Windows Phone 8.1 coming to SA

Microsoft South Africa announced on Thursday, 26 June 2014, that Windows Phone 8 users will soon be able to upgrade to 8.1 in the “coming months”.

Holding their first devices event since their acquisition of Nokia, Microsoft SA gave a live demo of the 8.1 interface, which included a customisable, tile based home screen; universal applications which sync across Windows devices; improvements to One Drive cloud storage; the ability to save application to SD cards; and a software enabled power saving mode which can extend the battery life by up to 12 hours.

Windows Phone 8.1 was first announced at the 2014 Microsoft Build developer conference in April this year, where the new notification tray – known as the “Action Centre” – was punted.

Another feature Microsoft SA showed off was the “shape writing” system, a gesture input system for Windows Phones’ keyboards which works similarly to Swype or SwiftKey – which are already available on Android devices.

Notably absent from the demonstration was Cortana – Windows’ version of Siri which allows users to interact with their devices via voice commnand.

A Microsoft SA spokesman said Cortana was still in beta in the US, UK, and China, and no SA release date had been set as yet.

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