Windows Phone 8.1 Brings Popular Android And iOS Features To The Platform

[Lloydbm41]

Excerpt from Darrell Etherington article on The Verge. Full article link below.

For all its polish, Windows Phone still lags the competition in certain features that seem obvious to include. Windows Phone 8.1, set for a public reveal at Microsoft’s Build conference in April, brings two iOS and Android standards to the Windows Phone quiver, including a Notification Center and a smart personal assistant.

Sources familiar with the unreleased update for Microsoft’s mobile operating system told The Verge that we’ll see a Siri-style personal assistant introduced, codenamed “Cortana,” (nice Halo ref, Redmond) and also a notification center that collects all your notices in one place. There’s also potentially going to be a move away from hardware keys and to on-screen soft keys, similar to the move made by Android in recent versions.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/16/wi...atures-to-the-emerging-third-mobile-platform/

 

[tbayrgs]

I used WP for a while back on 7.0 and 7.5, really liked the overall design and implementation. The app quality/quantity was pretty poor back then and while it's improved, still not quite at a competitive level with iOS and Android, IMO.

For all the improvements that Microsoft is making with 8.1, I won't go try another WP until Google supports it's services on the platform--rely on them far too much.

 

[Jessica Lares]

I think the voice feature right now works nice as it is. I like the built-in music ID feature too.

I've always preferred badges to notifications, so not too excited about that. For me, the live tiles take care of that.

 

[b166er]

While I do think the notifications on WP8 could be improved, I don't know that it needs a dedicated pull down notification center. Why not let us pin the notifications from the "me" tile and dump them all in there? I like tile/toast notifications but the problem now is that if you don't have the specific app pinned you'll likely miss the notification.

Since there is already a notifications place for messages/facebook/twitter/etc, I don't see why they couldn't just expand on that.

I am really looking forward to 8.1 though. Even more so, next summer's flagships. I'd love to see the next gen 1020 and 1520 from Nokia. And a more Siri like assistant will be nice, as will the pull down toggles and swipe right to clear notifications that are rumored at the moment.

 

[edgarjohnston]

Win 8.1 doesn't get my full ratings. It's not wise to have my win 8 upgraded.

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