Microsoft's announced details of its next smartphone platform, and there's plenty of good news on the power front - along with one bit of very bad news.

On the good front, Windows Phone 8 supports a number of power user features that weren't previously available. Microsoft had quite tight guidelines for the Windows Phone 7 platform, with single core processors and maximum screen resolutions being a particular bugbear for some. Having said that, Windows Phone 7 competes well on a single core processor; proof perhaps that you can get quite a lot out of tightly-optimised code rather than simple brute force.

But there's equally an upper limit to how far you can push a limited power set, and Windows Phone will support dual and quad core processors - and technically even beyond that. The screen resolution issue that bugged phones like the Titan 4G and Lumia 900 should also vanish, with Microsoft adding support for displays up to 720P (1280x720). NFC for contactless payments gets in. So too does MicroSD card expandability, which also removes the complaint that the largest WP7 devices only came with 16GB of storage - a paltry amount in today's competitive smartphone world.

Windows Phone 8 also changes up Microsoft's much-lauded "Live Tiles" display, with tiles taking up the entire screen display, rather than the leftmost side, as well as being able to come in differing sizes; alongside the standard tiles, apps will be able to use small and medium sizes. The new approach to the tile display is an interesting one. One thing that's attracted me to Windows Phone 7 in the general sense is that the larger tiles prohibit clutter; it's easy to see the vital details at a glance on the phone. Adding new tile sizes - in effect, making them not dissimilar to icons, or at least Android's widget philosophy - may somewhat dilute that power.

New features and a new platform are all well and good, but what about the market share that Microsoft's already gained with Windows Phone 7? It's a distinct third runner to iOS and Android, but it's still a market. Or, to be more accurate, it was a market.

Microsoft's doing to Windows Phone 7 users exactly what it did with Windows Mobile 6.5 users, leaving them with no upgrade path at all. It was widely presumed that Windows Phone 7 devices would have upgradeability to Windows Phone 8, but that simply isn't so. As a sop to WP7 owners, Microsoft will release Windows Phone 7.8, which brings the more iconised tile display to the older operating system. That's it, though; from that moment on Windows Phone 7 users are on their own.

That's got to make it hard to sell existing Windows Phone 7 devices, at least to anybody who'd done even a modicum of research. Why buy a phone that'll be technically redundant in pretty short order by edict of the company that controls the software base? Nokia especially must be feeling the crunch, and there's a weird ironic echo here. The generally excellent Lumia 800 is built on a design that Nokia first used for the N9, a phone on the MeeGo platform that Nokia launched after some delays. The N9 was an equally excellent handset - but it was the only MeeGo phone Nokia ever released, and this was known well before it was actually available. Again, the phone itself worked fine, but it was a dead platform even before it got going.

Not that it's markedly better on the other sides of the metaphorical smartphone fence, however. Apple's long used iOS upgrades as a way of casually making older models redundant. The upcoming release of iOS 6 will see every model of iPod Touch save the fourth generation left out, as well as the first generation iPad. Even within those devices that are eligible for the upgrade the feature list you'll get is markedly different depending on the age of your device; if you want the latest and greatest features, says Apple, you'd better have the latest and greatest devices in other words.

It's even worse over in the Android camp, where devices may or may not get upgrades to the latest versions depending on both the manufacturer and carrier you've got the phone with. Android does have the flexibility that you can at least go it alone if you're happy rooting and playing with custom firmware, but that's very much unsupported territory; if something goes wrong you're looking at re-flashing the phone at best, and a brick at worst, although that scenario has become more uncommon as time has passed.

Still, phones launch all the time with different Android iterations, and there's a definite hunger for the "latest" version in consumer land. Sony recently admitted that the fact that it was bringing two new phones (the Xperia P and U) to market with Gingerbread was "a retail disadvantage", if only because staff usually recommend the latest and greatest phones. Sony's had some problems in this area over the past few months; having said that its entire Android smartphone line from 2011 would be getting Android 4.0 ("Ice Cream Sandwich"), it later had to rescind parts of that promise, having realised that its gaming-centric phone, the Xperia PLAY, wouldn't play nicely with 4.0. If you bought a PLAY, tough luck, in other words, and the same pattern can be seen across plenty of handsets from other manufacturers as well. Some phones get regular updates, while others get utterly nothing at all.

This isn't just version number whinging either, although undoubtedly there is some of that in the online debate about upgrading smartphones. New software doesn't just bring new features, but also often a raft of bug fixes, battery optimisations and security patches. Older phones that don't get upgrades don't get any of that. In a world where everything from simple email communications to NFC cash payments are being made through our phones, that makes an unsupported model a distinct disadvantage.

It's undeniably a tricky thing to manage; I've got little doubt that the presence of much better processors and differing screen resolutions would make a WP7 to WP8 upgrade a difficult thing at best, and at some point it can be beneficial to cut legacy ties. At the same time, I don't think that consumers are always given the best information about handset upgrades - and in some instances this isn't just a matter of software compatibility, but a sheer desire on the part of manufacturers to shift new units rather than support older ones.