Microsoft made some important announcements in September about its upcoming operating system, Windows 10. The company announced that it will drop the 'Phone' from Windows Phone to make it Windows 10 as its upcoming operating system will be a single, unified platform which will support all types of devices including smartphones, tablets, laptops, PCs, hybrid devices, and wearables. Right now, no one knows about the features of Windows 10 for smartphones but Microsoft will reveal more details about it in January 2015 during a press event.
Last month, Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet reported that Microsoft has already started working on Windows 10 for smartphones internally. Later, Microsoft announced that it will provide Windows 10 update to all the Lumia smartphones running Windows 8.1. According to a new report from ZDNet, it appears that Windows 10 will run on ARM as well as Intel based processors, which exactly how Microsoft will be able to run the same operating system on all the platforms. This also means that we could finally see Windows 10 based smartphones with Intel processors based on x86 architecture.
"I'm hearing that Microsoft is still testing the mobile SKU on a very limited basis within the Operating Systems Group at this point. I would think the mobile SKU might need to be dogfooded internally at Microsoft more widely before Microsoft releases it to external testers. But once Microsoft does deliver the Windows 10 mobile bits to testers, ongoing and regular updates will be coming at least monthly, according to sources."
– Mary Jo Foley, ZDNet.
Currently, there are many brands out there who have launched Windows 8.1 based tablets at very cheap prices featuring Intel Atom processors. This might hint towards even cheaper Windows 10 based smartphones in the future which might give it a tough fight to Android smartphones in the low-end and mid-range segment. Intel's best smartphone processor right now is the Atom Z3580 which combines 2.33GHz quad-core 64-bit CPU, PowerVR G6430 GPU and can support up to 4GB RAM.
