Windows Phone 8.1 ‘Action Center’ notification center leaks

posted by Victor H.

Feb 09, 2014, 8:40 AM

Windows Phone 8.1 ‘Action Center’ notification center leaks

Windows Phone 8.1 is likely to indeed get a new notification center similar to the one on Android (and later on, on iOS), and it will be called ‘Action Center’. The first screenshots of the upcoming ‘Action Center’, part of an internal Microsoft presentation, have surfaced on Winphollowers, and later on TheVerge chimed in with more images confirming the veracity of the first leak.

The new ‘Action Center’ comes up when you swipe from top to bottom, just like you’d do on other platforms like Android. It shows four toggles for basic settings - Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Airplane and Driving modes. This new notifications hub will also display battery percentage and date.

A full pull down reveals the complete ‘Action Center’ with all notifications in it appearing in categories, apparently by the app they came from. You can clear all notifications in one swipe, and apps can control individual notifications, silently updating, adding and deleting them.

After this confirmation of the new ‘Action Center’ for Windows Phone, TheVerge also confirms that the Cortana Siri-like voice assistant is indeed coming to Microsoft’s platform, and that it’d pull information from Foursquare, Bing and others to better answer queries. Redmond will also finally split controls for volume and allow separate volume levels for notifications and media like music. All these new Windows Phone 8.1 features are expected to get officially unveiled at the Microsoft Build developer conference in the beginning of April.

Interestingly, Winphollowers, the resource that published the images, is down at the time of this writing. The resource has already said it has more to reveal, so we’re curious whether this has something to do with Microsoft, or has the website gone down under the traffic surge. Stay tuned, as more details could surface soon.