Thanks to Microsoft’s insistence on controlling the system specifications of smartphones using their Windows Phone operating system, whenever anyone announces a new Windows Phone it’s kind of … well, boring. LG’s Miracle is a perfect example of this. This unannounced device was just leaked by the folks at Pocketnow, who say it has a 4 inch ultra bright LCD that pushes 800 x 480 pixels, has a 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon, 512 MB of RAM, 5 megapixel camera, and here’s where things get weird, they say it also has suport for near field communication (NFC) technology. According to rumors we’ve heard in the past about Tango and Apollo, the future versions of Windows Phones, we thought NFC wasn’t going to hit Windows Phone until the end of this year with Windows Phone 8. We’re inclined to believe that the NFC spec was a typo. It wouldn’t be the first time that happened. Back in October we heard about the Nokia Lumia 900, almost three months before it was announced at the Consumer Electronics Show, and people said it too would have NFC. That obviously wasn’t the case.
The bigger question is when will Microsoft let phone vendors use a wider assortment of components to make their devices? We know Windows Phone 8 will let folks like Nokia and LG pick from four different screen resolutions, but forget about the display for a second, what about choice when it comes to picking a system on chip vendor or baseband provider?
Here’s where that Windows 8, the desktop version of Windows, makes things exciting. It’s going to run on ARM chips, namely those from Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, and NVIDIA. Rumor has it that Windows Phone 8 will be based on the same kernel as Windows 8. Does that mean that Windows Phone 8 will support the same chipsets that Windows 8 supports?
Something to think about going forward.