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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

Why can't the world of Smart Phones agree on one compatibility standard, and then everything runs fine on every device?

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.

Microsoft's interests don't include keeping Nokia shares high.

Quite the opposite in fact, if they really are planning to buy them.

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.

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.

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.

Or just Flash.

My Calculator tells me that this amounts to > 300 ppi until you get to sizes over 4.9 inch, what more do you want?

Because it makes NO sense to buy one over iPhone.
 
Fixed that for you. Maybe you'll understand when you little kids can get around to buying a real phone.

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!

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.

PROTIP: YOUR FONTS MIGHT NOT BE MY FONTS!

This would be more laughable if CSS wasn't a complete flaming pile of shit when it comes to sizing elements with respect to the size of the text they contain. Pixel perfect or not.

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.

Still need more cores.

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.

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.

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.

The difference between Apple dropping PPC support and Microsoft dropping Lumia 900 support is that Apple made the announcement 3 years in advance.

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?

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.

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.

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.