Nokia’s not exactly hiding its ambitions with the Lumia Icon, the new $199 5-inch phone it’s launching on February 20th with Verizon. "We want people to really remember this product," Ifi Majid, Nokia’s president of North American marketing, told me. It has no codename, no number: it’s just Icon. The 5-inch device is meant to make clear that Nokia builds phones better than anyone on the market, and that the Windows Phone software it runs isn’t nearly the detriment it once was. This is Nokia’s flagship phone on America’s largest carrier, with a great camera and specs as impressive as the Windows Phone ecosystem has ever seen.
New built-in camera UI, settings tweaks, on-screen buttons, and moreMicrosoft has started sharing its Windows Phone 8.1 Software Development Kit (SDK)with developers, and the inevitable leaks have begun. Over on Reddit, one developer has been documenting all of the updates discovered so far. The first major change appears to be the initial signs of a Windows Phone and Windows RT merger. While iOS and Android both allow developers to build apps across phones and tablets, Microsoft doesn't yet, but it has been hinting that it would follow a similar path. Windows Phones 8.1 includes support for "Universal Apps" that let developers build Windows Store and Windows Phone Store apps from the same shared HTML and JavaScript code. Effectively, this means Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 8.1 can run near-identical applications.
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