Windows Phone 8.1 Will Be Released On April 14th
The Windows Phone 8.1 update was already released as a preview to Windows Phone 8 devs, on February 10 and as we already told you, it is going to be released to developers this month. Even though Microsoft did not offer an official release date, a Windows Phone engineering email published by Neowin seems to indicate that the Windows Phone 8.1 update is going to be released exactly a week from now, on April 14th. The date will mark the release of the final version of the Windows Phone 8.1 update to developers, but everyone can get it on April 14, not just app devs.
We said that even though the Windows Phone 8.1 update will be released for developers on April 14th, everyone will be able to install it. That is possible thanks to Microsoft’s developer preview program for Windows Phone. The dev preview program for WP lets users install the latest updates, regardless of their carrier. As its name implies, it is designed for Windows Phone app developers, but everyone can access the developer preview program for Windows Phone and it is pretty simple to use.
The Windows Phone 8.1 update will include some very interesting additions. One of these additions is Microsoft?s own intelligent personal assistant that is going to be named Cortana, after the artificial intelligence from the video game series Halo. Cortana?s initial role will be to act as a search function replacing Bing as the default search engine; however Cortana will be more than just a search engine, as it will use Bing and Foursquare to achieve the contextual awareness of Google Now or Apple’s Siri. It will also try to learn more about the user thanks to the Notebook feature.
Another useful feature is that you will be able to use a wallpaper for the Start screen. As you know the Windows Phone 8 metro UI was built in such a way that id does not support background images for the Start screen. Microsoft’s solution is very simple, but equally effective: users will be able to choose a background image for the Start screen of their Windows Phone 8.1 devices and the mobile Operating System will display the image in the Live Tiles. Besides Cortana and the ability to use a wallpaper for the Start screen, the Windows Phone 8.1 update also includes user interface tweaks, a new notification center, a mobile version of Internet Explorer 11 as the default web browser and many other changes. In a week from now, everyone will be able to update to Windows Phone 8.1.
