Windows Phone 8

There’s a good argument to make that Windows Phone 8 doesn’t need a central notification system because it has live tiles to display incoming information in real-time. But according to The Verge,  Microsoft’s (MSFT) Thomas Fennel admitted at the company’s BUILD 2012 developer conference that Windows Phone 8 would have had a notifications system that matches Android and iOS’s if the company hadn’t run out of time. Fennel said that the company has gotten “tons of feedback from developers that they want something like that as well” and that Microsoft is “thinking very, very hard” about building a notification center for future releases.

Exactly one month after BGR’s exclusive report confirming Microsoft was developing an own-brand smartphone, a new report firms up the news. Reporting from Taipei, The Wall Street Journal’s Lorraine Luk and Shira Ovide state that Microsoft (MSFT) is working with component suppliers in Asia to test its own smartphone. No details about the device were provided beyond the claim that the phone’s display measures between 4 and 5 inches, and WSJ’s unnamed sources were not aware of Microsoft’s launch plans. BGR can confirm that this testing extends well beyond Asia; working Microsoft smartphone models running the company’s Windows Phone operating system are currently being tested by a number of people inside and outside the company in the United States.