Windows Phone 8.1: More Personal, Smarter, and even a “World Record Holder”
If you’re a Windows Phone user, you already know that we set out to create an experience that puts you and the things you care about most front and centre. As a result, we believe Windows Phone is the world’s most personal smartphone… and with Windows Phone 8.1, we’ve added a number of new features that make your smartphone even more a reflection of your personality and desires.
Start screen: Make the Live Tiles Yours
We want your Windows Phone Start screen to genuinely reflect your personality and the people and things you care about—so we are making it even more customisable!
In 2013, we added a third column on devices for 5-inch screen or larger devices, like the Nokia Lumia 1520, to enable more stuff to show up on the screen. People really liked this so we are enabling this on all screen sizes in Windows Phone 8.1. Pin away! We’ve also added the ability to customise your Start background with a favourite picture or one of the options we’ve provided, which will make many of the tiles on your Start screen become clear so you can see the background you selected as you scroll up and down.
Lock screen: Lots of new “themes” to choose from
The Lock screen is the very first thing you – or your friends—see when you grab your phone, and in Windows Phone 8.1 we’re providing a new app that lets you set a wide range of interesting “Lock Screen Themes” which show all kinds of different visuals and animations. Make it yours…
Cortana: Your PERSONAL Digital Assistant
Of everything we’ve announced today, we’re most excited to introduce you to the world’s first truly personal digital assistant, coming to the UK this year. We were inspired by the popular character from Halo who served as a brilliant AI and a deeply personal digital assistant to Master Chief… so we called her Cortana.
Powered by Bing, Cortana is the only digital assistant that gets to know you, builds a relationship that you can trust, and gets better over time by asking questions based on your behaviour and checking in with you before she makes assumptions. She tracks the stuff you care about, looks out for you throughout the day, and helps filter out the noise so you can focus on what matters to you.
A Whole Slew of New Delighters
Action Centre: Live Tiles are a great way to “glance and go,” and now we’ve added Action Centre to enable you to see notifications from ANY app – pinned or not—and to give you a customisable way to quickly access the settings you care about most, like Wi-Fi, Flight Mode, Bluetooth and Rotation Lock.
Word Flow Keyboard: The keyboard in Windows Phone is smart enough to learn your writing style and even knows the names of people in your contacts for faster typing. Best of all, our new Word Flow Keyboard lets you glide your fingers over the keys to type INCREDIBLY quickly… During his keynote, Joe Belfiore showed a video of a kid using Word Flow to BREAK THE OFFICIAL WORLD RECORD previously held by the Swype keyboard on a Samsung Galaxy S4… by 8 seconds!
Skype: The new Skype app for Windows Phone 8.1 brings the best of Skype on a smartphone. It’s integrated with the Phone dialer, so if you’re on a call you can quickly and easily “upgrade” your ordinary phone call to a Skype video call at the tap of a button! And… the new Skype app is designed to work seamlessly with Cortana, once it’s available in the UK, so you can use Cortana to setup your calls within Skype, just like a real phone operator.
Calendar: The new Calendar has been redesigned to add a new week view which many users have been asking for and it has many nice touches—like panning right to get to the next day or week or month! What’s more, it looks a lot like Outlook on your Windows PC… for example, the weather is integrated at the top – just like in Outlook.
Music & Video
We’ve made a ton of improvements to these experiences, which are now split out as separate apps and all of which can be updated via the Store. In Music, you can edit your playlists and manage your cloud collection really easily and effectively. Video makes it possible to buy or rent videos from Xbox Music. Oh… and we’ve improved the phone volume control by including separate sliders for your ringer/notifications and for your apps and media. Just the way you asked for it!
Data Sense, Wi-Fi Sense, Storage Sense, and Battery Saver: We’ve added a number of features in Windows Phone 8.1 that are designed to help you get the most out of your data allowance, battery life and storage.
Data Sense lets you track how much data usage you go through in a given month and will give you a breakdown of usage by app so you can see which app is using the most of your data. As you near your data limit, Data Sense will more aggressively offload data to Wi-Fi and limit mobile data usage… and in 8.1 there’s a new “high savings” mode that cranks up the compression of images as you browse the web so you can browse even faster using less data than WP8.
Wi-Fi Sense will automatically connect you to free public hotspots it finds to help you save mobile data. And, if you’d like, you can opt-in to automatically and securely enable your friends and contacts to auto-connect to your home Wi-Fi, so they can use the internet connection at your house without hassling you for the password and typing it in manually. If you turn off Wi-Fi in Wi-Fi Sense, you can have Cortana automatically turn it back on when you reach one of your favourite places as identified in Cortana.
We’re introducing Storage Sense to help you get the most out of the memory and storage on your phone. It will help you manage content you have on an SD memory card if your device supports those. You can also move content – like apps, music, photos – between the storage built in to your device and an SD memory card.
And Battery Saver gives you a clear breakdown of how apps are using your battery so you can make more informed usage decisions. With “automatic mode” enabled, our tests have shown when the battery is at 20%, we give people approximately 24 hours more battery life.
Windows and Windows Phone Together
Your Microsoft Account allows Windows and Windows Phone to work together in amazing ways. Windows Phone 8.1 furthers the integration between phone and PC. If you change your theme colour, that change will sync across all your Windows devices. If you buy an in-app purchase in one of the newer apps written for Windows Phone and Windows 8.1, the purchase works on your phone AND your PC. And other settings like your home Wi-Fi password will also sync. In Internet Explorer 11 for Windows Phone, you will be able to see all the open tabs you have on all your Windows devices and all your Favorites too. Plus the new IE gives you InPrivate browsing, password caching, and a super-handy reading mode.
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