Microsoft (MSFT) closed the deal with Nokia couple of months ago, and now new reports indicate that the Redmond giant may soon make a couple of changes to its smartphone and tablet brand names. Industry experts in the tech industry, claim that Microsoft will eventually change the brand of Windows Phone handsets' from Nokia to 'Nokia by Microsoft'.
As mentioned, @evleaks, an industry journal claims that Microsoft will also drop its 'Surface' brand name for its tablets and will instead use the Lumia moniker. According to Phonearena, a document revealed that Microsoft was planning to discard the Nokia brand name from its smartphones 18 months after the transaction has been closed. It has been further mentioned that both Nokia X and Nokia Asha devices might lose their brand names after December 31, 2015, and after 10 years, respectively.
Uptake of the Windows 8 operating system on desktops fell in June, while the In May, Windows 8 held a 6.29% share in the desktop market, but this has now dropped 0.36 points to 5.93%. However, usage of Windows 8.1, the first upgrade to Windows 8 which launched in June 2013, upped to 6.61% in June, a rise of 0.26 points.
In another twist, Windows XP managed to increase its market share in June, climbing to 25.31% from 25.27%.
Microsoft ended support for XP on April 8 this year as it tried to shift businesses onto more recent operating systems such as Windows 7, 8 or 8.1, meaning it no longer issues patches to solve security risks on the 13-year-old operating system.
For the record, Microsoft Mobiles last week launched the Nokia X2 handset, the successor to its popular Nokia X Android-based smartphone. Some of the key specifications of the Nokia X2 include a 4.3-inch ClearBlack LCD display with WVGA resolution, a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 processor clocked at 1.2GHz, 1GB of RAM, a 5-megapixel autofocus rear camera with LED flash, an unspecified front-facing camera, an 1800mAh battery, and 4GB of built-in storage that is expandable via microSD card (up to 32GB).
The new-look Windows is said to feature the compact Start Menu that Microsoft publicly showed off at its BUILD conference this past April. Instead of traditional menu icons, a la the Start Menu of Windows XP and Windows 7, smaller Live Tiles will be used.
According to the reports, users will have the option of flipping to the Start Menu. And they’ll still be able to use the Start Page’s “Metro” apps within windows in the desktop, as Microsoft added with its latest spring update, Windows 8.1 Update 1.
The industry analysts give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt: Microsoft boldly led users into a modern era of phones, tablets, PCs, notebooks, hybrids, and more—and designed an interface that could traverse the breadth and depth of what hardware makers cooked up within their planning departments. Threshold simply acknowledges that a preponderance of desktop PC users prefer, well, the Desktop interface. The new Start Menu Microsoft showed off at BUILD reportedly won't debut until next year.
Others, however, will take the opposing view: users never asked for a crazy quilt of tiled icons, each jiggling and shifting and updating—and never for a touch-based interface that required them to take their hands off their desktop. For those, simply shoveling dirt on top of the Metro interface isn’t good enough. They want to take that shovel and beat it senseless. New or old, Microsoft Windows has been dominating the PC scene since inception. It waits to be seen how the new-look Windows perform at the market.
