Quiet Hours appears to be a global feature now, no longer tied to Cortana

Jun 3, 2014 07:04 GMT  ·  By

Windows Phone 8.1, the latest flavor of Microsoft’s mobile operating system, landed on devices roughly one month and a half ago in the form of a Developer Preview, and it has received a new update this week.

On Monday, Microsoft started to push a small update to all those who downloaded and installed Windows Phone 8.1 Developer Preview on their devices, so as to make some small changes to it.

The update will land on devices as a 21MB download and will bump the OS version up build number 8.10.12393.890, as a recent post on WPCentral explains.

Unfortunately, Microsoft has not provided specific info on what was included in the new update, though users who have already downloaded and installed it have started to report on their findings.

Apparently, one of the main enhancements included in the new software release is related to Quiet Hours.

The feature was announced in April as being tied to Cortana, the digital personal assistant in Windows Phone 8.1, which meant that it was available only in the United States, since Cortana was restricted to this region as well.

Following the new firmware release, however, Quiet Hours appears to be available globally, no longer requiring Cortana to work, which should make a lot of users happy. According to WMPoweruser, however, things might not be so.

Additionally, it seems that the Windows Phone boot screen was modified as well, now falling in line with the one present on Lumia 630 (the first handset out there to arrive on shelves with Windows Phone 8.1 out of the box).

Undoubtedly, other changes were also included in the new firmware release, though only small ones, considering the size of the download.

This is the second update that Microsoft releases for the Windows Phone 8.1 Develop Preview, with the first of them arriving about two weeks ago with various battery enhancements.

Those of you who have the Developer Preview installed on their devices and would like to install the new update should head over to Settings > Phone Update > Check for Updates in order to manually download it.

However, you should receive a notification on the availability of the update, since it is being delivered to all handsets over the air.

This update might be the last or one of the last to be pushed to Windows Phone 8.1 Developer Preview devices before the final version of the operating system starts arriving.

The official update will be deployed on all devices running under Windows Phone 8 or Windows Phone 8.1 Developer Preview and is expected to start arriving as soon as this month.