Microsoft Reportedly Testing Windows Phone 8 on Lumia Devices

Redmond-based software giant Microsoft is gearing up for the release of a new flavor of its Windows Phone mobile platform before the end of this year, namely Windows Phone 8 (codenamed Apollo).

The company hasn’t yet made an official announcement on the platform, but it has been pushing out new OS versions regularly for the past few years, and the release of this new iteration of the mobile client would fall in this pattern.

Windows Phone 8 is expected to bring along a variety of changes and upgrades when compared to previous platform releases, and some more info on the matter has just emerged, courtesy of Chinese Windows Phone community wpxap.

Apparently, Microsoft has already started testing the upcoming OS version on Nokia phones, specifically on Nokia Lumia 800 smartphones.

Given the close relationship between Microsoft and Nokia, this does not come too much as a surprise, nor would the release of Windows Phone 8 on new devices coming out from the Finnish handset vendor.

We also learned that builds of Apollo have been loaded on Nokia Lumia 610 devices, but it seems that the performance is sluggish.

According to the aforementioned Chinese website, Windows Phone 8 will arrive with major improvements in Internet Explorer, and will enable users to add folders.

Moreover, it will come with enriched characters for Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese, and might feature VPN support (the beta builds that are being tested at the moment reportedly include this feature).

Apparently, Microsoft won’t make changes to the platform’s UI, which was expected, considering that the software behemoth is pushing the Metro interface to more and more of its products.

There are also rumors of a feature called gravity induction, through which one could zoom in and out by simply moving the phone up and down.

For the time being, we’ll take all these with a grain of salt, but we’ll keep an eye out for more details on the matter. Hopefully, it won’t be too long before Microsoft will go official with some info on Windows Phone 8.