Hot on the heels of the Microsoft Surface announcement, Microsoft has unveiled Windows Phone 8. The company’s press event in San Francisco showed off the operating system elements that it shares with Windows 8, as well as new opportunities for developers and consumers.

Microsoft is advertising a “uniquely personal mobile experience” with their newest phone platform, touting its new hardware capabilities and expanded features, such as multi-core chips, new screen resolutions, SD card support and NFC. The phone will feature Internet Explorer 10, Wallet, and a new Start Screen, though I don’t know if that last feature is impressive enough to boast about. The phone will support native development and feature device encryption and management capabilities. Let’s hope we don’t see another “smoked by Windows phone” incident.

On the software side of things, the Microsoft app marketplace has passed the 100,000 app milestone. As far as I’m convinced, that’s where the excitement truly lies.

Via Windows Team Blog