Windows Phone 8 is pretty, and there's a lot of things to like about it. But for every one of those there's also a glaring absence. Hopefully one of those is soon to disappear, leaked screenshots of an internal build of the OS shows that there's finally a notification center, presumably coming soon.
The screenshots were shared by a Redditorwho bought a 920 off Ebay and found that it was running a peculiar OS: an internal beta. In addition to the notification center, there seem to be some improvements to multitasking as well, including the ability to close applications in that view.
As with any leak, there's always the possibility it's just a big fake, but there's nothing about this set of screenshots to make it wildly suspicious. On top of that, we know Microsoft's pushing out a Windows 8.1 update soon, and when an update comes to Windows Phone 8, you'd hope it would include something so basic as a notification center.
You know how it goes, you buy a phone on eBay, and it comes with a developer / pre-release version of a major mobile OS. Well, if these images are to be believed, that's at least what happened to one bargain-hunting Windows Phone fan. The screenshots -- said to be taken from a Nokia 920 -- show Windows Phone 8, but with a few new tweaks and features. Most notable, will likely be the notifications, but other tidbits include App list ordering based on frequency of use, week view in the calendar and the option to kill apps from the multitask screen. The phone reports a build number of: 12084.WPMAIN(wpbldlab).20130509-1407 leading some to infer that this version could have been compiled sometime in May. A tease of something to come? As always, hard to tell, but expect the price of second-hand 920s to bump up a little, for the next few weeks at least.