Nokia and Microsoft to launch new Windows Phone 8 handsets in New York today

"Tiled” touchscreen-friendly interface of Microsoft’s new Windows 8 operating system to unify user experience between various devices

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The American software giant Microsoft will launch its new Windows 8 operating system in October. According to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Windows 8 is “the biggest bet in his company's history. It's a foray into tablets, a paradigm shaped and dominated by Apple.”
      The central idea of Windows 8 is to provide the consumers with a uniform user experience on any device, whether it be a desktop, laptop, tablet, mobile phone, or television.
      The starting point of the development has been to create an operating system for a touch screen, but it seems to work equally well with a keyboard and mouse.
     
At the centre of the Windows 8 user experience are the so-called live application tiles, which in some ways replace the customary start menu. The tiles provide the user with updates at a glance. For example, the weather tile may display the current temperature and the email tile the number of new messages.
      The idea is that the applications used most often need not to be opened separately. In addition to the new features, Windows 8 includes all the features and applications of the current Windows computers, albeit in a slightly renewed format.
      For them the operating system provides its renewed version of the “desktop view”.
     
After a very short and one-sided test use of Windows 8, the operating system appears to be relatively quick. It has interesting and impressive details that may well prove useful in regular use.
     
Today, Wednesday, the Finnish mobile phone manufacturer Nokia and Microsoft will hold an eagerly-awaited joint press conference in New York, to launch new Nokia handsets based on the Windows Phone 8 technology.
      The success of the new products is seen as a make-or-break point for Nokia, which has been hurt badly in the lucrative smartphone market by the arrival in 2007 of the Apple iPhone, and more recently by the seemingly irrestistible rise of phones using the Google Android platform.
      The first Windows Phone 8 handsets were launched last week by the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer Samsung.
      The fact that Samsung and Nokia - the world’s two largest mobile phone manufacturers - have faith in the Windows Phone 8 operating system indicates that Microsoft has managed to do something right.
      The company has sought to break into the mobile phone software market since the beginning of the 2000s.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Nokia to launch new smartphones next month (16.8.2012)

Links:
  Windows 8 (Wikipedia)
  Nokia
  Windows 8 (Official website)

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