Over the past several months I have been following @lituus on Twitter who occasionally offers rumours and information about future Microsoft products, as far as I can tell he has always been right. Today when checking Twitter a noticed a collection of tweets from him about what Microsoft are planning to do with both KIN and Windows Phone 7 over the coming months/years.
#rumor 2nd HW rev of KIN to use custom WP7OS, run Marketplace apps + KIN apps & use 3-button config. 1st-gen KIN phones won’t upgrade.
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lituus
#rumor KIN will continue to use Tegra in rev 2, while WP7 phones will use Snapdragon. KIN apps (both gen) will be ported from Zune HD apps._||_
lituus
#rumor rev 2 is more than 18 mo away. Near term work on KIN OS performance & stability improvements, expanding markets, adding more services_||_
lituus
#rumor On the other hand, WP7 team considering Loop, Spot & Studio-like implementations in the long term, suitable to WP7 design language._||_
lituus
All those rumours makes sense to me and its certainly the direction Microsoft should be heading by merging the functionality of both sets of devices whilst hopefully being able to keep the two distinct enough. One thing that strikes me is that the Zune HD 2 is thought to use Tegra 2 and will run a version of Windows Phone OS and from reading the above tweets it looks like the media player will be able to make use of the Windows Phone 7 catalogue of apps.
@Lituus also had one final tweet about how the version numbering of Windows Phone OS is going to be organised.
#tip WP7 major updates as 7.X00 version, performance updates as 7.XY0 & security patches as 7.XYZ. v 8.000 for next-gen HW to be clean break_||_
lituus
I always find it amusing that information starts to come out about the next version of a product before the first version has even launched but this information sounds promising. Microsoft might, in a few months time, have a single mobile OS for all their products, finally. The embedded tweets come from a plugin by Scott Lovegrove using Blackbird Pie.
By the way sorry for being so quiet over the past few weeks but I have been sitting exams so couldn’t allow myself to blog, I actually enjoyed just consuming Microsoft news rather than blogging about it too for the short time.
