Rumors surfaced this week concerning Microsoft’s upcoming mobile operating system, Windows Phone 8.  The rumors come from a leaked video featuring Joe Belfiore, a Microsoft senior vice president and manager of the Windows Phone project, and include a few obvious features as well as a particularly intriguing new initiative for Microsoft’s mobile phone division.

Most of the updates focus on scalability and versatility. For example, WP8 (codenamed “Apollo”) will support multicore processors, multiple screen resolutions, removable storage via MicroSD cards, and support for NFC radios. These changes seem to serve mostly as a catch-up measure to iOS and Android devices, which have historically beat Windows Phone in side-by-side hardware comparisons.

Data consumption seems to be another major component of Apollo. A feature called DataSmart will provide a breakdown of data usage, and will attempt to reduce consumption by giving Wi-Fi connections precedence and routing Internet Explorer web page requests through a proxy server for compression, which Belfiore claims could reduce data usage by 30%.

The most interesting detail from the leaked video is that Microsoft plans to unify Windows Phone 8 and the desktop version of Windows 8, going as far as to share a kernel, networking stacks, and security features such as BitLocker encryption. The goal of this unification is to allow developers to reuse large portions of their code between mobile and desktop versions of their software. Microsoft also intends to create a new, dedicated desktop application for syncing a WP8 device, dropping support for the Zune application and addressing a major complaint from users of the platform.

This move to unify the desktop and mobile versions of Windows could prove to be lucrative for Microsoft—if developers are able to easily port their apps to run on PCs, tablets and smartphones, they may flock to the Windows ecosystem to get the most exposure for their products. Since the Windows Phone ecosystem current trails Android and iOS in app selection by a factor of ten, this unification could boost WP device sales significantly.

Although Microsoft has traditionally lagged behind Apple and Google in the mobile phone sector, Windows Phone 8 may give the platform a much-needed advantage over its competition. We believe WP8 will be released sometime in mid-2012.

Reports have surfaced saying that Apple has begun talking to television component makers, lending credence to the oft-repeated rumor that an Apple-branded TV set may be in the works. Gene Munster, an analyst for Piper Jaffray, predicts it may arrive sometime this year.

The Apple TV set is one of the more persistent rumors surrounding the company, and there’s no doubt Apple is interested in the market—Steve Jobs’ biographer Walter Isaacson said Jobs wanted to “…do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant.”

However, there is some speculation as to whether Apple will enter the market at all. The Apple TV, a digital media receiver designed to feed content to a television, hasn’t sold particularly well since its introduction in 2007. And it’s often been stated that Apple won’t enter a market unless it can revolutionize it—as they did with portable music players and smartphones.

So then the question becomes, can Apple revolutionize the television market? One of the biggest issues is content, and analysts see three potential scenarios: Apple could take the TiVo model of providing hardware but not content, model a set-top box and pull content from providers such as Hulu and Netflix, or adopt a paid-content provider model where Apple collects monthly fees for custom content.

According to industry experts, producing a TV isn’t a quick proposition—most take a year to design and produce—but it’s not impossible to imagine Apple pulling off a product release late in 2012.

Although Samsung has chosen to hold off on unveiling the Galaxy S III at the Mobile World Congress event this month, it looks like there may be some exciting news from the mobile phone giant after all. Here’s what we think might be happening:

Galaxy Nexus: The popular Galaxy Nexus might be receiving a slight upgrade. Rumors include a CPU bump to 1.5GHz (from 1.2GHz in the current model) and an increase in camera resolution to 8MP.

Galaxy S II Plus: The Galaxy S II may also get some attention in the form of a faster and slightly improved version known as the Galaxy S II Plus. It’s rumored to have a dual-core 1.5GHz processor and a 4.5” Super AMOLED Plus display, in contrast to the Galaxy S II’s dual-core 1GHz CPU and 4.3” screen.

Tablets: Reports have surfaced that two as-of-yet unannounced Samsung tablets have recently received Wi-Fi certification. One of these may also include a quad-core CPU, which would certainly be a step up for a mobile device.

These updates sound intriguing, although they are of course rumors and are wholly unsubstantiated by Samsung. The next few months could prove to be interesting for the company, especially with the recent news of Apple losing their bid to ban the Galaxy Tab 10.1N and Galaxy Nexus in Germany. We’ll definitely be watching Samsung’s presentation at the Mobile World Congress event later this month closely.

Before long, your computer is going to be watching your every move—Microsoft is reportedly working on integrating the Kinect motion sensor into laptops. The Kinect, which is a special Xbox peripheral that uses a camera and microphone to watch and listen to a user for commands, has been successfully hacked to work on a computer by hobbyists, but the device would need to be modified significantly to work in a portable product such as a laptop.

The Kinect was released in early November 2010, but hasn’t been overly successful as a gaming controller due to fairly poor participation by game studios. Its uses as a user interface controller have been decidedly more interesting; only a few weeks after the Kinect hit shelves, videos were posted online of people using the device to play a piano as they tapped imaginary keys on a desk, control robotic arms, and navigate through web pages.

Microsoft has been surprisingly supportive of open-source Kinect products, and has released an SDK to allow programmers to more easily access its functions. This news about integrating a Kinect sensor into laptops could lead to Minority Report-esque interfaces in the future, with users speaking commands to their computers and businessmen in airports waving their arms around to view documents on their laptops.

Microsoft provided no estimates as to when we might actually see laptops with motion tracking features, but we do know that they will be licensing the technology to manufacturers rather than building a solution in-house.