Microsoft will release Windows Phone 8.1 to current Windows Phone 8 smartphones later this summer. A leaked Nokia document reveals the company's schedule of when Lumia smartphones will receive the update.
While Windows Phone is nowhere near the number of users of iOS and Android, Microsoft's mobile OS has been making steady gains in trying to catch up. Windows Phone surpassed BlackBerry and became the third most used smartphone platform in the U.S. behind Android and iOS.
The introduction of Windows Phone 8.1 adds a ton of new features that evens the playing field in terms of features offered by Apple and Google. The Windows Phone 8.1 update will finally give Windows Phone users a personal assistant in the form of Cortana. Cortana is a mixture of Siri and Google Now and performs many of the same functions.
Windows Phone 8.1's Action Center is similar to both iOS' and Android's notification center, which can be accessed the same way, just swipe down from the top of the screen to see your latest messages, emails, social updates and access to commonly used features and settings.
Microsoft has already released a 'Preview for Developers' that allows anyone with a Windows Phone 8 handset to install the OS update early. We posted a guide on how to do this in case you're curious to take Windows Phone 8.1 and all of its new features for a spin. We installed it on a T-Mobile Nokia Lumia 521 and the process was very simple.
If you're waiting for the official and final release of Windows Phone 8.1 and own a Nokia Lumia smartphone, a document has leaked that details the schedule of how Nokia plans on rolling out the OTA (over the air) update to its Lumia smartphones. The document was posted by evleaks and provides a time frame of when each Lumia smartphone will begin receiving the Lumia Cyan/Windows Phone 8.1 update. The first smartphones to receive the update will be the Nokia Lumia 1520, Lumia 1020 and Lumia 925 in late July or early August. The next set of smartphones to get Windows Phone 8.1 will be the Lumia 920, Lumia 820, Lumia 720, Lumia 625, Lumia 620 and Lumia 520 in early August.
This document was never meant to be seen by the public and Nokia notes that the Lumia Cyan/Windows Phone 8.1 release dates are subject to change. We should be hearing something official from Nokia in the coming weeks and will report back to you.
