Stephen Chapman of ZDnet has found a few clues that point towards the next next version of Windows Phone codenamed Apollo as possibly using the same core technologies as the full Windows 8 operating system. There are a couple of references in a few different ex-employee online resumes and HTC employee references that seem to indicate that it might be true.
Today Microsoft revealed some details about how Windows 8 will work at their Build conference keynote. Many things are very familiar to Windows Phone users. Windows 8 will support the exact same application development technologies as Windows Phone 7 (plus a few old ones like Win32 and a few new ones like HTML5.) It will also sport ARM processor support, 5 second boot up times, background updates of live tiles, battery saving features, system-wide hardware accelerated graphics and a fully touch-friendly interface. In the keynote you could even see a few existing Windows Phone games show up as Windows 8 live tiles, and it was demonstrated that building a Windows Phone version of a Windows 8 app could take as little as changing one line of code.
Perhaps it’s a good thing that Windows Phone 7 never allowed development of apps using native code. Since they all currently use Silverlight, XAML and XNA, Microsoft can easily switch to the new Apollo Windows 8 kernel in the future without breaking anything (in theory). Now, with a full Windows 8 kernel on your phone, think about how scalable that will be. You’ll have instant support for multiple processors, multiple cores, multiple displays, 256 terabyte disk drives, etc.
