies.
Who is ready for a new HTC Windows Phone smartphone?
