All of the rumors and leaks has led us up to this moment. Earlier today Microsoft made plenty of Windows Phone users very happy w/ the official unveiling of the WP 8.1 update. This looks to be a very important update for the platform to be a better competitor within the smartphone wars.
Cortana is the biggest addition and as we spoke of it before, it will offer a better personal digital assistant. The Halo-inspired service looks to to take the best of Google Now and Siri and merge it with their own vision. Cortana will be a circle on your homescreen or on her own page called Cortana Home.
Cortana utilizes your info/requests that are stored in her Notebook to access for future requests. She can give you the best times to leave in order to make it to your destination on time as she uses Bing and Foursquare for data. You can use to do video calls on Skype, pull videos on Hulu Plus, pull Facebook news feeds, and more.
Expect it to launch sometime in the 2nd half of 2014 in the US, UK & China. Other countries will get it in 2015. If you watched the livestream, it is definitely in Beta at the moment.
Meet Action Center: Microsoft’s take on a notification windows shade + quick settings. It shows all of your alerts along w/ a customized view of your settings like Bluetooth, Airplane Mode, Rotation Lock to name a few.
- Skype is now integrated into the Phone dialer
- WordFlow is more or less a Swype-like keyboard for a faster finger-dragging experience.
- New Calendar views
- Wi-Fi Sense to find free public Wi-Fi hotspots for you.
- Data Sense is a way to monitor your data, ideal for those on a tiered data plan.
- Storage Sense is a way to monitor whats eating up your storage (device or microSD card) and allows you to transfer data to free up some space.
- Themes for your homescreen.
- Customization of your Live Tiles.
- Addition of a 5th-row for Lumias w/ 5inch displays.
Windows Phone 8.1 is set to begin rolling out sometime this summer for all existing WP8 Lumia devices and will launch on new 2014 Lumias coming this year.
