Leaked Windows Phone ‘Apollo’ details: Security at last?

It’s not exactly news that Microsoft is planning a major update to Windows Phone this fall, one that’s supposed to fill in many of the promising smartphone OS’s deficiencies. But mobile reviews website PocketNow seems to have revealed the most substantive details to date, thanks to a purported intercept of a Microsoft executive’s video presentation. Though it sounds to me like an intentional leak from Microsoft intended to get coverage, the information itself appears genuine.

Rumors about the “Apollo” upgrade — which some are now calling “Windows Phone 8” — have been circulating for months, and analysts who follow the space have long said Microsoft was working on several of the issues that PocketNow reveals: adding on-device encryption, better integrating with the forthcoming Windows 8, and beefing up the hardware support.

PocketNow also says Microsoft is adding support for SD cards — which is not quite true, as Windows Phone 7 supports proprietary-format SD cards that most device makers decided not to use after customers complained. It’s unclear if “Apollo” will work with standard SD cards so that they can be used in other devices such as PCs. And PocketNow describes planned integration with Skype, a company Microsoft bought last year, and a replacement music player for the little-loved Zune.

Analysts have been saying for some time that we’ll see a minor upgrade called “Tango” this spring that probably adds even more social networking capabilities to the current Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango.” They also claim “Apollo” will be the update that matters, mainly because it will add some of the security management features that have kept it out of large enterprises and, conversely, let the iPhone and increasingly Android in.

That’s good and necessary, but it’s a “duh” move that Microsoft should have made long ago. What may go beyond “duh” is the apparently tighter integration between “Apollo” and Windows 8, making it easier for developers to write Metro UI applications for each device from a common code base. “What this shows is that Microsoft is indeed planning to create as seamless an ecosystem as possible across PC, tablet, phone, and [TV] set-top box,” IDC analyst Al Hilwa told my InfoWorld colleague Paul Krill.

Hilwa adds, “It appears that Windows Phone 8 will leverage important parts of Windows 8 while running the same application base. It remains to be seen how hard or easy for developers to modify apps written for one OS for the other, but all indications are that Windows Phone 8 will bring many of the important new features in Windows 8 to the phone platform. For example, application contracts will allow apps to talk to each other on the phone, and Windows Phone 8 will have native development with C and C++, which is supported on Windows 8.”

Windows 8 already uses Windows Phone 7’s visual style, so it makes sense for Microsoft to move the platforms at least as close together as Apple has done with Mac OS X and iOS and their common APIs, Objective-C-based Xcode development environment, and interface approaches.