Windows is gearing up for the next round of challenge as it announced the third update some hours ago. “A bigger Start screen for more Live Tiles. A new, customizable Driving Mode. Better accessibility options” quoted Darren Laybourn, Corporate Vice President for Windows Phones, in his blog. Update 3 is going to be a series of new features as well as upgrade for the existing ones. As the company launches this update for Developers, hardware manufacturers for Windows phones are likely to feel excited with the new release enabling support for larger screens, 5 and 6 inch displays. There was a buzz for quite some time now about windows venturing into the ‘phablet’ arena, well, this could likely be it. The larger displays with 1080 HD resolution will surely be applauded by the users.


As the screen size increases, the engineering team has ensured that the overall screen area is utilized in a better and efficient way. Hence, the number of live tiles on your windows phone has now increased to six from four. The scaling of built in apps like email, photos, videos, people, etc. will be done accordingly. The performance of current OS is likely to go up with the introduction of support for Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 quad-core processor.


This update has an additional feature called ‘Driving Mode’. Driving Mode enable a user to limit the notifications regarding text messages, calls, alerts, etc. on the home screen, so that, one is not distracted while driving. The phone needs to be connected to a Bluetooth device and shall not disturb you until you are off the wheels.

The blogger boasted of new accessibility features that can enable even a visually impaired person to make calls, send texts, email, etc. To witness how it actually works we will have to wait for a while. Internet sharing and creating hot-spots has been made easy with the new improvements as the users are simply required to connect the windows 8.1 PC with their phone over the Bluetooth and labels for the shared Wifi will show up. Tap and get started.

Newer ringtones, easily close-able apps, screen rotation locks, better Bluetooth are other feature enhancements that Windows phone users had demanded and have been granted with the third update. People at Windows feel that this should place the company in better position against the competitors like Android.

Now it’ll be interesting to see if Windows can actually take on the sheer mass of Android in the phone segment. Will it?