[Lenovo Will Reportedly Launch Its First Windows Phone 8.1 Handset This Summer

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Amancio Mccrae

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Jun 6, 2024, 4:58:54 PM6/6/24

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That tidbit was squeezed into the announcement made on Tuesday by Microsoft that Windows 10 itself would debut in 190 countries sometime this summer. In its blog post, Microsoft said Lenovo had announced a commitment to build Windows phones, which will be available in the middle of 2015 via Chinese carrier China Mobile.

Microsoft's mobile OS has been mired in third place in the global smartphone arena, stuck far behind Google's Android and Apple's iOS. Windows Phone's share of the market dipped to 2.7 percent last year from 3.3 percent in 2013, according to research firm IDC. As Microsoft prepares to roll out Windows 10 to all devices, from phones to tablets to PCs, the company needs to expand its presence on mobile devices, especially in China, which ranks as the largest smartphone market.

Lenovo Will Reportedly Launch Its First Windows Phone 8.1 Handset This Summer

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China Mobile is the nation's largest carrier, with around 808 million subscribers. So Lenovo's deal could provide a much-needed shot in the arm for Microsoft. Among mobile operating systems, Android held a 72.8 percent market share in China over the three months ending with January, according to a report out earlier this month from Kantar WorldPanel ComTech. Over the same time, Apple carved out a 25.4 percent share, while Windows Phone eked out less than 1 percent.

Microsoft will try to generate interest in Windows Phone -- a name that will be replaced by the Windows 10 moniker -- in China courtesy of an arrangement with Chinese mobile device maker Xiaomi. Under the plan, select owners of the Xiaomi Mi 4, an Android smartphone, will be able to install and test the Windows 10 Technical Preview in order to provide feedback to Microsoft.

Lenovo had reportedly been planning to launch Windows phones and was listed by Microsoft as one of its Windows Phone 8.1 partners. But no device has yet surfaced. The company didn't reveal whether its Windows phones would expand beyond its home base of China.

Microsoft's blog post also noted that Lenovo announced it will offer Windows 10 upgrades at service centers and select retail stores in China when the new OS launches. The goal is to help customers upgrade their new or existing devices to Windows 10.

Microsoft is firmly in its Copilot era, and that means an inevitable AI-centric refresh is coming to Windows this year. The next version of the OS, Windows 12, allegedly codenamed "Hudson Valley," is expected in the second half of 2024 (potentially as early as June, though that timeframe is unconfirmed).

Windows 12's biggest differentiator will be how thoroughly it incorporates AI, building on the Copilot capabilities that were introduced as a preview in Windows 11 23H2 last fall. In fact, Microsoft indicated at the start of the year that all Windows 12 devices (and new Windows 11 devices) will have a dedicated Copilot button, marking "the first significant change to the Windows PC keyboard in nearly three decades."

The Copilot button announcement also hints at Microsoft's aims for future Windows versions, starting with 12: "We will continue to build Windows to be the destination for the best AI experiences," the announcement read. "This will require an operating system that blurs the lines between local and cloud processing." [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Microsoft ships new .NET versions every November during its .NET Conf event, with last November's .NET 8 sporting full-stack Blazor, AI and .NET MAUI as major highlights. This November, .NET 9 will continue to advance better performance, speed, support for cloud-native development and, of course, AI capabilities.

According to this GitHub roadmap, Microsoft's dev team is focusing on product quality across layout, control features and reliability of tooling experiences such as setup, build, deploy, hot reload, debug and diagnostics. Specific items being considered include interoperability with the Swift programming language, better integration between .NET MAUI and Blazor hybrid applications, customizable cursors and controls access via the Maui.Core layer. Specific items across the runtime, libraries and application models can be tracked on the company's Themes of .NET roadmap. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Though it's coming up on three years since Microsoft released the latest version of its flagship IDE, Microsoft has kept mum about the next version, with no indication so far that a Visual Studio 2024 edition is in the works. Editions since VS 2013 shipped every two years, but that pattern was broken when the company skipped a year and launched VS 2022, perhaps due to the pandemic. So expect to see incremental updates to VS 2022, which broke ground as the first 64-bit version of the product.

As of this writing, Microsoft is focused on getting VS 2022 version 17.9 out the door. Microsoft has described this upcoming version as a "transformation," not just an update, and as being very AI-focused.

"Imagine crafting perfect Git commit messages without a second thought, or seamlessly navigating complex code with advanced IntelliSense support for Unreal Engine projects," the company said last November when it rolled out Preview 1 of version 17.9. "We're not just enhancing features; we're rethinking the way you interact with your development environment." [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

As 2023 came to a close, Microsoft debuted version 1 of its Semantic Kernel SDK for AI development. The open source SDK serves as an orchestration layer for Microsoft's stack of AI models and Copilot AI assistants, providing interaction services to work with underlying machine language foundation models and AI infrastructure. While the version 1 release boasted advanced AI constructs including agents, plug-ins, planners and personas, in early 2024, Microsoft's dev team is focused on three core themes: AI connectors, memory connectors and additional agent abstractions. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Microsoft plans to make the AI-optimized SharePoint Premium product broadly available in the first half of 2024. First announced last fall at Ignite 2023, SharePoint Premium is essentially the old Microsoft Syntex product repackaged. Syntex tapped AI to surface an organization's data. Its rebrand to SharePoint Premium makes explicit Syntex's ties to SharePoint, as Microsoft's Jeff Teper explained at Ignite. "SharePoint is the base content management collaboration platform for Microsoft 365; SharePoint Premium [is] value-added services on top," Teper said. Those value-added services fall into three categories:

Some components of SharePoint Premium became available at the end of 2023, but the complete feature set -- which Teper indicated will eventually include "Business Documents app, Documents Hub, and the enhanced file viewer" -- will become available when it publicly launches this year. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Currently in paid public preview, SharePoint Embedded (previously known as Syntex Repository Services) is expected to become generally available sometime in mid-2024. Microsoft described SharePoint Embedded as "a new API-only solution which enables app developers to harness the power of the Microsoft 365 file and document storage platform for any app, and is suitable for enterprises building line of business applications and ISVs building multi-tenant applications." [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Microsoft now mostly sells its application servers by subscription only, a plan announced during its 2020 Ignite event. At present, SharePoint Server Subscription Edition version 23H2 is the main product release. If past practice is a guide, Microsoft can be expected to release SharePoint Server Subscription Edition version 24H1 in March, followed by a version 24H2 release in September or November. These product releases, installed on customer infrastructure, aren't necessarily notable in terms of features, as Microsoft delivers new features monthly to the product via "Public Updates," which are supported for one year. A list of features for H-version releases can be found at this Microsoft documents page. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Fluid Framework, Microsoft's open source document collaboration solution, is set to hit the Version 2 milestone this summer. In beta as of earlier this month, Fluid Framework 2.0 will feature support for Azure Fluid Relay and SharePoint Embedded. It will also include a SharedTree Distributed Data Structure (DDS) feature, which Microsoft explained is a new, intuitive programming interface.

"Like other Fluid Framework distributed data structures, SharedTree is designed to use the same patterns developers would use when working with local data structures such as an object model. The difference is that the data can be changed remotely and is kept in sync by the Fluid Framework," the company said. "SharedTree includes sophisticated merge semantics for working with arrays and supports features like atomic move operations that make working with collaborative data much simpler." [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

Microsoft hasn't indicated when the next customer-premises version of Windows Server is coming, but with the current version approaching the three-year mark, it's not a stretch to expect the next major launch sometime in the later part of 2024.

At any rate, work is already well underway on Windows Server "vNext" (which may eventually be named "Windows Server 2025" when it is officially released). The latest preview build as of this writing, 26010, was released at the end of 2023, and more are on the way.

At Ignite last November, Microsoft revealed a few changes coming to the release, including an easier update process, a pay-as-you-go subscription option on top of the usual perpetual license, improvements to Azure Stack HCI, hotpatching, broad availability of SMB over QUIC and more. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]

According to details shared by Microsoft last November, the new Planner will combine its existing capabilities with those of Microsoft To Do (task management) and Microsoft Project (project management). It'll also have natural-language AI capabilities via new integration with Copilot. [BACK TO PRODUCT LIST]