Microsoft Holds Windows Phone 8 Event [Updated]

I’ve been consumed with other things so far, so I didn’t even hear about a Windows Phone 8 event until I saw the hashtag on twitter. Luckily you can check it out from the beginning at the Engadget WP8 Liveblog.

In other news, wasn’t Windows Phone 7 just released?

Hit up The Verge for more Windows Phone 8 details.

Sounds like MS is going balls to the wall putting products (or at least announcements) out there.

Update:

Short story is:

• Fall release (I’m sure this won’t affect WP7 device sales until then, nosiree)
• No updates for current Windows Phone 7 devices
• Fairly nice looking specs and developer info, if you judge on specs. Most of what I saw though looks it’s on par with the current iPhone and Android offerings (multi-core, 1280x760, external SD storage (hopefully they’ve licked the issues previously where only a couple of very specific SD cards would work properly), etc.
• NFC and wallet capabilities (somewhere in between what google wallet and iOS6 Passbook)
• Unexciting but needed-by-IT-nerds enterprise capabilities
• 3D Maps from Nokia, with offline map support, turn by turn, etc.
• Tighter Skype integration, very cool for devs to be able to hook into that

In short this sounds like what WP7 should have been. I’m really interested to hear what Paul Thurrott has to say about this on Windows Weekly this week. He’s got two articles about WP8 and WP7.8 for some insight.