Two days ago we ran a fun little piece on a Nokia Lumia 900 ad showing up on some sites. The ad featured a rendered 900, spinning around with Live Tiles in motion. Nothing odd there except that two of the Live Tiles had new and very specific behavior:
- Contacts - The tiles flip and it says "Meet up with Sarah"
- Photo Hub - Flips and splits into two tiles, one with the latest photo, the other with a count
The contacts/People Hub behavior was a tad redundant but also not a bad idea. The Photo Hub count confused people as knowing how many pictures you had didn't seem very useful. We guessed at the time that instead that count was for non-viewed photos from contacts i.e. new Facebook uploads, etc which seemed plausible.
Of course the ad was Photoshopped--in fact the whole thing was. The question wasn't the means but rather the intent (if there was any).
Nokia PR got back to us yesterday on the matter though and perhaps not too surprisingly, deny that what we see is anything more than a marketing error:
"Just to clarify and remove any questions, I want to let you know that this was a change that was made in in the advertisement process and is not an indication of what may or may not come in future iterations of the Windows Phone software. Perhaps someone got a little carried away tinkering in the photo and video editing process, as it did not come from engineering or product management in any way.Basically, you shouldn’t take that image to mean that the product might change."
Of course we weren't exactly expecting Nokia to give us a slow-clap and congratulations on figuring our an unintentional leak. But having them go on record denying any accidental reveals of slight OS upgrades should put the matter to rest.
Still, we think they're pretty decent ideas. We should note for Windows Phone 8 we're not expecting a major UI revisions but rather slight changes and additions. So we'll what happens in June and come back to this.
