Windows Phone 8 Officially Unveiled 414
BogenDorpher writes with news that Microsoft has officially introduced Windows Phone 8. The new version of their mobile operating system will bring support for processors with up to 64 cores, as well as resolutions higher than 800x480 — up to 1280x768. It will also include better support for NFC and microSD cards. One important thing to note is that Windows Phone 8 won't be coming to current Windows Phone devices.
64 cores (Score:5, Funny)
Now I can buy a Windows Phone to warm my hands on in the winter.
Re:64 cores (Score:5, Funny)
It would get way too hot for that. You could use the excess heat to generate enough electricity to power your laptop. Then you could use your laptop to warm your hands.
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Re:64 cores (Score:5, Interesting)
...up to 64 cores, certainly.
On just one core? Sorry - you get to buy a new phone.
I'm wondering how they're going to avoid the Osbourne Effect on all the existing Nokia gear out there now, especially at a time when Nokia really, really, really needs the sales.
Re:64 cores (Score:5, Insightful)
It's worth noting that the Lumia 900 came out five months ago... My response to people who complain about Apple dropping iOS support for old hardware is that Android has even shorter support periods, but this takes the cake. They didn't even make it half a year before announcing they're dropping support for it...
On the one hand I wonder if Microsoft can afford to snub the few customers they have, what with WP7's tiny marketshare, but that got me thinking, maybe they see the tiny marketshare as the reason they can afford to snub the people: they don't have much to lose if they alienate existing customers if they can capture a respectable marketshare with WP8?
Re:64 cores (Score:4, Interesting)
It's worth noting that the Lumia 900 came out five months ago...
5 months ago? Vodafone Germany will START to sell them "in a couple of weeks". I'm sure it will be really popular here...
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Pretty sure the Lumia 900 was introduced 3 months ago in the US.
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To be fair, Microsoft isn't completely snubbing the Lumia 900. They announced Windows Phone 7.8, bringing the compatible features like the updates to the Start screen to the older hardware.
You may say that this isn't good enough, but Apple did the same thing by not bringing Siri to the iPad 2 which was only a few months old. Nor did they bring it to the iPhone 4, which was around a year old and still under 2 year contract. They technically could have ported it (given that homebrew ports exist).
Anyway, Ap
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They didn't "Drop Support" they'll update it to 7.8. It just won't get features like NFC... which wouldn't do any good since it has no NFC chip in it anyway.
What good does updating the kernel of the Lumia 900 to support 64 cores or 720p screens do for the Lumia? No software update will add those features.
Re:64 cores (Score:4, Funny)
Re:64 cores (Score:5, Insightful)
Or just Flash.
Re:64 cores (Score:4, Insightful)
Still need more cores.
Re:64 cores (Score:5, Informative)
But Flash is single threaded!
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Or just Flash.
Or vagina.
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I had a flash application that made my old nokia 5800 phone vibrate in various intervals. And phone was small enough to fit inside a condom with some stretching.
You won't see something like that on your new hip iphone! :D
Re:64 cores (Score:5, Funny)
Da fuck did I just read?
Why such a low maximum resolution? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would you limit the max res like that?
Why not design it to scale from the very beginning so you don't have to hack it on later?
Why they could not support smp from the beginning had me wondering as well.
Re:Why such a low maximum resolution? (Score:5, Informative)
Why would you limit the max res like that? Why not design it to scale from the very beginning so you don't have to hack it on later?
It's mainly to make things easier for app developers so that they have specific resolutions to target. Much like the iOS ecosystem.
Arguably, this made more sense back when there was just one resolution, less so when there are three...
Re:Why such a low maximum resolution? (Score:5, Insightful)
I still don't really get this. If I was put in charge of such a thing, I would be looking at making everything 2d SVGs or similar. So long as the ratios stay fairly similar it should not be such a huge deal to support a lot of different display sizes.
Re:Why such a low maximum resolution? (Score:5, Informative)
You're probably not a designer - these guys are crazy about things being pixel perfect, which can be hard to achieve with vector graphics. Apple does the same thing here.
For Metro, though, it makes less sense due to its emphasis on simple flat shapes and typography over colorful icons. Yes, personally, I also don't see much point in not using vector graphics for a Metro app and having it scale seamlessly. And the UI framework already has flexible layouts and such, so really there's no excuse to not make it all scale nicely.
Interestingly enough, there is no set of predefined resolutions for Win8 Metro. So there isn't much consistency here. I hope that WP would eventually follow the big brother, of course.
Re:Why such a low maximum resolution? (Score:5, Insightful)
Pixel perfect positioning is brain dead. I regularly laugh at ones who attempt to do such things with webpages. PROTIP: YOUR FONTS MIGHT NOT BE MY FONTS!
WP seems very well designed to not need it. The simple tiles would scale very well to any resolution. I would have thought this forward looking design was for that very purpose.
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You misunderstood. I was not referring to pixel perfect positioning, but rather pixel perfect bitmaps (icons and such).
From a technical standpoint, WP application framework (which is Silverlight, with XAML for markup language) is well designed [microsoft.com] to enable scaling and flexible UI layouts.
Re:Why such a low maximum resolution? (Score:5, Insightful)
Further, pixel perfect positioning is less important with higher DPI. On a low res device, like 240x320, it made a big difference because you could see individual pixels so easily. Nowadays if things are fudged by a pixel or few then it's not visually apparent.
This reminds me of when everything was so lo-res it took a great deal of talent to create a 16x16 icon with a 16 color palette to portray some meaning. Every single pixel mattered, and you couldn't just take a large image and scale it down - you had to manipulate pixels individually, sometimes in non-obvious ways, to get the intended visual result. Now with 128x128 and higher resolution icons you can create them vector and just render them to whatever resolution is needed, or scale a massive image down to size, and it looks perfectly fine.
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Well not quite, sometimes you have to cheat a little because a simple scale blur things so you want to tweak it a little even if it's a little bit distorted compared to the full size image. I haven't tried it on a 4K screen but at least on a FullHD screen that was still true, the original "icon" was huge like 400x400 or whatever but it still took some pixel tweaking to make it look decent at 16x16, 22x22, 32x32 which I think was the sizes in use at the time. That's why most icon formats allow you to specify
Re:Why such a low maximum resolution? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why such a low maximum resolution? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Why such a low maximum resolution? (Score:5, Insightful)
The SVGs only need to be turned into rasters at install time, storage is cheap. The display resolution is not going to change after that.
Try less trolling and more thinking.
Re:Why such a low maximum resolution? (Score:5, Informative)
To make it even faster you can generate the ones for common display sizes at build time. The device can even delete the files that do not match resolutions it supports during install to save local storage space.
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Yeah, because ponting out facts is now apparently "trolling". *rolls eyes*
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1280 x 768 isn't common.
Computer Monitors [wikipedia.org]
Looks pretty popular to me. The lesson... Microsoft typically does its homework when copying.
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Looks pretty popular to me.
Errr... are you sure you're reading that right? By that table, less than 2% of Web users and a negligible percentage of Steam users have 1280x768 monitors. By comparison, 1280x800 commands 13% of the Web and 4% of Steam, and 1366x768 is around 18% across the board.
Re:Why such a low maximum resolution? (Score:5, Informative)
1280 x 768 isn't common.
We're talking phones here, not desktops or netbooks. 1280x768 is pretty common for phones now (Galaxy Nexus etc).
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Why would you want more than 1280x720 on a mobile phone? It's enough to get a very high ppi on a 5" device like the Galaxy Note. As for SMP, the old WP7 was just WinCE with a Silverlight front-end. This one is based on NT.
It looks like a decent OS. By all credible accounts, WP7 was a decent OS if you disregarded everything that wasn't its UI (which is to say it is a good UI on a crap OS), whereas this thing looks like it might be pretty damn good. I'd actually consider a Nokia PureView WP8 phone with a dece
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On the Rezound that resolution is fine, but on a device like the Note 1920x1080 would be great. On my Nexus it is already a bit too low.
If this one is NT based it should be able to support single core CPUs just fine.
Re:Why such a low maximum resolution? (Score:4, Informative)
Well, you're not going to get 1080p resolution on a 5" device the next couple of years, so WP8 will be fine with 1280x720.
oh RLY?
http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/5-inch-lg-display-packs-440ppi-1080p-resolution-20120528/ [geek.com]
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Don't knock it 'til you've tried it, I love my note.
It must be said that I don't actually talk on the phone very often though, it's more of a messaging device and games machine.
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http://www.google.com/search?q=lg+5%22+fullhd&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a [google.com]
lg has already demoed such screen.
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Why would you want more than 1280x720 on a mobile phone?
Yeah, and why should anybody want more than 640K for their desktop either?
In all seriousness, if support for future devices with higher-resolution screens is so ridiculous, then why design Windows Phone 8 to be capable of running on 64 cores? I don't see many 64-core phones floating around right now either.
Re:Why such a low maximum resolution? (Score:5, Insightful)
64 cores is supported because it uses the NT kernel. Once you pass 300 PPI, however, there isn't all that much value in adding more pixels for a screen that's at best used to show photos and film. Perhaps if you use your phone for CAD or medical imaging or something, but you don't and you won't, ever. It's just not something anyone should care about.
Re:Why such a low maximum resolution? (Score:5, Informative)
Why would you limit the max res like that?
to make us buy windows phone 9 supporting HD in 2013/14... which probably won't work on current windows phone 8 devices.
Sorry M$, everything was good until " Windows Phone 8 won't be coming to current Windows Phone devices". A 2009 iPhone [wikipedia.org] runs 2012 iOS 5.1.1, [wikipedia.org] and I have to tell you it's been pretty nice not having to throw away my phone every time a new OS comes out and being able to download the "latest and greatest" apps because everything new works on my old phone. After all, it's a phone first, not a PC, I don't like the idea of having to throw out my phone with all my contacts and info and all the cases and chargers and everything I've spent supporting it. I don't mind the constant upgrades on a PC, that's the nature of the beast, but I don't want to go through the same mess with my phone. Oh, and my 2009 iPhone will support 2013 iOS 6. [theverge.com] Wow, say what you want about Apple, but sometimes they just get it.
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My Calculator tells me that this amounts to > 300 ppi until you get to sizes over 4.9 inch, what more do you want?
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Why does M$ do any of the dumb shit they do?
Because Balmer is fat and sweaty and touches himself at night. That's why.
Haters gotta hate.
Re:Why such a low maximum resolution? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why does M$ do any of the dumb shit they do?
Because Balmer is fat and sweaty and touches himself at night. That's why.
Partly; yes; it's because their managment are idiots. But there's a deeper reason, and it's the reason why IBM took so long to release a decent PC in the first place and ended up having to buy in a system from MS. The are afraid of cannibalizing their main market. They want to "differentiate" from market to market. That means that the x86 tablet gets a stylus whilst the ARM tablets don't get access to tradiitional apps. That means that you will get a "Windows XX - Pro" edition which costs $2000 but is the only way to get some of the "power user" features.
When Apple came out with one phone which did everything for everybody, suddenly you could just add a rubber cover and use your business phone (which needed a calendar) for sport (where you need non-scratch glass). That destroyed a whole market which was used to providing separate phones for each different group of people. Microsoft wants to reinstate that kind of division. I expect the same success as IBM had in blocking the development of personal computers.
Won't work on current phones? (Score:5, Insightful)
QUOTE: "Microsoft tirelessly pushed the idea that its saving grace, the Nokia Lumia 900, was the next big thing in smartphones. However, the fact that the Lumia 900..... won't be able to update will undoubtedly leave some owners of these devices feeling hung out..... Without the software update, potential customers will basically have no reason to snag a Lumia 900, a Titan II, or any other Windows Phone device for that matter, until Windows Phone 8 is available."
This move reminds me of when Apple stopped supporting PPC devices. The article says WinPh8 won't support single-core devices. I wonder why? That would be equivalent to them releasing Windows 7 and saying, "Won't support Pentium 4 or other single-cores."
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I agree that it seems very odd.
Why would you care how many cores it has? Not like having an OS that can use 1-XXX cores is a new thing.
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It worked very well for desktop Windows - Microsoft writes the minimum requirements in order to force hardware manufacturers/OEMs to actually make powerful devices, because vendors want the MS sticker. The result is an upgrade in the product line. This time around, Microsoft is betting on two things that they had with the desktop monopoly that they certainly don't have in the mobile market:
1) Manufacturers will give a damn about supporting WP8
2) Consumers will give a damn about buying WP8
Although if 1 com
Re:Won't work on current phones? (Score:5, Informative)
>>>It worked very well for desktop Windows - Microsoft writes the minimum requirements in order to force hardware manufacturers/OEMs to actually make powerful devices,
And this is what we call "spin". Also known as "false". With every WinOS released (except 7) Microsoft wrote the requirements to make it EASY for manufacturers to qualify with older hardware. Like when they claimed XP could run on 64 meg (but it ran like a snail). Or that Vista could run on 512 meg, but instead made my brother's new P4 PC randomly freeze for 2-3 minutes (while vista thrashed the HD swapfile). Microsoft has always *under* specced their OSes to try and boost sales for older computers that barely run the poorly-coded memory hog.
Vice-versa Apple sells hardware, so they tend to over spec their OS requirements, in order to make older machines obsolete and force an upgrade if you want the new OS (or the latest Safari or latest iTunes). Example: When I tried to upgrade to 10.4 and discovered my 400 MHz Mac was blocked by Apple ("does not meet minimum specs"). I found an online hack to override Apple's block (an illegal act under DMCA) and discovered 10.4 worked just fine on my machine. Apple was just trying to force me and others to buy new machines.
Re:Won't work on current phones? (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft's interests don't include keeping Nokia shares high.
Quite the opposite in fact, if they really are planning to buy them.
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Re:Won't work on current phones? (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference between Apple dropping PPC support and Microsoft dropping Lumia 900 support is that Apple made the announcement 3 years in advance.
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Only native code won't be compatible.
What a lame announcement... (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems they consistantly miss the mark in what consumers want to buy. OK great, 64-cores? who cares? What features does it offer the consumers who are supposed to purchase these to make their day to day lives more productive? Easier? More connected with friends / family?
None of my friends could tell you what WVGA or WXGA is, nor do they probably care.
I live in Boston and see hundreds of of people daily using a variety of phones. I have NEVER seen a Windows phone. not once. Why? Because it makes NO sense to buy one over Android/Iphone.
Microsoft needs to figure out quickly how to incorporate features, functions and uses that NO OTHER company has thought of. Until then, they will remain completely irrelevant and if I were a stock holder in their company, leave me questioning whether all that R&D money is being spent wisely.
it's called hype/fud (Score:3)
They've always been good at FUD, but never at hype. This is as much of a yawn as always. I wish it were real competition to give apple and google something to actually care or even have to compare to, but it's not.
Re:it's called hype/fud (Score:5, Insightful)
There really isn't even any FUD in this lol - They haven't announced anything that's even remotely interesting.
Oh and it's not compatible with any current phones. brilliant.
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None of my friends could tell you what WVGA or WXGA is, nor do they probably care.
I bet all of them can relate to "Retina Display" though...
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As much as I hate that marketing term, Apple nails it when it comes to bringing technology to the masses.
Come to think of it, I don't think many of them now it's a "Retina" screen, just that it's "better, brighter and crisper"
Re:What a lame announcement... (Score:5, Informative)
The conference was for developers, mostly. They said they weren't gonna unveil the end-user featureset that they have until closer to launch, probably to avoid what happened last time: all of the Mango features they unveiled were promptly implemented by Apple.
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Mango features they unveiled were promptly implemented by Apple.
Come-on, that is a bit lame. If you have done any type of development in a large company, you would know that it takes month to do about anything, even something trivial takes month to develop, especially if you need to make sure that the new feature work well on one of the market leading device. That is even worse at Apple where there is a culture of being anally retentive on the little details and they completely ignored for years other great Android features. You will notice that all companies always see
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Microsoft needs to figure out quickly how to incorporate features, functions and uses that NO OTHER company has thought of. Until then, they will remain completely irrelevant
Apple doesn't incorporate features that "NO OTHER company has thought of" - rather, they incorporate features that have been out in the wild for ages, but do them well, and that seems to work for them.
All the hardware points that you go over are important in the grand scheme of things because those were the ones people have been harping on for a long time (and rightly so) with respect to WP7. From user's perspective, yes, user experience is far more important than hardware. On that front, WP8 has two things
Re:What a lame announcement... (Score:4, Insightful)
They already did that. It's called WP7. It's full of features that nobody else has. This is a case of adding all the ones that everyone else had too.
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Somebody at MS has just discovered that Android can run dozens of thousands of cores, and they can't be left behind.
Re:What a lame announcement... (Score:5, Insightful)
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why the iPhone is selling as quick as they can build them and Nokia's Windows phones... aren't. Apple introduce a feature and immediately figure out a way to tell the world how that feature is useful; Microsoft introduce a feature so they can tick a box.
Re:What a lame announcement... (Score:4, Interesting)
Apple introduce a feature and immediately figure out a way to tell the world how that feature is useful
This is something Apple really does deserve a lot of credit for. When the iPhone launched, their commercials were essentially little 30 second tutorials on how to use the fucking thing. Same with the iPhone 4S - their commercials show people using Siri, creating a little tutorial on the commands you can use with Siri and what they do. Their ads are literally little user stories and tutorials on how to use the device and how it enhances your life.
So if you hand someone an iPhone, chances are, they'll know how to use it. Not because the interface is intuitive, but because they've seen a 30 second tutorial on it 50 thousand times.
As opposed to other companies' ads, which basically boast features like "higher megapixels than iPhone" and "you can take pictures while taking a video!" (That's a desired feature? I've never wanted to do that.) And while it's still a user story, the user in the ad I'm thinking of is skydiving, whereas Apple has Zooey Whatshername in her pajamas wandering around her house using her iPhone. One's a bit easier to relate to for most people.
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You know what the odd thing is?
This sort of thing is Sales 101: Appeal to people's emotional side. Adding emotional value to a product sells.
Apple do this by, for instance, showing someone happily video calling a relative. Yeah, they do tell you about the technology on their website but every time they do they immediately explain in plain English why it might interest you - talking about features people actually care about.
Most technology companies are terrible at this.
How to kill a nonexistant marketshare.... (Score:5, Interesting)
FTA:
And FTS plus the other article there:
So windows phone 7 is not selling... solution! Reveal windows phone 8 due in a few months which won't run on any phone bought now.... so better not buy now!
I'm sure this is *really* going to help them sell those phones and gain some marketshare to improve on the nonexistant one they have now... but good news though! The hundreds of thousands of excellent windows phone 7.5 apps will work on windows phone 8 ....
Re:How to kill a nonexistant marketshare.... (Score:4, Funny)
Step 2: Rename the current WinPhones "Osborn Phones".
Nokia's New Platform Burns Brighter, Faster! (Score:3)
Osborne Effect round 2, here we go, kicking Nokia in the nuts when its down. Elop will tell us all to just wait a bit longer for his master plan to work and profits to start happening.
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Microsoft must REALLY hate Nokia. :) This is pretty low even for them... It's rather harsh that the "Beta test is over" for smartphones, only if you don't buy a WP7 phone. (yes, "some" or "most" of the Win 8 features are in store for WP7.8, but let's be realistic, how much of that is hype and how much is it technically correct... not to mention, how long before WP8 is required for phone apps?)
Still, Microsoft really hasn't had a clue since the internet took off (they had leveraged power in existing markets
Native code (Score:5, Informative)
The most interesting point by far is arguably native code support, something that was sorely missing from WP7, and made porting apps from iOS and Android incredibly difficult (since you couldn't just share model code in C/C++ between the platforms). Not to mention the perf issues it created for games.
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^^^ Jesus H Tap-dancing Christ why do I still come to this site....
*puke* (Score:2)
microSD cards (Score:2)
What does "better support for microSD cards" mean? Were they having problems with reliable reads/writes?
Re:microSD cards (Score:5, Informative)
No, they leveraged the "Secure" part of "Secure Digital" cards and had issues with some cards that weren't fully compliant since no one else really implemented the secure half. They need it for DRM, after all, and have probably come up with a workaround for it.
Re:microSD cards (Score:5, Informative)
What does "better support for microSD cards" mean? Were they having problems with reliable reads/writes?
Not quite - they were having problems using them in a way that's sensible:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2450831
In short, once you put an SD card into a WP7 phone you can't take it out (or the phone won't boot) and you can't read it on any other devices. Each card model also needed to be "certified" before use.
64 cores... (Score:5, Funny)
64 cores should be enough for anyone!
Phone owners screwed then? (Score:3)
Is it going to be like the days of Windows Mobile? the only way to get updates is to buy a new phone?
This is where Apple is winning, all phones get OS updates for several years. Google falls down on this as they let phone makers screw the users.
Microsoft had better offer a instant free upgrade to WP8 for all owners of the Nokia WP7 phones, or they might as well pack it in. Their "Screw the user, unless they have a credit card" attitude back with the Windows Mobile phones are what drove me to Apple in the first place.
Re:Phone owners screwed then? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is where Apple is winning, all phones get OS updates for several years.
Except while they call it iOS 6 or iOS 5 on all devices, each device has only access to a subset of features. Microsoft is doing the same thing but calling one Windows Phone 7.8 and the other Windows Phone 8.
OS Upgrading (Score:3)
Can someone explain to me why Microsoft isn't capitalizing on the phone market in the same way they have the PC market? Why design a phone operating system that can only be run on a small niche of devices, and can't even upgrade phones that came with WP7? Why not instead go after the entire market and design an OS that can be installed on any mobile phone of adequate specifications.
While there may be some serious difficulties to overcome in the short term, this to me seems like a very possible end-state for the industry. Just look at what happened in the (non-Apple) PC market: competing hardware+OS standards evolved into a common hardware standard and a separate OS market that Microsoft dominated.
Disclaimer: this is not necessarily an end-state that I would like to see happen, just some ponderings that I've had.
Re:OS Upgrading (Score:4, Interesting)
Can someone explain to me why Microsoft isn't capitalizing on the phone market in the same way they have the PC market?
There are ten reasons:
1) Microsoft failed to leverage its PC monopoly onto mobile devices by fair means or foul.
2) Microsoft held onto its desktop centric UI model until it was too late (then overreacted in the other direction, threatening its desktop business)
3) Nobody trusts Microsoft.
4) Carriers do not trust Microsoft.
5) Developers do not trust Microsoft.
6) Partners do not trust Microsoft.
7) Manufacturers do not trust Microsoft.
8) The DoJ does not trust Microsoft.
9) Nobody trusts Microsoft.
10) The engineering culture at Microsoft is toxic and minimally productive.
Clippy and the 911 Call (Score:3)
Popular? (Score:5, Funny)
Wait, what?
Popular? (Score:3)
Microsoft announced the successor to its popular Windows Phone 7 platform.
Perhaps I'm out of touch, and this isn't meant to be snarky, but that's an interesting definition of "popular". Honestly I've never seen a Windows 7 phone.
Biggest Feature (Score:4, Interesting)
Is probably just the switch to the NT kernel from a stripped (legacy removed) CE kernel. I hope the speed and stability carries through! It's so weird saying that about a Microsoft product but as anybody who has actually used WP7 knows, it's generally rock solid.
Switching to the NT kernel is what has enabled the multicore support and it probably also enables the use of any future x86 hardware platforms too. Obviously moving to NT also helps Microsoft unify their infrastructure because it means they only have 1 kernel to worry about (and mostly just the Metro framework).
Normally I'd be the first one to bash Microsoft about the whole WP8 not being on older devices thing, but since WP8 runs a completely different kernel it'd be foolish to expect them to support older devices which probably don't even have device drivers written for the NT kernel.
Talk to me when I can get apps for it (Score:3)
Re:What's the advantage of so many OSs for Phones? (Score:5, Insightful)
Diversity, you know. Choice. Something that's been missing from the market since Microsoft killed off virtually all of their competitors and established their monopoly.
Well, that's what HTML5 is for, supposedly. Doesn't mean you're going to get any performance out of it though, which limits its use case. Theoretically that's the problem Java was supposed to solve, but it doesn't really seem to have panned out.
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Except most consumers hated all the incompatible choices. The average computer user was quite happy to see the useless divergent choices killed off.
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Really? You know this for a fact?
The average computer user never had the option of using the other choices. Microsoft made sure they were dead and gone from the desktop before Windows ME hit.
Re:What's the advantage of so many OSs for Phones? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm wondering what the advantage of so many different - and incompatible - OSs on Phones is. iOS, Android, Blackberry, now Windows Phone, et cetera. Each with different APP stores, different SDKs and Apps... What's the point of it all? What does it matter where a Smart Phone with hardware specs XX runs Android, iOS or Windows Phone. ---------- The whole things seems like a waste of software developers' finite resources to me...
Hey! I think you're right, and you've just given me a great idea.
As a society, we can have some sort of planning organization that decides what the specs will be, then to avoid duplication of effort in manufacturing, the planning board can arrange for the production too. With advanced scientific, statistical analysis, it shouldn't be any problem to figure out exactly how many devices need to be produced, so that we don't waste raw materials by making too many.
In fact, it seems to me like we could take this sort of centralized planning approach with pretty much any industrial product. It's really just a matter of applying scientific principles to industry for the good of society. It would eliminate waste and duplication of effort and make sure that all necessary industrial products are designed and manufactured with optimal efficiency.
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You knew that going in though. Getting a skinned and carrier branded android device means you will lag behind or have to run 3rd party roms.
WinPhone will not have 3rd party roms to let you do that.
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It will run 7.8, an update that has most (if not all) of the non-hardware-specific features. The summary is incorrect.
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It will run 7.8, an update that has most (if not all) of the non-hardware-specific features. The summary is incorrect.
But the phones with 7.8 will not run windows phone 8 apps and that's what really matters. Please be intellectually honest when fanboying in the future.
Re:iPhone 3GS will support iOS 6 (Score:4, Informative)
The difference between this and the WP8 situation is mostly marketing. WP7 devices will get WP7.8, which includes many WP8 features, but not some that MS considers dependent on the hardware specs that differ betwen WP8 and WP7 (either because the older hardware doesn't support the feature at all or because using it on the older hardware would produce an unacceptable -- in MS's eyes -- user experience.)
While older iPhones nominally get the current iOS versions, the versions they get are lacking features that Apple feels are dependent on the newer device hardware (either because the older hardware doesn't support the feature at all or because using it on the older hardware would produce an unacceptable -- in Apple's eyes -- user experience.)
iOS 5 on the iPhone 3GS doesn't support the same features as iOS 5 on the iPhone 4, which doesn't support the same features as iOS 5 on the iPhone 4S. With iOS 6, that'll all still be true (and is increasingly true as more iOS devices are supported by the same nominal OS version.)
Re: (Score:3)
iOS does indeed use a fully fledged OSX kernel, just like Android uses a fully fledged Linux kernel.
CLI based apps can run just fine with little more than a recompile, anything gui based obviously needs code changes not because the mobiles are not "fully fledged" but because a desktop ui would be really unusable on a mobile phone... That said, there is an implementation of X11 for android and even for iOS, not that you'd want to use it for anything.
Apple don't provide the same proprietary gui libs for phone
Re: (Score:3)
I don't know if you're using "core" to mean "kernel" or "basic OS layout", but either way you'd be wrong. iOS is derived from OSX and shares the Darwin/XNU kernel, BSD subsystem and even the BSD userspace stuff with OSX. Most of the frameworks (Cocoa, etc) are also essentially the same or very similar.
Well he could be mostly right, actually.
Yes, the kernel and BSD userland are very, very similar, but once you move up the stack towards Cocoa there are actually quite a lot of differences. It's not as simple as s/NS/UI/ on the class names, case in point: JWZ's efforts to port Dali Clock [jwz.org].
Re:I'm excited (Score:4, Funny)
yay i love non upgradeable phones from dying companies too! im sooo excited. i hope to get paid this week from the troll fund.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
It's upgradeable to Windows Phone 7.8, AC. Plus, a Windows Phone on Virgin Mobile would be a lot better than the cheap, often laggy Android devices they have.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Plus, a Windows Phone on Virgin Mobile would be a lot better than the cheap, often laggy Android devices they have.
I've read several of your comments and finally the bias comes out. I have the HTC Evo 4G on Virgin Mobile and it is not even remotely laggy. As far as WP7.8, it's fucking bullshit as WP8 apps will not be backward compatible.
Re:I'm excited (Score:4, Insightful)
I love my phone on Virgin Mobile. It isn't the latest, greatest hardware, but its fantastic for the price. The problem with the Android phones I have had is that they are terrible stock, but can be great phones once rooted and have a decent mod on them.
Re:Summary is a lie. (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is fine, except for the marketing.
Apple, on the other hand, says "Oh of course the 3GS runs iOS 6. Some features may not work though...". The version number is meaningless...
What this does is to cannibalize WP7 sales in favour of a not-yet-even-remotely-released WP8!