Microsoft has held a press event today to give us a “sneak peek of the future of Windows Phone”. Terry Myerson, VP of Windows Phone, took the stage and bragged that seven of the top nine phones in Amazon’s marketplace are Windows Phone handsets.

But that’s the past – Joe Belfiore took over to preview Windows Phone 8. One huge change in WP8 is the shared core – shared with Windows 8 that is. With it, devs for either OS can easily port their work to the other OS.

There will be 8 platform announcements based on this shared core.

Windows Phone 8 will support multi-core processors thanks to the shared kernel. For this fall, Microsoft will focus on dual-cores. Next up, higher resolutions will be supported – WVGA is joined by 720p (1280 x 720) and WXGA (1280 x 768). All existing Windows Phone 7.5 apps will work without modification on the new OS regardless of the resolution.

Removable storage is another highly requested feature that will be enabled with WP8.

Windows Phone 8 will launch with Internet Explorer 10, which borrows a lot of pieces from the desktop browser. JavaScript performance is improved and sites that work on the desktop browser will work on the phone too.

Windows Phone 8 also makes the jump to native code apps – which both improves performance and makes porting stuff like games written for Windows 8 RT to Windows Phone 8 a breeze.

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