Earlier this week Microsoft excited many users in the Windows Phone camp by posting on their Windows Phone User Voice site asking what features users specifically want to come to Windows Phone 7.8. Originally only the improved Start Screen was named to come to legacy devices, but it seems Microsoft wanted to improve the experience by adding some additional features.
Despite in the original statement by a Windows Phone team member asking "SPECIFICALLY what features you would like to see on 7.8", the team now appears to have backtracked on this statement, offering a different explanation on their site at the moment.
We are truly floored over the excitement about future Windows Phone releases. Unfortunately our earlier response on this post was not well worded. We really do care about your feedback. This forum is intended to seek suggestions on future product features but it is not set up to take requests for specific product versions. We apologize for the confusion.
We would like to reinforce that for this forum to work optimally we would need users to create unique suggestions each with a single idea. This particular suggestion item has many varied ideas and because of that we aren’t able to infer what is the most important to this forum. Please reallocate your votes to other suggestions that have a single idea.
This is in response to a post with nearly 60,000 votes asking for Windows Phone 7.8 to include native screenshots, Internet Explorer 10, over-the-air updates, Office 2013, Skype VoIP, DataSmart, new languages and new dictation. Comments in this thread also list pretty much every other Windows Phone 8 feature planned for the main release to new devices; features Microsoft are clearly not going to add to legacy devices.
While the Windows Phone team has essentially stated that they will not be taking requests for Windows Phone 7.8 specifically, there is hope as they still ask for users to voice their ideas for features individually - although it has now been clarified to suggest that Microsoft are not specifically after Windows Phone 7.8 feature requests, but general requests like the User Voice service has been used for in the past.
So you can continue to submit your suggestions to User Voice for features you"d like to see in Windows Phone 7.8, although it doesn"t look like Microsoft will be looking to specially integrate heavily requested features.
Source: User Voice via WMPowerUser