Microsoft is rumored to shake things up a bit next year, with the acquisition of Nokia’s hardware and services division it will formally step into the world of making smartphones which will obviously be powered by Windows Phone. The company is expected to waive licensing fees for OEMs to given them an incentive to produce even more WP devices. The hardware bit aside, what sort of changes can we expect to the OS itself? Rumor, and a wild one at that, has it that Microsoft will ditch the tile-based user interface, commonly known as the Metro UI, in Windows Phone 9, which is expected to be released between the third and fourth quarter of 2014.
The reason why this rumor seems so wild is that Microsoft has devoted considerable resources to unifying user interfaces with common elements, such as tiles. You find tiles on Windows PCs, tablets, smartphones and even the Xbox gaming console. It would seem illogical to some for the company to shift its mobile platform away from these unified user interfaces. The rumor comes from Eldar Murtazin, who is deemed to be well connected, and while he has been right on several occasions in the past, he has more than a few duds to his name as well. As always, Microsoft hasn’t commented on the rumors and we can’t expect it to. So far nothing major has been said about Windows Phone 9, but we can surely expect the rumors to keep coming in.