Microsoft has confirmed - rather unintentionally; a video about WP8 for Nokia leaked - that Windows Phone 8 will ditch the CE kernel in favour of the NT kernel from Windows 8. This was actually a long time coming, as rumours to that effect have come up intermittently ever since Windows Phone 7 was launched. Thanks to Windows Phone 7's clean and kernel-independent architecture, all current Windows Phone 7.5 applications will continue to run - without a single code change.

It goes further than that, though. Not only will Windows Phone 8 run on Windows NT, it will also share many other components with its desktop cousin: sensors, the security model, and the network, audio, and graphics stacks. So much so, in fact, that developers can "reuse - by far - most of their code", according to senior vice president and Windows Phone manager Joe Belfiore.