He also hints that Cortana could make her way to the PC.

Joe Belfiore, who runs the Windows Phone design and definition team, was on reddit today to answer questions about Microsoft's smartphone platform.

The question Belfiore was most excited to answer was whether Windows Phone would get a File Manager app any time soon. It turns out that it will. Belfiore shared a number of screenshots of the app, and said that he hoped to have it released by the end of the month.

File managers aren't necessarily the first thing that people think of when it comes to smartphones, but with Windows Phone's support for microSD cards, a tool for moving pictures, music, and files between internal storage and SD storage makes some sense.

Much of the talk was about apps. When reviewing Windows Phone 8.1, we didn't look too much at apps, because we knew it would take some time for software to be updated for Windows Phone 8.1's new features. Since our review, the Music app is now on a rapid release cycle, with updates being published every two weeks. Also after our review, the OneDrive app has been updated and a beta Twitter app leaked out, both providing integration with the newly restructured Photos app.

Belfiore explained the design of the new Photos app with a diagram showing which features of the old Photos Hub were used most often. The new app is designed to make those features more readily accessible. It also makes integration with third party applications more or less seamless: OneDrive, Facebook, and Twitter all show up more or less as folders, and pictures stored on these services can be browsed and manipulated in much the same way as pictures on the phone's own storage.

The Facebook app is also due to be updated in June, Belfiore wrote, to improve performance and the way it presents photos.

Microsoft is updating its own apps too. The Skype app already integrates with the People hub, but its performance leaves many users unhappy. Belfiore said that the Skype team is working on this and will have a faster updated version for Windows Phone 8.1.

Yesterday, Microsoft released a Reading List app for Windows Phone that syncs with the Windows 8.1 Reading List, Microsoft's entry in the "read it later" app category. At the same time, the company released a Windows Phone version of its Movie Moments app, which makes it easy to create short movie clips with text captions and music.

Unsurprisingly, there was a lot of interest in the Windows Phone virtual assistant Cortana. Cortana is currently restricted to the US and in beta. Once it leaves beta, Microsoft is adding the UK and China, with other English-speaking countries likely to be next. The broader rollout faces two big challenges, according to Belfiore: reliable speech recognition that can cope with a wide range of accents, and good localized data. Unfortunately, he offered no specifics on which regions were the priorities.

There was also a cheeky hint that Cortana is likely to make her way to form factors beyond the phone. When asked if Cortana would ever come to Windows 8, Belfiore replied that he had nothing to announce, but that Cortana was "always telling us she's a fan of PCs herself. " So we wouldn't be altogether surprised to see Microsoft bring the technology to the PC—and the Xbox—at some point in the future.