Gadgetory

hey guys this is a tom werman from the verge we're just looking at the windows phone 8 emulator today and so the first thing you'll notice is obviously the new start screen tiles that might have been introduced at the windows phone summit in June now you can move the tiles around as normal but you can actually shrink the size of them now so this is the small tile which you can then obviously move it back to the normal tile and some of the additional tiles like the messaging or the calendar or the mail title here you can actually edit this one so that you've got the really large tile or the medium one and obviously the small one as well so it's quite easy to edit the tiles there and if we move into the settings and there's the settings are very similar to the existing Windows Phone but we've actually gotten notifications saying here on the lock screen that allows you just to to set any app to to provide notifications on the lock screen so that's that's a change from windows phone 7.5 you've also got the NFC tap and send sharing here which you can talk all enough and the next thing that's really knew that microsoft hasn't really detailed is the backup settings so you can see here you've got an app list and settings which will store your internet explorer favorites or your list of apps in the cloud so you just simply sign into your Microsoft account for that and text messages will also be stored in the cloud here and so you can turn that on and off and Microsoft is also adding options for to control video and photos uploading to SkyDrive next up there's a new data sentence feature and this allows you to basically track your data usage so you can see here you can set it up for one time month for your unlimited and the specific day of the month that that data reset so say you've got 512 Meg from your carrier you can track to see how much you're actually using and when your limits going to reset you can also pin data since the start screen and has a live tile that warn you when your date is finished my purse also has he done some work on the start screen to improve it and they've also improved the themes as well so you can see here there's a color picker that allows you to pick a variety of colors and if you pick one it obviously changes the color throughout the whole operating system so also expecting Microsoft in previous mobile Internet Explorer and some signs are there are here in the SDK so we've got an address bar a sitting here that allows us to swap the buttons from tabs to refresh and favorites and what you'll notice if we go back and in the bottom left is a tab button now and that allows us to control the tabs rather than the refresh button that's typically there and you can also change that obviously back to favorites so you can have the favorites there to access to your mobile favorites on the go the SDK am also gives us a look at some of the camera functions that might supply to integrate here and so you'll notice as an apps button which immediately gives us access to Bing vision within the actual camera application and if we get back there's option to find more lenses which are basically app extensions for the camera alongside some camera improvements much sauce also adding some functionality to its Photos app so you can see here there's a select button down the bottom which allows you to multi-select photos which you can then favor it delete or you can also share so we're hoping to see more share options is there fairly limited right now but it's a good science seen you can actually multi select photos in the app now and there's also some edit features that have been added as well so you can go into a single photo and in hit the edit option and there's some cropping rotating and ill see the standard auto fix you also get an aspect ratio option here so you can pick and whatever aspect ratio you want for the crop and we've also got the ability to control it yourself in Microsoft's Bing application the company is also adding filter information top videos and top headlines that you can swipe to reveal there's also some changes to the built in exports application here and now these changes are mainly visual and they appear to resemble the Xbox SmartGlass that we saw a free this year most are also changing its music and videos up now this looks like almost identical to the Xbox hub now and there's even access to the Xbox music store from riv in here and it closely symbols a zune experience as you can see you can go in and play songs or obviously downloads and purchase them most of the store isn't functional through the emulator and we can obviously see that it's very similar to the windows phone marketplace okay so that was a quick look at Windows Phone 8 running on the Windows Phone 8 SDK emulator and which we are expecting to be available in preview soon