Smaller People Hub Tiles; Forthcoming Update, or Bad Render?

In the Lumia 521 sales video on HSN they played a video promo for the Nokia “Flame”; the 521’s pre-release code name. In the promo they showed off the recent tiles in the people hub, which struck me as odd since it doesn’t match up with the current WP8 design, nor the previous WP7 design.

In WP8 the recent tiles are listed in a vertical layout of 8 tiles maximum as seen below, also note that the hub itself is a “panoramic view” (meaning you can see the edge of the neighboring pane without swiping out). In WP7 the recent tiles were arranged in a left-to-right panoramic view of also 8 contacts maximum, rather than the new vertical layout in WP8.

In the recent contacts on the 521 however they appear as a full size app displaying multiple small tile sized contacts (with the possible potential of more than 8 contacts). Of course this is pretty useful since you are obviously getting more use out of the same “hub”, especially since the recent contacts on my 920 are usually filled with contacts from my room chats; rather than people I actually called.

So what does this mean? Possibly nothing, it could be a shoddy render job by Nokia or their advertising team, or it could be a glimpse of how WP8 was supposed to deal with recent contacts; or dare we hope, it could be an option in a upcoming update? Something around the lines of “choose recent contact tile size” or “Number of recent contacts to be displayed” (similar to the recent posts option in baconit).

While we’re on the subject of the recent contacts, I do wish there was a way to pin it as a live tile; especially since it’s a lot prettier than the call list.

So what do you guys think?

Category: Lumia, Nokia, Windows Phone