The Windows Phone 7.8 roll out has been quite a ride. The recent update for legacy Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) devices was first delayed, and then once released suffered from problems with tiles, so much so that Microsoft had to pause the update.
Nevertheless, the update is out now, and a fair fraction of users have already deployed it to their smartphones with success.
One question that has popped up though is how does it perform? Does Windows Phone 7.8 bring with it some performance improvements, or do users have to make do with interface enhancements.
The folks over at 7Tutorials took it upon themselves to answer this little question. And let’s just say that Microsoft has not included any performance improvements in the newest version of its legacy mobile platform, and instead only focused on porting over a few Windows Phone 8 features.
The benchmark results show that there are no noticeable differences between Windows Phone 7.5 and Windows Phone 7.8 — synthetic benchmarks, browser speed and boot up time results all fall within 2 percent of each version.
Yup, nothing meaningful, as most would have expected.
Then again this is not something that can be held against Microsoft. With the arrival of Windows Phone 8, both these old operating systems have taken a back seat.
That’s not to say Microsoft may not have explored some performance optimizations, but the single core Qualcomm CPUs in most such devices may have left little room for extracting extra juice. Besides, both 7.5 and 7.8 do offer smooth and lag-free performance anyway.
So if you had any doubts, you can lay them to rest — Windows Phone 8 is the future of Redmond’s mobile ambitions.
And even though it looks like we will not be seeing any more updates for Windows Phone 7.8, even if Microsoft sends one our way, it will most probably be a security focused one rather than performance.