Microsoft CMO Confirms Development of 'Spiritual Equivalent' of Surface Phone (hothardware.com) 165
MojoKid writes: We all know what Microsoft wants to do with Windows 10. It's supposedly the last monolithic release of Windows and the ultimate plan is to unite hardware from different device categories under a single, universal ecosystem. That includes smartphones, which is an area where Microsoft has historically struggled hard to compete. The release of a premium "Surface Phone" of some sort, however, could prove to be a game changer. Microsoft is aggressively pushing Windows 10 upgrades, and makes no bones about it, all in an effort to get developers on board to build universal Windows 10 cross-platform apps and spur mobile development. In that respect, Microsoft needs to finally make an impact in the handset space and Windows 10 Mobile is the company's one shot to do just that. And it appears that Microsoft is working on what could be essentially a true Surface Phone, or at least something very similar. In a recent interview, Mary Jo Foley pushed Microsoft's Chief Marketing Officer Chris Capossela on the prospect of a Surface Phone and he confirmed the company is working on a "breakthrough" phone that is the "spiritual equivalent" of their very successful line of Surface branded products. Capossela has been with Microsoft for over two decades. He used to write speeches for Bill Gates and is intimately familiar with Microsoft's many products and strategies.
ok...Apple/Jobs is a religion..i get that (Score:2)
Re:ok...Apple/Jobs is a religion..i get that (Score:5, Funny)
"You have found A Spiritual Equivalent of a Surface Phone."
# wield phone
"You are now wielding A Spiritual Equivalent of a Surface Phone."
# turn on phone
"Nothing happens. The battery appears to be dead."
# drop phone
"You can't. The Spiritual Equivalent of a Surface Phone appears to be cursed."
Cut! Cut! Cut! (Score:2)
You beat your forehead with it until bloody.
This is a religious ritual, remember?
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You don't drop the phone like a mic.
You beat your forehead with it until bloody.
This is a religious ritual, remember?
In that case, shouldn't I beat someone else with it until bloody? Maybe I could beat their first born child to death with it, that would be appropriately biblical.
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Re:ok...Apple/Jobs is a religion..i get that (Score:5, Funny)
The LCD is pitch black. Your data cap is likely to be eaten by a grue.
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Three things are certain:
Death, taxes and dataloss!
Guess what happened?
(Not by me and not sure if it is correct)
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That was old school.
To bad +funny mods don't yield Karma.
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That has to be added to nethack as an artifact "The Spiritual Equivalent of a Surface Phone" along with a new character class - the Tech Guru.
Oh noes (Score:5, Insightful)
And I'm sure it'll be another stunning success, just like the last 5 failed phones they tried to force into the market.
Microsoft's struggles (Score:2)
How would that really be different from their Lumias today?
Microsoft has 2 problem - the first being that it's failed to get mindshare of app devs who otherwise are happy to support both iOS and Android. Almost every app you see out there supports those 2 OSs, but not Windows Phone/Mobile. Their other issue is that they've failed to get clout w/ the carriers so that they rather than the carriers can push phone updates, like Apple does and like Google is starting to do beginning w/ Lollipop. I'm not sur
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One more thing - they need to discontinue all their phones that have just 8GB of storage, and start at 16GB. 8GB fills up too fast.
If they had half a brain they'd start at 32GB or even 64GB. That might help set them apart at least a little bit.
Re:Oh noes (Score:4, Insightful)
They don't. Their phone division has always been a massive financial liability. Its just that Microsoft is literally obsessed with the thought of getting into phones.
Any other company acting like their phone division but without their massive safety net would have gone bust 5 times over by now.
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Microsoft knows that its long term future depends on success in mobile, and no, a tablet that is a replacement for laptops is not "mobile".
Re:Oh noes (Score:4, Insightful)
wouldn't a company that knew its ass from a hole in the wall have figured out mobile was important say 15 years ago? WTF?
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It did. Microsoft debuted Windows Mobile (then called Pocked PC) in 2000. Microsoft was one of the most successful mobile "smart device" companies before 2007.
Their problems, common to many of their consumer offerings at the time, were built upon complacency and lack of innovation that I believe is the ultimate legacy of Ballmer. He loved his monopolies, and sat on them well past the point of staleness. Good thing for consumers that other companies decided enough was enough and came out with substantial
Re:Oh noes (Score:5, Interesting)
It wasn't that long ago when Windows Mobile was the dominant OS in the smartphone arena. To boot, MS and hardware makers did a pretty good job. The HTC Wizard comes to mind, with a week's battery life. It might be laughable by our standards now, since it only puttered at EDGE speeds, and didn't have the latest rev of BlueTooth, not to mention the use of MiniSD cards... but for the time, it was a very nice phone.
Microsoft dropped the ball when the iPhone came out. The biggest problem is that Windows Mobile was designed around a stylus, while iOS and Android were designed for finger gestures. The shift in the UI expectations left MS in the dust, just because all their device apps were not "finger friendly". MS was encumbered with an existing solution, and having to either figure out how to retrofit the latest UI style, or to just toss everything out and start anew.
MS did a good job with starting anew, and they have a competitive device.
As for a spiritual successor for the Surface... this gets me wondering... are they going to try for an Intel x86 type of computer running W10 in a smartphone form factor? If they could pull this off running a real x86 version of Windows 10 and all Windows applications, it would be a game-changer.
Of course, other companies tried this, such as Motorola with the Atrix and Atrix 2... but if a phone could be tossed in a stand or have a USB-C cable connected, and it take the role of a desktop machine with an x86 version of W10, Microsoft would be breaking new ground. It would mean that one wouldn't need to have anything other than a keyboard, monitor, and USB-C hub in order to have a functioning desktop.
There is one missing piece of the puzzle, and that is getting a phone to handle heavy GPU tasks. This is easy. Since MS has their own graphics standard, it would be trivial for them to make something like a LAN version of OnLive, and have smartphones and tablets send the DirectX commands over the network to a render box, and the render box send back streaming video. Since 4k res of streaming video is about 10Mbps, a wireless LAN can easily handle this. If one uses a newer graphics protocol like ZPEG which gets even better compression for the same quality, it would be even less.
If Microsoft pulls this off, where the only GPU needed for a device would be for the basic UI... they would have a major breakthrough market that would be in high demand.
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As for a spiritual successor for the Surface... this gets me wondering... are they going to try for an Intel x86 type of computer running W10 in a smartphone form factor? If they could pull this off running a real x86 version of Windows 10 and all Windows applications, it would be a game-changer.
There is some demand for it, as evidenced on several tech forums, blogs, etc. IF they could get it into a form-factor similar to today's smartphones, without extra heat and with low energy consumption (at least when not plugged in)... then I would be very interested. I'm personally OK with it not being as powerful as a gaming rig; I would have a separate machine for that.
But it would still have to be a great smartphone, and I wouldn't be willing to give up more than about 50% extra thickness over common m
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It wasn't that long ago when Windows Mobile was the dominant OS in the smartphone arena. To boot, MS and hardware makers did a pretty good job.
You are remembering a past that did not exist. WM phones' hardware was shit. I mean, you're completely glossing over the period where WM devices didn't even have nonvolatile storage, aside from space for the OS! Palm never went through that. Nor did the other "smart" phones of the day. That was unique to WinCE of the day. "Sure, we can do it without flash!" No, no you can't, Microsoft. Not when an OS crash can destroy all your files. What a festering piece of shit.
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You are remembering a past that did not exist. WM phones' hardware was shit. I mean, you're completely glossing over the period where WM devices didn't even have nonvolatile storage, aside from space for the OS! Palm never went through that. Nor did the other "smart" phones of the day. That was unique to WinCE of the day. "Sure, we can do it without flash!" No, no you can't, Microsoft. Not when an OS crash can destroy all your files. What a festering piece of shit.
True, but they did bury Palm. A friend of mine invested some money & developed programs for CE & did OK for a while. All the time he was bitching about how the MS dev forums were begging for more innovation with the platform. All the ideas & suggestions were ignored, CE was left to rot due to complacency.
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Thats always been their whole strategy: let other innovate and them move in when the marketplace is already mature. Wierdley they always do that with a sub-standard copy of whats already been done better by the innovator, and unfortunately somehow stay in business.
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IMO they'll keep failing at it too. Their current strategy (same applications run on all hardware) is riding on the idea that people will create desktop universal apps.
It's just not going to happen because, first of all, hardly anybody writes desktop applications anymore. If somebody wants to create an app for desktop users these days, it's almost always a web app that you interact with in your web browser.
Second of all, the few desktop apps that people write can't even be done in a universal app due to API
Re: Oh noes (Score:4, Insightful)
MS will continue to fail at mobile, but not because of their strategy. They've been failing at mobile since before the iPhone.
Their mobile failures are just examples of a broader cultural deficiency in Redmond: they don't know how to connect with consumers, and they're too stubborn and full of hubris to realize that. The XBox division succeeded mostly because it was left alone by the top brass (who likely didn't understand a damn thing about it). When MS learns to put aside their preconceptions about buying habits and that consumers don't shop the same way CTO's do, they might have a chance in any consumer market, including mobile.
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And they damned near hobbled the Xbox One by:
1) Losing their initial focus on their core audience and core use, which is gaming.
2) Their ham-handed, arrogant approach to once-per-day mandatory connected DRM.
3) Their insistence that Kinnect be an integral part of the console before belatedly realizing that it kind of sucked for most types of games.
It was only when the market slapped them down that they backpedaled. Windows 8 was also a similar display of incredible hubris / arrogance, ignoring the very lou
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The XBox division succeeded mostly because it was left alone by the top brass (who likely didn't understand a damn thing about it).
The XBox division "succeeded" by pouring money into that hole until it was full. The original Xbox never made a profit, for example, and it was years into the 360 before it was profitable.
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XBox succeeded because it was able to leverage a lot of what developers were already doing for PC games to their console. That's where Microsoft has failed miserably in mobile. By supporting only the new metro API's for mobile, they had no real way to leverage their desktop monopoly. The apps simply didn't materialize because they were late to market (as usual), but this time they didn't have the monopoly to grant them success from a position of lateness. Since they couldn't 'force' developers to code f
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Microsoft couldn't have succeeded in leveraging their desktop monopoly on to mobile for 2 reasons. First was their choice of CPU - having chosen ARM for the Lumias (okay, it was Nokia who did it), it wasn't gonna run their usual Wintel apps. But even beyond that, the form factor of Wintel apps was never meant for phones, and nothing illustrates that better than the failures of Windows CE.
The apps in the app store are remarkably bad - they tend to crash randomly. Microsoft can't even make a stable Mail
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If somebody wants to create an app for desktop users these days, it's almost always a web app that you interact with in your web browser. ...
You mean on Windows ? Well, that does not really make sense to me.
It is more the way mobile Apps work in our days
For Macs an Linux plenty of Desktop Applications get written ... I for my part don't use any SaaS, web based solutions anyway. Does not make sense in Europe (at least not right now) where you are crossing a boarder three times a day (or more often) while tr
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You mean on Windows ? Well, that does not really make sense to me. ...
It is more the way mobile Apps work in our days
Well look at for example, Adobe, who is making a lot of their tools (including photoshop) run in web browsers. Hell, Microsoft is doing the same thing with Office 365.
For Macs an Linux plenty of Desktop Applications get written
I'm sure they do for things that for some technical reason can't be done in a browser, which is especially true with Linux devs who are always pushing the envelope, but it's not like it used to be where *everything* that came out was a platform native app. Hell, even the pirates write webapps, look at sabnzbd, sickrage, couchpotato, rutorrent,
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The problem is that Microsoft has so much money, and has a cash cow making so much money, that they can keep on throwing lots of money on the project until they finally have what they want: a dominant position in smart phones and tablets.
They are really forcing all those tablets/laptop hybrids and phones to their partners, just like they a forcing their partners to adopt cloud versions of the office stack. I know plenty of people working in some MS oriented shop who claim they don't need anything in a phone
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SharePoint is almost an industry unto itself. Probably because it's not useful out of the box without a bunch of coding to make it resemble some kind of workflow or CRM application. I almost never see it deployed without in house talent of some kind because it's one of those things that's never quite done and always needs tweaking.
MS on Intel is an ecosystem and there a reasonably intelligent people at all levels who really don't know anything else, mostly because they don't need to. There's enough cust
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their mobile operating system used to make money and had 90%+ marketshare in certain segments. ..then they decided it was a good idea to throw all that away, take all the general computing device/hackability features away and market _that_ as a smartphone OS.
and that's how they fucked up the profitable portions of windows ce.
all they needed was a decent user interface, so they copied zunes shitty user interface, called it "new from the ground up", shipped the phone with zune software to manage it(no support
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You can't blame them. Look at what a smartphone can do now. HD screen resolutions with a simple HDMI plug in cable. Better texture-mapping than an Ultra-64 or PS2 . OK, not too impressive now, but. Back 20 years, you'd have to fork out $150,000 just to get an SGI workstation that could do texture-mapping. Now that comes for less than $500 using OpenGL ES. Combine that with GPS location, MEMS accelerometers, barometers, temperature sensors, magnetic sensors, motion sensors, allows augmented reality with Ocul
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You must be one hardcore MS fanboi, because I've (had to) use both and its very clear that Lumia totally sucks compared to Android.
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It could be worse. They might have announced a wrist watch.
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I agree that this phone is not for you if you are just thinking personal use. But as a work phone, it has many things going for it:
1. All the basic apps one would need in a phone. Typing is a breeze on a Lumia - Apple and Android have only recently caught up in that department. Other apps that Microsoft comes w/ are really handy - particularly OneNote. I had a setup where I had OneNote, Office, Maps (at that time, there was both HERE and Bing Maps), and so on. Granted that these are all there on And
MS CEO said the same thing about Win10 in 2014 (Score:2)
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"Windows 10" is the "OS X" of Redmond. OS X was released in 2001, still has the same name, but has evolved quite a bit. It also means "Ten" in Latin.
Windows 10 is going to incrementally alienate every single desktop user, which is the business user, which is where Microsoft makes most of its money. Headless virtual machines on keyboardless commodity hardware are not going to be administered by tablet, and the stupid tablet interface is really just going to piss people off.
Well, that sounds terrible. May
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the stupid tablet interface is really just going to piss people off.
Then I guess it's a good thing they got rid of their tablet-only interface before Windows 10.
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Wait a minute...I heard Windows Phone 6 was going to be the game changer. Then WP7...now it's 10? Perhaps they will succeed with Windows Phone 11?
But I get why they say it will be the spiritual equivalent of surface...the surface machines don't get the bad reviews that the Windows Phones do...so they are hoping the improved marketing speak will work this time.
Microsoft need to just get it (Score:2, Insightful)
No one WANTS a Microsoft-branded anything.
The only reason anyone still uses Microsoft products is because:
1) it came preinstalled on your new computer.
2) Most workplace IT managers only know Windows so automatically force it onto everyone's work computers.
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If by "no one" and "anyone" you mean "all the other kids in my parents basement", then yes, you are probably right. If none of them are gamers.
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Their one successful piece of hardware, the Xbox, seems to go up and down. The XBox success is that it is not windows, and MS does not do a lot to use Xbox to push MS Windows. From a consumer point of view, the MS ecos
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I'm actually getting a Surface. (A used Surface Pro 2, but still specifically a Surface - I found a use case where Windows compatibility in a super-portable machine with a touchscreen is actually quite useful).
Microsoft is blatantly trying to be Apple, but they actually seem to be doing a better job of it than the modern Apple is. All their devices are reportedly solidly-built and well-specced (either high-end overall, or good specs for the price... yes, their high-end stuff is expensive, but at least it's
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It's not the detachable per se that's the problem - it's the limited ability to customize and upgrade which I would want in a full-size laptop, and that is at odds with the need for compactness that a tablet needs. Oh, and also the simple physical size - a productivity laptop ought to be in the 15"-17" range, not 13", if only for the keyboard.
The Surface Book seems like a good convertible ultrabook. The sacrifices they made to make it good at certain things made it less suitable for other things. Nothing wr
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Laptops are tough to upgrade anyway. If upgradability was a criteria, I'd think one would go for desktops. As for the keyboard, I prefer the ones that still have the numeric keypad section on the right, as opposed to the compact ones where you can only type the numbers from row 2.
Anyway, my point was that if Microsoft started making laptops like what you're describing, they'd start to cannibalize their Surface books. They needn't make EVERYTHING
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I'm still using a first generation Intellimouse. Love the layout.
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It's the best platform for Fallout 4.
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Anecdotes still don't count for much. Microsoft could barely be described as a bit player in hardware outside the Xbox division (which I suspect still hasn't paid back the vast investment Redmond has put into it).
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Microsoft could barely be described as a bit player in hardware outside the Xbox division (which I suspect still hasn't paid back the vast investment Redmond has put into it).
It's so easy to google you wrong, why do you not take a minute to check before making this kind of empty comment
Microsoft is aggressively pushing Windows 10 upgra (Score:3)
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But nevertheless Slashdot feels the need to tout it as the Coming Great Thing.
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Is that why Windows Mobile 10, or whatever it is now called, got pushed back until 2016?
Pushed back? I'm using it on my phone right now.
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Is that why Windows Mobile 10, or whatever it is now called, got pushed back until 2016? I am sure people will be busting down doors to buy this new phone, maybe they'll break 5% market share in Beruit!
Pushed back? One can already get a Lumia 950/XL, which comes w/ Windows 10 Mobile. Only thing they haven't yet done is upgrade all their other phones to 10. They need to take back the OS upgrade capabilities from the carriers
This just in: (Score:3)
Chief marketing officer thinks his next product is good, and spiritually equivalent to things people like. This is credible because he's spent decades writing speeches for Microsoft saying similar things.
What's the difference from a Lumia? (Score:2)
I read the article, and I'm still not clear on how a "Surface Phone" would be different from a Lumia with Windows 10. I'm sure someone here can explain to me, seeing as I'm apparently not familiar enough with the Microsoft eco-system.
Thanks!
Re:What's the difference from a Lumia? (Score:5, Insightful)
Lumia represents the last of the Nokia/Elop era, whereas a "Surface Phone" is done in-house?
x86 compatibility, perhaps. If they cram an Atom into a phone then when docked you've got a desktop PC in your pocket, with the full win32 back catalogue.
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x86 compatibility, perhaps. If they cram an Atom into a phone then when docked you've got a desktop PC in your pocket, with the full win32 back catalogue.
That is what I'm hoping for, they saw how Surface tablets/convertibles with ARM processors and WinRT tanked. The one reason to buy Microsoft products is compatibility with the vast, vast amounts of x86 software. If this is yet another ARM phone, just call it a Lumia. It's not a terrible brand and it's an established as a non-x86 platform. They've finally unfucked their brands, if they do it again by launching a new non-x86 product under the Surface name their marketing department should be fired. Out of a c
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I fully agree w/ this. On the hardware side of things, they made things pretty clean. Like one of their ARM based tablets running RT 8.1 is called a Lumia, not a surface. Using the Surface name for any of their ARMs was a bad idea. Lumia is good, if not great, hardware, and all one needs is the key apps that they commonly use.
I'm not sure whether having an x86 phone would make things better for them in the software department. Like some apps, such as Yelp! and Fandango, are available on Windows Phone
"Spiritual" (Score:2)
It's spiritual because you need a lot of faith to use it.
Surface (Score:2, Insightful)
There seems to be this narrative that the Surface is successful in the market. It isn't. The only Surface I have seen in the wild is on the NFL sidelines, and Microsoft is paying the NFL for that. There is no way Surfaces are selling widely.
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Tell me about it. These iPads are a flop too. I just got off a train and I didn't see a single iPad. Not one. I saw 2 Surfaces though.
You may not think Surfaces are selling wildly, and in your tiny little world they probably aren't. In the mean time my local government has bought many thousands of them, my partner's school is switching to them for all staff and students (iPads were a flop for real this time not just me being stupid as in the first line) and the more I talk to people the more they are either
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game changer (Score:5, Interesting)
Hypothesis: if you have to tell people your product is a "game changer," then it probably isn't.
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Not sure if Steve Jobs used the exact term "gamechanger" in that original iPhone keynote, but he definitely did effectively describe it as such.
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Hell, I would do it myself if anyone would fund me.
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However, I live in hope of scsi-over-ip being implemented by a third party on Android.
Hell, I would do it myself if anyone would fund me.
That stuff is in the normal Linux kernel, how hard can it be to put it back in?
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If they wanted to be really slick, just make the phone pluggable like a PCMCIA card into the dock itself so no one even knows it's a dock.
Every time someone decides to dock a phone into a larger device, it is stupid. The phone needs to be the whole device aside from your input devices. If you need more than that, you're going to need more ports than you can reasonably put on a phone. But needing a proprietary dock is a non-starter. Uptake is never good on those.
The problem is the screen, which always goes to waste. At best it's used as a gimmick. Mostly it's just turned away from the user and not available at all.
I don't want windows 10 or whatever is next (Score:3)
I'm tired of coming back to my desktop PC and finding Microsoft has decided to reboot it without asking me, thus losing work. I'm tired of constantly being nagged to upgrade to windows 10. I don't want all information shared with Microsoft. I really wish I could but windows 7 and down grade. I only run Windows because some dev tools for electronic design and some games only run there and I can't get PCIe slots without buying an insanely expensive MAC. I think I'm pretty much end of the line with Microsoft. Disclaimer: I run MacOS X and FreeBSD. I'm not unaware of my options but there are some things for which I want a windows PC or I want Windows to die so I don't need a windows machine but just a PC.
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I hear you, and I have the same complaints/concerns.
My guess is that I'll be running Linux Mint or possibly Ubuntu once they force the Win10 upgrade down my throat.
Barring that, I'll run Win 7....until my PC dies or drivers are no longer available for whatever new gadget I buy...and I'm thinking tat will happen within a year or so, maybe sooner.
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I'd pay good money to have a Windows 7 with the internals of 10 but I guess Microsoft thinks we're too few to be worth it.
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I'd pay good money to have a Windows 7 with the internals of 10 but I guess Microsoft thinks we're too few to be worth it.
Same here, but the whole "telemetry on every mouse-click and keystroke" thing is a little off-putting to me.
I hate technology (Score:3)
Used to be excited about "new" technology because it sometimes had a purpose and offered users value and capabilities. Today all anyone can do is fuck with people. Everyone wants to be a spyware or malware vendor and they don't want to do anything useful in return for a paycheck. Much of the consumer crap being churned out today is not only worthless but hostile and even dangerous.
Why would I want a Windows phone when I'm required to have a MS account, can't use my devices GPS without uploading my location to Microsoft, can't have a local phone book without giving all of my contacts to Microsoft, can't install software not approved by Microsoft, can't use wifi without participating in MS crowd sourced skyhook spying. I'm fed up with the childish games and people constantly justifying their actions by citing who else is doing it too.
The opportunity cost of so much wasted potential is beyond sad.
I still don't understand how anyone (Score:2)
I still don't understand how anyone can possibly think that every device from cellphones to servers can possibly be used to their own full potential with the same damn user interface.
Either servers are going to be dumbed down or cellphones are going to be missing features, there simply is no way around that. And neither one is acceptable.
Any rational being would recognize that cellphones and servers have such different roles that differing interfaces on them would only help people to realize that there is m
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I still don't understand how anyone can possibly think that every device from cellphones to servers can possibly be used to their own full potential with the same damn user interface.
Either servers are going to be dumbed down or cellphones are going to be missing features, there simply is no way around that. And neither one is acceptable.
You are talking bollocks here. My Android tablet has got a Terminal application, and therefore it has the same interface that I use to administer Linux. Why can't a Windows tablet have the same interface used to administer a server? You can run Powershell on non-server Windows. They both have the same GUI classes. You're full of it.
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I've gone back and forth between Apple and Windows platforms over the years, but Windows 7 is the end of the Microsoft road for me. In addition to the invasive data mining of Windows 10, the endless nagging to upgrade is beyond the pale.
Yeah disappointing isn't it?unfortunately for pc desktops its the only real option. Guess we both keep running Windows 7 until forced to upgrade by Microsoft abandoning support in 2020
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I loaded Linux Mint and have found it quite usable.
I agree that Win7 is my last version of a Microsoft OS unless they back off on their prying in to my personal computer. I doubt they will.
People in the Yoo Ess are quite complacent regarding data privacy.
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MS problem is that they have spent the last 20 years pulling the rug from under their phone users' feet, and expect them not to remember.
Before you get off my lawn, let me remind you:
In the beginning there was a mainframe with no software. Since no one had used on
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In practice, with "new" UI paradigma's, that will probably be used which user configurable options will be skipped this time.
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I would disagree with you wholeheartedly... I would be potentially very interested in a "surface" phone, and I think a lot of other people would be too... depending on how it eventually worked, of course. It could potentially be a gamechanger or it could be another flop, but Microsoft is at least going outside the box to try and do something different. There is a decent demand for surface tablets. I don't see why there wouldn't be similar demand for a surface phone if it is done correctly.
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But now my phone (just 2 years old!) is too "out of date" to receive the newest version of Android. I knew I should have gone with a Nexus, but it's still bullshit.
If you didn't buy a phone from a vendor with a substantial fan base, you have only yourself to blame. If you had bought something popular, there would be multiple alternate ROMs available at XDA-Developers. Instead, you bought some cheap piece of shit, or alternately some gewgaw so expensive that nobody can afford it, and now there's no ROMs for it.
That, or there are, and you're complaining about a problem that the community has addressed for you...
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What are the main things you use your phone for? Do you use a lot of apps, be it RetailMeNot or Lyft or Vonage or other such apps, or do you just use it for basic work related stuff? Depending on that would be your answer. If you don't use many apps nor go beyond free games, the Lumia is great. If you do use a lot of apps, go w/ a Nexus. Right now, Marshmallow is only available on that, and it gives you the option of getting something w/ low internal storage, but using a high density SD card as INTERN
"Spiritual" and "Microsoft" don't belong together. (Score:2)
From the summary: "Capossela has been with Microsoft for over two decades. He used to write speeches for Bill Gates..." That indicates: 1) Bill Gates wasn't able to write his own speeches. 2) What Bill Gates said in a speech was not what he actually thought.
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From the summary: "Capossela has been with Microsoft for over two decades. He used to write speeches for Bill Gates..." That indicates: 1) Bill Gates wasn't able to write his own speeches. 2) What Bill Gates said in a speech was not what he actually thought.
#1 seems to be a given, but I don't know about #2.
It may just be that Capossela was able to craft a better speech or was a better writer, but it doesn't necessarily follow that he wasn't expressing what Gates wanted expressed. It's likely Gates gave him direction on what he wanted said and that they worked together on the final text. That's often the way it's done.
Book: "The Road Ahead" gave no useful information. (Score:2)
"... the book he has written with Nathan Myhrvold, a vice president at Microsoft, and Peter Rinearson, a freelance journalist, is bland and tepid."
"The Road Ahead" is in fact little more than a positioning document, sold in book form with accompanying CD-ROM and designed mainly to advance the interests of the Microsoft Corporation.
It's worse than I'm saying. (Score:2)
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Don't forget the NFL.
As a Bears fan and a Packer hater, Ioved when Rodgers the that Surface at the end of the Panthers game.
Pissed off two foes at once.
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Don't forget the big outlay tio equip the NFL with free surfaces.
It does raise a question though. Do players get to keep their old devices and use them wherever they did before?
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Break even from sunk costs, no. Break even from product sales, they did that 2 years ago. The Surface Pro 3 and Surface Pro 4 lines are fully profitable, and profit has been on the steady rise since early 2014.
I like pissing on Microsoft as much as the next guy, but I bite my tongue ever since saying the same thing you just did about their Xbox line many years ago. Now I too wish I had a machine that prints money.