Bangalore: Microsoft has announced that it will provide support for Windows Phone 7.8 till September 2014, and Windows Phone 8 till July 2014. The news was first spotted by Italian website, Plaffo on the software giant’s support pages.

This means that the Redmond giant will make updates available for the Mobile operating system on the user’s phone including security updates for a period of 18 months from the lifecycle start date. However, the Windows developer has clearly mentioned that the availability of the updates will vary by region, operator, manufacturer and hardware capabilities.

This caused great concern for windows phone OS users as they felt that come 2014, they would be left without any support. Microsoft's Windows Phone team tweeted to reassure everyone "As we've said, one benefit of moving to the Windows core is that Windows Phone is upgradeable."

Does this imply that Microsoft is already working on a Windows Phone 9 or the next version of the mobile platform? It would be far from a surprise if Microsoft was already in the testing stages of Windows Phone 9 given its once yearly cadence for major mobile OS releases: Windows Phone 7.5 Mango was released in September 2011, followed by Windows Phone 8 in October the following year. Should Microsoft follow the same schedule for the next release, Windows Phone 9 is likely to be six months away, over six months before support for Windows Phone 8 comes to a close. Seems like the PC veteran is picking up speed in the mobile dimension as well.

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