Last night, we broke the story on a few leaks published over the weekend by mystery user @qxerro on Twitter. He has been publishing a steady supply of Windows Phone 8.1 'screenshots' over the past few weeks, and has most recently teased changes coming to the lock screen.
Today, the shady account has unmasked the lock screen in its entirety, and may have also revealed a glimpse at one of Microsoft's most hotly anticipated new features in speech assistant Cortana.
As we can see from the screenshot/mockup above, the most apparent change is what's resting underneath or below the lock screen. For weeks we've been hearing a lot about Cortana,and this may be a shot of what using the speech service will look like when the phone is locked. We've gone over the other minor changes in yesterday's post, such as the Alarm being present in the lock screen notifications tray and the clock now included in the top-right corner of the status tray.
But we may not want to put too much stock into these subtle changes, as @qxerro says in the accompanying tweet: "Remember, WP8.1 would not look like that in the final builds."
But wait, there's more. The account has also published(above) that may shed some light on Microsoft's future plans for their hardware brands. Thanks to the Nokia hardware acquisition, we know that Microsoft has gained the rights to use the Lumia brand, and this image suggests that Microsoft is planning to take advantage of that for their future first-party smartphones.
Meanwhile, Surface is also present in the image so we suspect that brand will stick around as the name of Microsoft's tablets, instead of an all-encompassing hardware label.
More interesting fodder to chew on as we wait for the stars to align and for Microsoft to deliver hardware running Windows Phone 8.1 in early 2014...
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