Windows Phone 8 (codenamed Apollo) has finally landed! Microsoft has put a lot of effort into keeping their latest smartphone operating system under wraps all year so that they could show off some surprise features this fall. Some were revealed little by little, but today we've finally got the whole thing and are able to see how everything fits together. We've only had about 24 hours to use this latest iteration of Microsoft's smartphone operating system and a few of the back-end things are not as fully implemented as they should be once the new Windows Phones go on sale, but we hope the following review will give you a good idea of what to expect.

Windows Phone 8 builds upon Windows Phone 7′s new concept of being a very personal operating system. Its design is far removed from the usual way of extending a computing operating system with a list of applications that can be launched, in the same way the graphical user interface has worked since the 20th century. Instead of just a grid of app icons, with Windows Phone, the operating system is extended within tasks or content in order to make for a more integrated and intuitive experience. This is more apparent than ever in Windows Phone 8 as you'll see that many aspects of the phone can now be seamlessly added to by third party developers. less