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Microsoft Operating Systems Software Hardware

Microsoft Exec Says Windows 10 Mobile is No Longer a 'Focus' (engadget.com) 135

Posted by msmash from the done-deal dept.
From a report: Microsoft's Joe Belfiore informed Twitter users that new features and hardware for Windows 10 Mobile "aren't the focus" any more. There will be fixes and security patches, of course, but you shouldn't expect more than that. As for why the platform has been all but dropped? The executive boils it down to one main reason: the difficulty of getting developers to write apps. Microsoft tried paying companies to produce apps and even wrote them itself when creators couldn't or wouldn't get involved, but the number of users was "too low for most companies to invest." Why build an app for a relatively small bunch of Windows phone owners when there are many more Android and iOS users? Belfiore himself switched to Android for the "app/[hardware] diversity." It's a bit more complicated than that, of course. You can point to a few other factors in Windows' fate on phones, such as slowness in responding to Apple and Google as well as an inconsistent hardware strategy (you could rarely count on getting a timely sequel to a handset you liked). Whatever the reason, it's safe to say that Microsoft isn't just acknowledging that Android and iOS hold a clear lead -- it's quashing any hopes for a comeback, at least for the foreseeable future.
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Microsoft Exec Says Windows 10 Mobile is No Longer a 'Focus'

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  • words of Nelson Muntz come to mind...

  • There's a Windows 10 Mobile? So is that targeted for the 4 people that still use Windows Mobile?
  • No longer focusing on something you've already been ignoring. This man gets paid too much money.

  • I'd love it if Microsoft would release an affordable mid-range Android phone much like what Google's Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 were like

    The price point should be around $300 to $400, at the most, like the Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 were.

    Keep the physical size of the phone reasonable. Somewhere between that of the Nexus 4 and Nexus 5 would be ideal.

    There's no need to go overboard with the hardware. Give us the most bang for the buck, even if this means using slightly older or slower hardware.

    Put some emphasis on reliabil

    • win32(x86-64)+android phone will be killer

      • If you mean "DOA", then I agree. Why would anyone need Win32/64 on a phone?

        • It works with windows apps and is not tied to the shiity MS store.

          • Most of the actual Windows programs I use would suck very badly indeed on the tiny display and interface of a phone.

        • Any businessman who needs microsoft office. Anyone who needs a specific windows program for work. Hey Microsoft, here is how to make this work: Buy a cellphone company, give away a windows phone with free (on network) streaming of TV and music, and free high speed tethering. 5 years of this will give you an easy 25% market share.
          • Or just live with not owning the platform once and make windows office apps available for the other platforms.

        • If you mean "DOA", then I agree. Why would anyone need Win32/64 on a phone?

          They wouldn't, but they might need it on a tablet size device, .... and the code is the same.

    • Why should Microsoft do that, and probably-related: why would you want one from them (compared to pretty much anyone else)?

      I'd think the only reason MS would sell an Android phone, would be to preload software on it to try to lock people into their desktop and server products. If you don't want it "customized" (i.e. bloated) then you're taking away 100% of Microsoft's incentive.

    • Imho, winphone (and the iWatch) havenâ(TM)t achieved much market penetration, because they simply arenâ(TM)t available on cutting edge hardware. market share leads from the top down, and if your flagship product blows, so do all the products that follow it.

  • Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps where supposed to run on Windows 10 Mobile. Do they remain relevant? Have they ever been?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      They're only relevant if you think the Windows App Store will be around long, or maybe if you really want your app to run on an XBox.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Rob Y. ( 110975 )

      Whether Microsoft likes it or not, the future of Windows is Win32 apps. That's what forces people to keep using it, and almost nobody who has written an extensive Win32 app is going to rewrite it as a Metro app - though some will rewrite their apps as web apps, Android apps or iOS apps. The app store may someday be chock full of Win32 apps if their ChromeOS competitor ever takes off.

      Microsoft has moved on - and their current focus seems to be to attempt to usurp Android, and 'own' it without having to own

      • Microsoft has been trying to make it easy to use Visual Studio to write iOS and Android apps. I can see that one possibility would be make it easy to use UWP to write apps that worked well on iOS, Android, and Windows, then come back to mobile devices when there are enough apps that use it and can become mobile Windows apps with a simple recompile.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dwpro ( 520418 )
          I think xamlstandard +.net core will bridge that gap, but I haven't heard much on the xaml piece yet.

  • Android has easy side loading and no dev fees to put out an APK off the store.

  • It is official. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It is official; Netcraft now confirms: Windows Phone is dying

    One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Windows Phone community when IDC confirmed that Windows Phone market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all phones. Coming close on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Windows Phone has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Windows Phone is collapsing in complete disarray, as

  • I thought it was the same codebase? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    If it's the same codebase, then no special work is needed for Windows 10 Mobile, it gets carried forward by work on Windows 10.

    If it's the same codebase, then there is no "apps shortage", every Metro app written since Windows 8 should work just fine. That was the point of Metro, no?

    If it's *not* the same codebase, then it should be called "Windows Phone".

    • Regardless, they will double down on the tablet UI for desktops and servers. Fuck your keyboard skills, use a mouse.

    • Same codebase is a myth: one needs to maintain the different platforms separately, and they fork on their own. Otherwise, Windows NT/RISC had a common codebase w/ Windows NT on x86, but the former went nowhere. Microsoft doomed itself into becoming an Intel only platform, and when Intel punted on a market, like phones, Microsoft had to, as well. Windows on ARM was always a bad idea

    • If it's the same codebase, then no special work is needed for Windows 10 Mobile, it gets carried forward by work on Windows 10.

      It's not the same codebase, that's why it is called Windows 10 Mobile and not simply Windows 10.

      If it's the same codebase, then there is no "apps shortage", every Metro app written since Windows 8 should work just fine. That was the point of Metro, no?

      The point is people don't want to use Windows for Metro 'apps', the advantage of Windows is in its use as a workstation and enthusiast gaming platform (by that I mean custom configurations, highend hardware, various combinations of control mechanisms, VR, etc), neither of which transition well to Metro apps running on mobile devices. We already have platforms for running mobile apps and they do it just fine: Andr

  • Great, so you fucked up our UI for nothing? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09, 2017 @09:23AM (#55335389)

    1. Make phone with shitty UI.
    2. Make you bread and butter funtion and look like the hated phone UI. To make people like the phone.
    4. Stop making phone.
    5. ?
    6. Profit.

    • Development (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      1. Deprecate the existing WinCE platform and force developers to update their code to the XAML/Silverlight/.NET Platform for Windows Phone 7
      2. Deprecate Silverlight, force everyone to switch to C#/C++/Metro backend
      3. Deprecate C#/C++/Metro, force everyone to switch to Universal Windows Platform and whatever that supports

      Most developers bailed at step 2.

      • Re:Development (Score:4, Insightful)

        by mcrbids ( 148650 ) on Monday October 09, 2017 @12:13PM (#55336739) Journal

        As a developer myself, I watched the clusterfu#! of Microsoft launching, then dropping, platform after platform... And every time they did that, I thanked myself for not investing in the previous platform!

        Want to guess how much that made me want to invest in their next platform?

      • Re:Development (Score:4, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 09, 2017 @12:59PM (#55337147)

        As a Microsoft-stack developer, I never got started on this path. I still, to this day, have WinCE/WinMo/WinEH programs that I have to maintain.

        WinCE is still supported until 2020. But development for it got a LOT more difficult under Windows 10, and then EVEN MORE difficult with the 1703 (Creators Update) version of Windows 10. Development for that old-ass platform requires VS2008 (VS2010 broke compatibility with a lot of tools). VS2008 uses ActiveSync/WMDC to deploy code to a test device. (And I have to use a test device because device emulators lack real-world features like barcode imagers and such.) But WMDC support was dropped in 2012.

        So when Win10 came out, it broke compatibility with the WMDC application up to and including the version you can download and install from the web... but not the version that had a hotfix to make it work with Windows 8.0 that installs automatically through Windows Update when you plug in a WMDC-able device. The fix was to make sure you NEVER installed WMDC manually, but instead, allowed it to install automatically when you plug in a device.

        Oh, but it gets better... When the Creators Update (Win10 r.1703) came out, they made svchost.exe stop hosting things together by default, since, in theory, this makes services more stable and less prone to being taken down by a service in the same host instance. But this broke the services that WMDC uses to communicate with devices through USB. WcesComm and RapiMgr use a common mutex for some reason, which ensures that they either MUST be running under the same svchost.exe instance, or else the late-comer (whichever one starts last) will crash. So to make these work under 1703, you have to add a registry flag to tell SCM to NOT separate them into separate instances of svchost.exe. This makes these processes crashy AF, so you then have to set the "if it crashes more than twice" option to "just restart the stupid POS" in the service properties.

        I have yet to be "forced" to adopt any of these newer platforms or frameworks. I have yet to ship even one project with any XAML code. I never touched Silverlight, WP7, WP8, or "Metro". I've dabbled a bit with UWP. (Good job mischaracterizing all of these things completely, though. It's great that you confuse languages, frameworks, platforms, and UI guidelines as all the same thing.) In the near future, I'll probably be "forced" to develop replacements for these WinCE/WinMo/WinEH apps for Android and/or iOS. I'll be using Xamarin, because, honestly, C# is a damned fine language and I just don't want to be bothered writing multiple different apps in multiple different languages, and with a different language on the back-end, too. There's just no good reason to adopt Java or Swift when you already use C# and Xamarin is available.

        And in case you didn't notice, Xamarin is the next step in UWP. It will remove the "W".

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tazan ( 652775 )
        I was WinCE developer, loved coding mobile apps, was not excited when told I had to learn completely new skillset to move to WinPhone 7. Then was told I needed a new skillset for 8, then found out silverlight was dead. It was more like step 1.5 I was moving out the door, step 2 did give me that final shove though. They had a ton of developers at 6.5. They dumped them when they went to 7, that's what baffles me.
    • I'd disagree with step 1. Windows Phone had a pretty good UI (though using the same UI on laptop / desktop devices without touchscreens was horrible, and using a Frankenstein mix of that and the traditional Windows UI was even worse). The problem with Windows Mobile was always the lack of third-party apps, not the core functionality.
  • Perhaps they could consider working on a good phone OS and ignoring the "apps"? For example: I'm a grown-up. I don't use "apps". I want the best phone in order to get work done (calls and e-mail). I couldn't give two shits about Twit-Face-Gram-Chat. I have to imagine there are enough people like me out there that generate enough demand to justify working on the OS.

    • Re:"Apps"? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Monday October 09, 2017 @09:27AM (#55335429) Homepage Journal
      What are you talking about? Even if you were being honest and never ever used apps you would make up about 0.00001% of smartphone users.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DogDude ( 805747 )
        I doubt that. There have to be a decent percentage of people who just use a phone for work only.

        • Re:"Apps"? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by UnknowingFool ( 672806 ) on Monday October 09, 2017 @09:43AM (#55335531)

          The issue is that your work requirements are not everyone's work requirements. For example: email and calls. Yes. But I travel sometimes for work which means: At least a browser to book hotels, flights, rental cars. It means cab hailing apps sometimes. It also means a VPN app so I can get access to the company network when I'm on the road.

          Now here's where apps help: Airline apps to check-in, book, upgrade, gate information. Hotel apps to check-in/check out, request service, get directions. Car rental apps to avoid the lines. I can do 100% of all those things with a browser and phone calls. It's much faster and more convenient to use apps.

        • Re:"Apps"? (Score:5, Informative)

          by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Monday October 09, 2017 @10:00AM (#55335627) Homepage

          I doubt that. There have to be a decent percentage of people who just use a phone for work only.

          You seem to assume apps are just for fun and games. Even our very traditional organization with very limited work needs have added the time tracking and travel expense system as an app (in addition to the desktop version), from what I understand it's quite popular because you can use it for all off-site meetings and stuff and you can fill out your travel expenses as you go. Pay a taxi bill, go to your expense form and type in amount, take a photo of the reciept and done. As opposed to having a stack to process when you get back to the office. Heck, if the last leg is a fixed price like the bus/train from the airport you can be done before you even get home.

          • And furthermore, what's wrong with entertainment? If you're on a business trip and want to relax with Netflix or Angry Birds to unwind at the end of a long day, there's nothing in the world wrong with having those on your "pure work" device. No sane boss will begrudge their employees that. These aren't just words: I would refuse (and have! refused) to carry a work-issued device that was so locked down that I couldn't use it for the occasional 10 minutes of down time.

        • I doubt that. There have to be a decent percentage of people who just use a phone for work only.

          Um, a decent percentage of people's work requires apps these days for things like two factor authentification. People on call have apps to do thier work if they get called. I use VPN and RDC to get things done rather than carry around a laptop, nevermind have to drive across the city to a computer. the CxOs use apps because they don't want to carry around a laptop to get into systems when they have to off site. Stroke doctors use app on phone and tablets to look at X-Rays and give the ER vital information w

    • Exactly! I was ready to pay more money, than for Android phone but instead get something what syncs nicely with Windows PC: emails, pics, docs. Nope.

    • I'm a grown-up. I don't use "apps". I want the best phone in order to get work done (calls and e-mail).

      You don't use "apps", yet you somehow get email on your phone?

      Have you never used Waze, or another navigation app?

      I suspect you're being arbitrary here.

    • Wait, you use your phone to make calls? How... quaint. Seriously, the ability to make calls from my phone could be dropped and I wouldn't even miss it.

      • Wait, you use your phone to make calls? How... quaint. Seriously, the ability to make calls from my phone could be dropped and I wouldn't even miss it.

        I think making calls is sort of the definition of a phone.

    • Perhaps they could consider working on a good phone OS and ignoring the "apps"? For example: I'm a grown-up. I don't use "apps". I want the best phone in order to get work done (calls and e-mail). I couldn't give two shits about Twit-Face-Gram-Chat. I have to imagine there are enough people like me out there that generate enough demand to justify working on the OS.

      While I agree w/ you that most apps are useless, there are some apps that ought to be there on any phone:

      1. Video calling apps: Apple always had it w/ FaceTime, Google got it late, and Microsoft got it after everybody else, w/ WhatsApp's video calling. That's the whole idea of a smartphone

      2. Service apps: Apps like Uber, Lyft, the Uber Partner/Lyft driver apps, banking & financial apps, and so on. Like w/ E*TRADE, I have to use the phone to deposit checks, since that bank hardly has any branches.

      3.

    • Perhaps they could consider working on a good phone OS and ignoring the "apps"? For example: I'm a grown-up. I don't use "apps".

      By "apps" do you mean you don't use programs? Or did you put it in quotations because you mean something else?

      I have a few different messenger apps (because not everyone uses just phone and email to communicate), a home automation one, remote security camera viewer, VPN, a couple of video streaming services for the occasional on-the-go entertainment, spotify app, maps and a bluetooth mouse one. With the built in calendar, phone, camera, browser, notes, reminders and email apps that pretty much covers my usa

  • I'm still floored (Score:3)

    by grasshoppa ( 657393 ) on Monday October 09, 2017 @09:25AM (#55335407) Homepage

    MS was handed a built in majority in the mobile market by way of their market penetration in business desktop and productivity software, and they apparently did everything they could to piss it away. The *moment* they saw what RIM was up to with the blackberry, they should have been thinking to themselves, "We could be doing that so much better, and providing a much better experience".

    Instead, they let RIM eat their lunch, then Apple, then Google. All the while kinda half-assing multiple doomed attempts in what is reminiscent of a shakespearean tragedy.

    • A burn Nokia (Score:4, Informative)

      by DrYak ( 748999 ) on Monday October 09, 2017 @09:32AM (#55335461) Homepage

      Instead, they let RIM eat their lunch, then Apple, then Google. All the while kinda half-assing multiple doomed attempts in what is reminiscent of a shakespearean tragedy.

      And managed to burn Nokia in the process (who were in a very strong position before Stephan Elop and Microsoft happened to them).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bazorg ( 911295 )

        Can you expand a bit on how very strong Nokia's position was, the moment that iPhone went on sale?

        I certainly don't remember things that way.

        • Re:A burn Nokia (Score:4, Informative)

          by Uecker ( 1842596 ) on Monday October 09, 2017 @11:39AM (#55336463)

          You remember incorrectly. I followed this story very closely at that time. Nokia was not only - by far - the largest smartphone vendor, it also was the fastest growing smartphone vendor in absolute number (different analysts published numbers). The smartphone unit was also extremely profitable (the numbers are also public). Nokia also had an new mobile platform in the pipeline (Meego) as a replacement for their older Symbian smartphone OS with several phones nearly finished (only the N9 was then sold which got stellar reviews and some prestigious awards.) They had a convincing plan to transition developers from Symbian to Meego via Qt. They had some initial set of working apps for Meego including third party apps. And all this at a time where Android was still small. .

          It is also true that they had no significant presence in the US. They also lost market share in smartphones. (Despite growing fastest in absolute numbers. This may happen if the overall market grows rapidly and new players enter the market.) For some reasons (some say large investors from the US pressured them), they hired Stephen Elop. Stephen Elop cancelled Meego, declared Symbian obsolete already before a replacement was ready, and switched to Windows Phone which alienated their workforce and customers. Sales immediately collapsed. (Who would by a phone with a OS the vendor himself has declared obsolete?) Only the N9 was brought to market and it sold well in the few markets it was released in (no major market). Windows Phone never cathched on and smartphone unit never recovered. Samsung came and filled the void. Later the smartphone unit was sold to Microsoft.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by Kiuas ( 1084567 )

            You remember incorrectly. I followed this story very closely at that time. Nokia was not only - by far - the largest smartphone vendor, it also was the fastest growing smartphone vendor in absolute number (different analysts published numbers). The smartphone unit was also extremely profitable (the numbers are also public). Nokia also had an new mobile platform in the pipeline (Meego) as a replacement for their older Symbian smartphone OS with several phones nearly finished (only the N9 was then sold which

            • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

              by Uecker ( 1842596 )

              You got some things right (Elop took a wrong turn and killed the company), but it's not quite as straightforward. Nokia was losing market share [statista.com] way before they ever hired Elop. Their share of the smartphone market fell from 50,8 % in Q2 of '07 to 37,3 % in Q2 of '10.

              This agrees with what I wrote. I think these number are what caused the panic reaction. But measuring percentage changes with a growing total is just a meaningless thing to do. Let's say you sell 50 items and one year and 90 next year. Somebody else realized this is a profitable business and sells 10 item (after selling 0 before). Then your market share dropped from 100% to 90% despite this being a very successful business.

              The reason was quite simple: the iPhone Meego was taking too long and they were getting their asses kicked by Android and Apple. Symbian was just way too outdated to match the iphone, and the iphone 3G/3Gs just made the situation worse and the fall more rapid.

              This true except that Nokia still was highly profitable and the largest vendor. This

        • Can you expand a bit on how very strong Nokia's position was, the moment that iPhone went on sale?

          Here's an overly long rant [blogs.com] by an analyst, with lots of details of what went wrong.

          I certainly don't remember things that way.

          Part of this boils down "In my tiny corner of the world, everybody flocked en masse to the Jesus Phone !" - "Yeah but not all the planet Earth follows what happens to be popular in California, and billions of people can't afford Apple overpriced iGadgets while these billions are still in need of some portable communication tools, and Nokia phones are serving them better than anything".

          After the release of iPhone Nokia was basi

      • Nokia killed themselves long before Microsoft got involved. Going with Windows Phone was a long shot that might have worked. Keeping their existing strategy of 6 independent teams all trying to sabotage each other and ignoring the fact that there was actual competition in the smartphone market was an even worse alternative.

        Nokia has a well-designed kernel (Symbian EKA2) with a horribly dated set of userspace APIs designed for a time when 2MB of RAM was a lot. Their solution? Replace the kernel with L

      • And managed to burn Nokia in the process (who were in a very strong position before Stephan Elop and Microsoft happened to them).

        They did screw up Nokia but Nokia was in trouble before they got into bed with Microsoft. Elop was hired BECAUSE Nokia was in trouble and they knew it. It was a bad hire of course but they did see the problem coming. Their failure was an inability to do anything about it. A lot of this was structural. Smartphones are mostly about software and Nokia was never very good at the sort of software that end users actually care about. They could build a decent piece of hardware but the user interfaces genera

    • Instead, they let RIM eat their lunch, then Apple, then Google. All the while kinda half-assing multiple doomed attempts in what is reminiscent of a shakespearean tragedy.

      The problem with MS is they staged a multi-front war and ignored the mobile one. They went against Google in web searches and lost while trying to fight Apple on computer OS. Java was a threat to them so .NET had to be promoted. Then Apple started selling iPods and songs and even though they were not directly competing with MS in any way, MS had to make a competitor.

      MS probably thought that mobile phones were safe. After all RIM and Symbian were making small incremental improvements that they could countera

      • I think Microsoft saw the problem well enough. They saw that computing was steadily moving over to mobile devices. But they could never come up with a device or operating system that gave developers and consumer any particular reason to move to their platform. They've been all but begging these days for people to develop apps for the Microsoft Store, but nobody cares, because it's irrelevant and who is going to waste their time?

        So we're going to see them continue to leverage the things they do have dominanc

        • Re:I'm still floored (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Rob Y. ( 110975 ) on Monday October 09, 2017 @10:46AM (#55336017)

          To be fair, they saw mobile. What they didn't see was Open Source mobile. According to the standard Microsoft playbook

            1. Microsoft would be in mobile - because they 'have' to be in everything, tech wise. But their offerings would have limited appeal - mostly to business execs.
            2. iOS would come out and redefine mobile
            3. Microsoft would observe iOS and see what it takes to be successful.
            4. Microsoft would make a system that works like iOS and sell it to OEM's at low enough prices that they would be the only viable alternative to iOS.

          Google short-circuited that plan at step 4, and Android became what Windows mobile would've been. In fact Android's weakness (being Open Source, it was allowed to diverge enough from the 'standard' to make timely upgrades near impossible) was also it's biggest strength (allowing OEM's to attempt to differentiate themselves led to healthy competition and a great deal of innovation). Would there be hundreds of Windows Phone manufacturers, if all those phones had to be essentially the same on the inside? I don't know. Of course, now many of us would like Android phones to be as stock as possible - having witnessed the downside. But in any case, the alternative to iOS has been established, and Microsoft is at least smart enough to understand that now.

        • With the rule that you must license all cores in the cluster at a min of 16 per server. That kills for clusters that have a few windows servers and lot's of non windows one. The idea that you must 1 windows only is bad as now you can't update the host without down time.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dracos ( 107777 )

      It doesn't matter how much market leverage MS ever gets in a business sector: they have no clue how to market to consumers. Their only consumer success is XBox, which the brass never cared about and was left to its own whims.

    • The *moment* they saw what RIM was up to with the blackberry, they should have been thinking to themselves, "We could be doing that so much better, and providing a much better experience".

      Yes, because if there's one thing that comes to mind when people think about interacting with a Microsoft product, it's the quality of the experience. /sarcasm

      • Yes, because if there's one thing that comes to mind when people think about interacting with a Microsoft product, it's the quality of the experience. /sarcasm

        Ok, ya. Fair enough. That's even worse though; a quality UI design isn't really all that hard, yet MS has repeatedly failed to do it for decades now.

        It really should be embarrassing how much they fuck this stuff up.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by rl117 ( 110595 )
          It's all down to the culture of extreme backward compatibility, both of interfaces and implementations. Look at core applications like notepad, calculator, paint etc. as well as various explorer dialogue windows, control panel dialogues etc. None were changed since their original implementation except for the most superficial tweaks. They made zero effort to update these in line with the rest of the system, which is why the whole thing is a horrible inconsistent mess using several generations of differen

  • originally I bought myself a Palm Pre. Nice phone, superior OS to Android, but the apps were lacking. Android had many times more apps. Sold the phone, got a Black Berry tho'- the same basic problem: lack of apps, but the OS itself was far superior to Android.

    Been using Android for 7 years now, and it sucks. Ever use a Galaxy S7 Edge by Samsung for T-Mobile for example? When using this device, it takes the proverbial lag every time you interact with it. Menus have such high latency to appear, switching betw

    • Android for 7 years now, and it sucks. Ever use a Galaxy S7 Edge by Samsung for T-Mobile for example? When using this device, it takes the proverbial lag every time you interact with it.

      Hopefully you're not technical in android function, otherwise this post will end up being irony and sarcasm. Each app you install on your android device has a potential to slow down your device, either ram usage, background services usage, storage space, permissions, battery usage, notifications, auto updates, auto scan, auto backup, etc. Each new OS update you install will also has a potential to slow down your device, like iOS.

      You can of course manually turn off/ block app functions to ensure your device

  • They needed to focus on X86 on ARM (Score:4, Informative)

    by Deathlizard ( 115856 ) on Monday October 09, 2017 @09:51AM (#55335591) Homepage Journal

    The best thing MS could've done to save the platform is to focus on running x86 on ARM. At least at that point, phones like the HP Elite x3 would have made sense.

    Unfortunately, with HP pulling the plug on the x3 and no real focus on the ARM platform other than as a novelty as well as Intel threatening lawsuits over x86 emulation over ARM, The windows phone market (as well as Windows on ARM for the most part) is all but officially dead.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rl117 ( 110595 )
      They definitely should. But they intentionally made ARM a second class platform by locking it down to only use store apps, as well as locking out other OSes from the UEFI BIOS, etc. If they wanted it to be adopted, they should have given us reasons to want to use it, rather than reasons to avoid it. I wouldn't have minded using and developing on ARM. But a locked down system which is only useful for a small number of apps, and which I can't also boost with FreeBSD or Linux, is a system I won't be bother

      • That was windows RT. They didn't allow software installs outside of the windows store and barred recompilation of existing apps to arm. It bombed. The closest thing to this is Windows 10S, which will also bomb unless the OS is free, which it's not. At least you can upgrade it to pro though.

        Windows 10 arm is pretty much windows 10 pro on arm. They would support existing app recompile to arm as well as existing compiled x86 apps (but not x64). Its what windows RT should have been in the first place, but no on

  • "Microsoft Exec Says Windows 10 Mobile is No Longer a 'Focus' "

    So for the first time since the Universe was a pup, Microsoft and users actually agree about something.

    Truly, these must be the End Times.

  • Yeah that really sucks... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by shaitand ( 626655 ) on Monday October 09, 2017 @10:05AM (#55335653) Journal
    Imagine how much sympathy we all have for Microsoft having to face a target market completely locked in by one or two competitors.

  • I had Windows 7, 8, and 10 phones -- the Samsung Focus, Lumia 920, and Lumia 950.

    7, 8, and 8.1 were great. Excellent UI -- better than Android or iPhone in my opinion. Very usable, clean, and never laggy. It could easily run smooth on hardware Android would choke on.

    10 has been a horrible experience. For the two years I had my Lumia 950, I had constant problems. A patch would fix one thing and break another. Bluetooth never worked reliably. It somtimes became slow --- slow like Android was slow -- for seemingly no reason at all until a reboot. About a year into the phone, a patch came out that made GPS sporadically stop working until rebooting the phone -- which only exacerbated the Bluetooth issues, as the phone would often not reconnect to my car after a reboot.

    I now have an LG V30 that I picked up a few days ago. It is one of the few headphones not only keeping the headphone jack, but doubling down on it by making it super high quality -- I want to vote with my wallet. I'm not happy to be using Android, but I am *extremely* happy to not be using Windows 10 Mobile.

    I can only imagine the massive costs Microsoft eat as a result of their mobile lineup. 7 was an all new shell. 8 dumped that shell for a new one, and also brought in the NT kernel. And finally 10 dumped the mobile shell to make the same code shared between desktop and mobile. That was a huge amount of churn.

  • A few years ago when Windows Phone 7 came out, I remember having a blast hanging out on tech blog forums like Engadget and The Verge and trolling against it. I would write long screeds about how much it sucked, how terrible tiles were, the lackluster hardware, how much Android was better and on and on. Of course the WP7 fanboys would hit right back about how Android lagged and you need overpowered hardware just to run it and how the apps sucked and on and on. It was a blast. Really all in good fun until I

  • It's quite bad when the Nokia 1020, a circa-2013 phone, can hold its own with modern-day Android devices, much less be able to run more modern code. (Yes, I have both Android and the 1020. I'd just like to see a better camera versus "better processing".)
    • My partner just replaced her Nokia 1020. It was quite depressing how much better the 1020 was than the replacement in almost all regards. She'd probably have kept it if not for the fact that it didn't speak a modern version of TLS and so was breaking with an increasing number of web sites. It's a shame no one managed a decent Android port to the 1020 - I'd love to put LineageOS on it.
  • I love my Lumia 950, and I'll miss it, but to be honest, I was carrying an iPad with me for boarding passes and comixology and all the apps that weren't being written for windows 10 anyway.

    I always used to say, Apple OS let you do anything that APPLE thought of really easily and intuitively, without really learning anything, Microsoft OS make you learn the damn thing so you can do whatever YOU can think of. (yes yes yes Linux! but for the masses, the argument holds) The moment Microsoft made an environm

  • The foreseeable future means what 18 months tops before they try this yet again? At first you don't succeed try and try again and hope the consumers forget how you bailed on the market before.

  • So I get it that we are probably talking about a phone interface, but tablets are mobile too. I have a couple cheap x86 tablet running a full install of Windows 10. One with Home one with Pro. Windows 10 runs remarkably well on them. I do understand that it's a different ballgame, but I find it to be very useful.

    I had a Windows Phone a couple years ago. At first, the interface was great. But once I had installed a number of apps I found it impossible to include more than a few in the launcher before things

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by IMightB ( 533307 )

      Do you work on AmiDuOS? Rarely plugs get put in unless your a shill.

      Fuck You - Carls Jr.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by wjcofkc ( 964165 )
        Don't worry, scrote. There are plenty of 'tards out there living really kick-ass lives. My first wife was 'tarded. She's a pilot now.

        Now go have a Brawndo, you could use the electrolytes.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • It seems all they've been doing for 10 years is releasing apps, services, and frameworks as if they were setting a dove free and then letting it live or die on its own, rebranding it if it doesn't catch on without changing anything fundamental or changing the way they support it. Also, before everything suffered from too much focus testing, and now it seems like they've abandoned any notion of soliciting input.

  • So we got that HORRIBLE "phone/tablet" UI in Windows 8, and still in 8.1 and 10, because of the one-platform-for-all idea (classic desktop + mobile), and now MS is dropping mobile? Does that mean we're getting Windows 11 which is basically an updated Windows 7 (driver models, CPU support, DX12, etc.) or what?

  • This should be opened up to the community then. If you're worried about shared propriety code then strip that out and let people rewrite it.

    Windows Mobile (IMO) is/was a great OS, and could easily be a competitor to Android and iOS. Microsoft could easily put a dent in the dominance of the other two platforms by simply giving their OS (which they don't care about or value) away.

    But they won't. :(

  • Windows Universal was the shittiest thing I've ever had to develop in, Hypercard and 3D graphics in QBasic were so much more pleasant.

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