Windows Phone 8 Not To Be Compatible With WP7 Devices?
With Windows Phone 7 Microsoft has specified basic hardware requirements for all Windows Phone 7 devices. Known as WP7 chassis, this standard across phones is to provide a similar experience across all WP7 devices. The current chassis requirements are:
- ARMv7 based applications processor
- Hardware accelerated DirectX and Direct3D
- Capacative multi-touch screen
- Camera
- Bluetooth + Wi-Fi
- FM Radio
- A-GPS
- Accelerometer, compass, light, proximity sensor
Another important shift with Windows Phone 7 is that Microsoft will be pushing software updates and not the OEMs. In a tweet @lituus has explained how the upgrdes will be numbered:
- major updates – 7.X00
- performance updates – 7.XY0
- security patches – 7.XYZ
He further points out that with Windows Phone 8 hardware will get a refresh, which means that the chassis requirements will be upgraded and existing Windows Phone 7 devices will not be compatible with Windows Phone 8.
#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
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lituus
In my opinion, this has a good and bad side to it:
The Good: It will allow phone manufacturers and Microsoft to leverage latest hardware capabilities.
The Bad: WP7 value for money now depends on WP7’s shelf life as decided by Microsoft. To put that in perspective, iPhones have a 2 year shelf life after which some features of new iPhone OS updates don’t work on older iPhones and that is quite frustrating given that iPhones aren’t exactly economical devices.
(h/t to , I had missed the tweets)
The phone market is so rapidly evolving currently that sadly this will always be the case for some years. After it matures like the PC market now has, maybe there will be OSes with longer shelf life. Though I would personally have liked Microsoft to do big bang long lasting releases that weren’t limited and crippled at v1.