Windows Phone 8: Microsoft’s 4 Big Challenges

The tech world is abuzz with new details on Windows Phone 8, the next major upgrade for Microsoft’s mobile operating system.

According to reports from PocketNow and Paul Thurrott, Windows Phone 8 will support a wider range of specs, including multi-core processors, four different screen resolutions, microSD storage and digital wallet services that use near-field communications. It’ll also have deep integration with Windows 8, allowing developers to easily port their apps from the desktop to the phone, and allowing users to sync data across all their devices.

In other words, this is the big upgrade everyone’s been waiting for, the one that merges Windows Phone with Windows PCs — or starts to, anyway — and allows for more powerful phones to compete with the iPhone and Android. It’s exciting in theory, but it’ll only work if Microsoft has solutions for the following challenges:

Making the Convergence Dead-Simple

The allure of having one ecosystem across phones, tablets and PCs is that you could easily share content — apps, music, photos, documents, and so on — between devices with minimal effort. But this type of sharing can get complicated in a hurry. Different devices may serve different purposes, which means you might not want to share every photo, song and app between your phone and your PC. And with varying amounts of storage space on each device, sharing everything could cause you to run out of room for the things you actually need. The trick for Microsoft will be to provide a simple way to sync apps and media between Windows Phones and Windows 8 PCs, while also allowing lots of control.

Meaningful App-to-App Communication

With Windows 8, apps will be able to talk with one another. So if one app has photos to share, and another app is designed to edit photos, those two apps can pass data back and forth with just a few button presses. Microsoft is reportedly bringing that same app-to-app communication system, called “Contracts,” to Windows Phone. This is exciting, but only if developers embrace the concept en masse, making it a central part of their apps. We may get a glimpse of how well this is going when the Windows 8 beta launches this month.