By Adam Z. Lein

Every time Microsoft releases a new version of their mobile phone operating system there are a good number of new features added, but there are also often a few features that get removed.  We’re not sure why they do this, but it has been happening for about 12 years.  Even when Windows Phone 7.5 was released, which brought hundreds of new features to the very basic Windows Phone 7, a few features were still removed.  For example, you lost the ability to edit Office 2003 documents in Windows Phone 7.5.  You could still view them, but editing was enabled only for Office 2007 and higher documents.  Internet Explorer also lost the ability to “Find on Page” which was a great feature for finding the section you wanted to read about within a long web page. The context-sensitive search button’s function was also changed to only go to Bing search, while additional in-app search buttons were added for the contextual search functions though that was more of a re-arrangement of features as opposed to a removal.

So which features of Windows Phone 7.5 do you think will be removed from Windows Phone 8?  We already know that Windows Phone 8 won’t use the Zune PC software for syncing music, videos, and podcasts.  That could mean that we will lose the ability to create automatic playlists that are automatically generated based on certain criteria as your music library changes… and then are synced to your phone over WiFi when the phone is in the charger.  That’s a great feature that not many people know about so its removal could go unnoticed unfortunately.  We actually haven’t seen any indication of how Windows Phone 8 might sync with PCs until this leak appeared just recently.  There’s no indication of any integration with Windows Phone 8 in the RTM version of Windows 8 on the PC.  There’s no interface in the Windows 8 Music or Video apps that might allow you to select content to auto-sync or manual-sync to a Windows Phone. 

Windows Phone 8 is a complete rebuild of the Windows Phone operating system, so there’s a big chance that many things may have changed.  What other features do you think will have mysteriously disappeared from Windows Phone 8 once it gets into the hands of consumers?