We’ve known for quite some time that despite what a lot of the doom-and-gloomers out the have said, Windows Phone 7 is far from dead. Between Windows Phone 7.8 coming out and Nokia who keeps churning out all sorts of neat additions to the OS, people with 7.x phones still have reason to be satisfied.

A new leaked slide from a 25-page Nokia PowerPoint deck may make things even better, if we’re not reading too much into it. (This will be the second Nokia PowerPoint presentation to have leaked in recent days.) The slide, attained by WPArea.de, shows a timeline with Windows Phone 7.x being overlapped by Windows Phone 8. There we see the familiar Mango --> Tango --> Windows Phone 7.8 progression but there is another box after 7.8 that simply states “Windows Phone 7.x”...

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Microsoft may not even have plans for a post-7.8 update but we see little reason why Nokia would include such a box after 7.8 if there weren’t something there. They could have very well have ended with 7.8 and Windows Phone 8 would have continued the future of the OS.

The other interesting bit about the timeline is how 7.8 comes after Windows Phone 8—something we’ve known since June—but it will come before the first set of Windows Phone 8 updates.  That leads us to the another curious aspect: “Windows Phone 8 updates” as in more than one. That can either mean that yes, WP8 will of course have a long life with many general updates over the next few years or it could mean we will have numerous smaller updates that trickle out over the next few months.

Such a system is already in place as detailed in our earlier post on how over-the-air (OTA) updates work on Windows Phone 8. Some of those updates will be small at less than a megabyte, while others will range up to “extra large” at over 150MB. All in all, there are five different size-levels of potential updates for Windows Phone 8 and we couldn’t help but think Microsoft would not have made such distinctions were they not planning on using them.

Windows Phone 8 in theory could have a vibrant future of many updates ranging from small patches to full OS updates. That’s the dream of many smartphone users who are now buying into the system but it remains to be seen if that is what actually occurs, especially with carriers running interference. The other conclusion we can tentatively draw is that Windows Phone 7 may also have more life left in it that previously thought. Now we just anxiously await that 7.8 update, which is expected in the next few months. Fingers crossed.

Source: WPArea.de; Thanks, Natan, for the link!