Microsoft announces udpate to Windows Phone 8.1, Cortana spreads her wings

Looks like Microsoft is upping the ante on Windows Phone development. Microsoft Windows Phone team has officially accounced the availability of Windows phone 8.1 update that brings in many new features and optimizations. Here is a quick list of changes. Some of the features that are announced are very useful and time saving features while few are to please enterprise users. Here is a quick list of changes

1. Cortana will be made available in China and UK as beta and in Canda, India and Australia as alpha.
2. Organize apps into Live folders in start screen
3. Xbox Music : performance updates and many new features
4. Windows store tile will be a live tile, when placed on home screen
5. You can now select multiple SMS to delete/forward etc.
6. App corner, to run apps in sandboxed mode.
7. VPN tunneling is now supported

This new update will be rolling out to end users in coming few months and if you are already using Windows Phone 8.1 Preview for Developers, you will see the update next week.

You can find more data here.