Thanks to sites like the FCC and the Bluetooth SIG, devices that aren’t yet announced sometimes end up being inadvertently leaked. The latest of such leaks is the Nokia Lumia 719. According to the Bluetooth SIG it has the exact same specifications as the Lumia 710, and it’s meant for the North American, South American, and Asian markets. So why the different model number? The Lumia 710 is already on sale in the United States, courtesy of T-Mobile. We’ve already heard rumors of a new device called the Lumia 730, which is supposed to have 4G LTE support and an improved 8 megapixel camera, so we’re left scratching our heads … what’s so special about the Lumia 719 that it deserves its own model name? We know the 719 isn’t going to run Tango, the low end version of Windows Phone, because it has a 5 megapixel camera. Could the 719 be the 710, but with AT&T’s 3G bands?
The bigger question is what’s Nokia and Microsoft going to tell their customers once Windows Phone 8 rolls around later this year? There are strong rumors that suggest today’s Windows Phones will not get updated to Windows Phone 8. As bad as that sounds, it had to happen sometime. Currently there is no such thing as Windows Phone fragmentation, but by the end of this year there are going to be three separate tiers. They’ll be low end Tango devices with 256 MB of RAM. They’ll me mid range Tango devices, which are basically today’s Windows Phone, but updated with newer software. And finally they’ll be Apollo devices running the latest and greatest version of Windows Phone. How will developers cope with that? To be fair, iOS developers are in the same boat. There are plenty of people who still use an iPhone 3GS or an iPhone 4, so it doesn’t make sense to build apps that can only run on the new dual core enabled iPhone 4S.
[Via: Unwired View]