Windows Phone 8.1 Will Let You Set Screen Wallpapers
Not long ago we reported that the upcoming Windows Phone 8.1 update, which was already released as a preview to Windows Phone 8 devs, last month on February 10th, may include a very interesting addition: Microsoft’s own intelligent personal assistant that would be named Cortana, after the artificial intelligence from the video game series Halo. Now a new rumors surfaced online about the upcoming Windows Phone 8.1 update and the rumor is that you will be able to use a wallpaper for the Start screen.
The news in itself is pretty surprising because, as anyone that used a smartphone running on Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8 mobile Operating System knows, due to the mobile Operating System’s metro user interface, it was built in such a way that id does not support background images for the start screen. It would seem that after researching for ways to bring the feature to its mobile Operating System, Microsoft settled on a very simple, but effective solution. 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. As we said, this will be implemented in the upcoming Windows Phone 8.1 update.
You can see the leaked images in this article. As you see, Live Tiles now display whatever background image you choose and they can even become transparent. The new option is welcomed for those users that wanted to use a Start screen wallpaper but couldn’t due to the nature of the Windows Phone 8 user interface. However, not all apps will allow the Live Tile that they occupy to be used as part of a wallpaper. Some of the apps that won’t let background images use their Live Tiles are: Games, Office, and Xbox Music. In the end, Microsoft is finally brining a feature that many users asked for their Windows Phone 8 devices; of course, there are other ways to achieve this, some of these ways involving the use of a 3rd party app, such as Skinnery. As we said, a preview of Windows Phone 8.1 was already released to Windows Phone 8 devs, last month. The final version of Windows Phone 8.1 is expected to be released earlier next month to Windows Phone 8 devs, during Microsoft’s Build developer conference.
It is very interesting to learn about the new features of the upcoming major update, Windows Phone 8.1. First there were rumors about a intelligent personal assistant named Cortana that would have a role similar to the of Siri and now we have rumors about being able to set a custom Start Screen wallpaper. That is if the feature would make its way into the Windows Phone 8.1 update, since the update did not get to the the RTM stage yet. Even so, odds are pretty good in favor of the feature making it into the upcoming update, an update that shapes up to be very very important for Microsoft’s mobile Operating System, Windows Phone 8. We will keep you up to date in early April as the final version of Windows Phone 8.1 will be made available to Windows Phone 8 devs.
