Bill Gates switches to Android phone
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
I really wished they had managed to gain a foothold, because as a platform it really lacks nothing (excepting an app developer base, and actual producers of handsets).
I had had some Nokia phone with WP7 and it was a pretty nice phone despite lacking some apps, and I was looking forward the the future of the platform. Of course when the future did come witn WP8, they said there would be no updates to existing phones and they were pushing developers to use APIs that would only work on the new OS meaning my limited pool of apps wouldn't grow on my current phone, which hurt more than the no OS upgrade. While the lack of OS upgrade isn't uncommon in the Android world, Google doesn't generally push developers to abandon the old OS base so quickly. So with my Windows Phone basically EOL'd overnight(within about 6 months or so of buying it), I went back to Android.
Ironically, by the time it was terminated it had developed into a very valid product indeed. Shame - Apple and Android definitely need more competition from someone with actual resources (sorry to the Sailfish, Firefox OS, Ubuntu Phone, etc etc).
The person who was the head of the Windows Phone group while it failed repeatedly under the first CEO was promoted and put in charge of the entire Windows division by the next CEO.
Something to contemplate.
I think all that ultimately mattered was that Android became the Windows of mobile phones; an operating system that each manufacturer/carrier could customize to sell the idea of value-add (with no actual value-add, I know).
It was really close, Verizon was going to make the Pre its flagship device but changed its mind when the Droid was a success. The smartphone landscape could looks very different right now had the timelines been just a tad different.
I can report this is exactly what drove me from the platform. I adopted Windows Phone out the gate and received a never-ending litany of supportive emails, oneDrive bonuses, etc. There were missing features, but early adopters were promised they were coming and I think most of us thought the experience was worth compromising for early on. Then Windows Phone "7.5" released barely a year after I'd bought my phone, included most of the features early adopters had begged for, and didn't support any of the phones people had already bought. Soon some apps didn't work without 7.5 either. It felt like we all got flipped the bird for taking a risk on Microsoft's platform and I switched to Android. Every aspect of it felt dishonest and disingenuous - "7.5" implies an incremental release, and in terms of features it really should have been one. I have no idea if they just couldn't hack it on the weaker early devices or if MS honestly thought we were all going to run out and buy Nokias immediately. I mean, I nearly did a year later when they were $1...
(Confusingly is not the same hardware as the android Idol 4s. The windows version actually has much better hardware. Snapdragon 820 processor.)
I would say that some of the apps were either sub-par or missing. The Uber app wasn't as good, and there was no Lyft app. Yet, I found that the mobile websites for both were perfectly fine, and you can pin them to your start screen just like apps.
The AMC theater app for both Android and Windows always gave me endless trouble, but I likewise realized that their mobile website was just fine.
The Comcast/Xfinity site likewise can do basically anything their app can do.
I think being forced to use mobile sites is much less unpleasant than one would expect, and this is the way things should be trending anyways. It is the only way to achieve adequate cross-platform development.
When I open an app in WP I received immediate loading/animation feedback.
In android many core actions (such as initiating a phone call) cause temporary freeze while the app loads. Did the phone receive my tap? Do I need to tap again or wait?
Coming from a more fluid interface like the WP this is something I really miss and makes android feel a little more primitive in comparison (but the advanced apps do make up for it)
Polished OS, build quality, call quality, battery life -- these features are all available (and were pre-Microsoft mobile) in both Android and Apple worlds.
Be cautious about assuming that the applications you use are all other people will want. I suspect the massive disparity in application volume & variety was the driving force behind Microsoft abandoning this platform.
I don't agree Android offers that as an OS. Battery life is a little hardware specific, but on average Android provides below par "performance per mWh" compared to the other two.
[1] https://www.windowscentral.com/sites/wpcentral.com/files/sty...
Android is making strides with things like Doze, but the same things that make iOS feel locked down for me as a developer compared to Android are also a huge part of the reason why iPhones can get such amazing standby time (since crappy software isn't even allowed to do inefficient things)
And fwiw, if I were talking about hardware, I'd expect the lower-end devices are better with battery life because more of them come with near bone stock Android than flagships.
Windows Central have also reported Microsoft's next vision of the OS called "Andromeda" there will be a base OS that can have components bolted on [2].
[0] http://www.itpro.co.uk/desktop-hardware/windows-10/28534/win... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_GlGglbu1U [2] https://www.windowscentral.com/andromeda-os
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/249292-microsoft-decla...
What I really want is just some way to maintain my 'working state' wherever I go.
When I'm in front of a desk, I'll want to make best use of multiple screens, higher-speed networking and storage. And when mobile (on a phone or tablet) I still want to maintain my context, at least in terms of what I've been looking at on the browser, in email, etc.
At any rate, I don't want to be power/thermal limited by the processor I can carry around in my pocket.
That's Apple's strategy with their continuity technology.
The whole .NET Standard only happened to appease developers fed up with the whole story.
On top of that they kept failing the promises regarding the OS upgrades, even dropping devices that were running the preview builds without issues.
And honestly the OS was rock solid and worked great (unlike my experience with the Lenovo Windows work laptop I was given which would keep blue-screening after going into hibernate for more than 5 minutes. I ended up switching to a SurfaceBook once that was available and it worked perfectly. Amazing laptop. Like a MacBook Pro. Except without Bash which sucked so you had to learn PowerShell to script things (well until recently now I think there’s Bash on Windows using some kind of emulation trick I guess))
Windows Phone was a solid system with a decent easy to use UI it is kind of a pity it didn’t take off.
But because the app ecoosysem was so poor after about 6 months I switched to a Samsung Android phone (there was no Google Pixel at the time), which had worse battery life but it performed fine.
I use an iPhone now and the biggest thing I miss is the lack of certain categories of apps that I could find on Android or Windows that I couldn’t find in the iOS App Store.
And the feature set of iOS usually lags behind Android but after using it for over a year now it’s really not that bad and I really like the cross-OS integration features with macOS, tvOS, and watchOS.
Universal copy paste is a killer feature imo.
To be honest I’m happy with both Android and iOS. They both have the same set of popular third party US apps in their App Stores.
Agreed. We developed a couple apps way back in Windows Phone 7, and the UI was slick and stylish. The developer tools were fantastic - very fast and easy to create decent apps. Unfortunately we didn't see much ROI for those apps, and then Microsoft decided everyone needed to redo their apps for Windows Phone 8. It was an easy choice to drop support for those apps and stop all development for Windows Phone at that point. The biggest problem people had with Windows Phone was the lack of apps, and it seemed like MS caused that problem themselves.
But they do this with version 6.5 then "rewrote apps" for 7, and then "rewrite apps" for 8 and now for 10.
It's easy to understand why devs are pissed-off from that decisions.
PS: I forgot fiasco with 7.5 and upgrade to 7.9 and 8.0
There was a period where targeting the 8.0 APIs meant you had access to one set of features and targeting the 8.1 set of APIs meant you were missing certain features but gaining others. The constant rewrites was a nightmare from the developer perspective and prevented any traction being gained.
The story of Windows Phone is full of similar bone-headed decisions in which Microsoft continuously pisses off people trying to love it.
It's been a while but here are a few things that stand out to me as being particurarly bad:
Many Windows Phone users came from Zune, so they were super into music. The Windows Phone 7 -> 8 transition made the music app into a horrifically bad experience missing so many features it was laughably bad compared to other platforms.
The flagship for a period of time was the Lumia 1020. Nokia wrote all sorts of interesting applications for it that were later unsupported or removed when Microsoft acquired Nokia.
Microsoft shipped no flagship for a really long period of time (other than the flop of the Lumia Icon available only on Verizon) and so the "super fans" had the choice of sticking with their Lumia 1020 or 'upgrading' to a cheaper build quality and worse camera Windows Phone that had better specs. Eventually when Windows 10 for phone rolled around they promised 1020 users that Windows 10 would support their phones, but eventually they gave in and announced they couldn't make it work. At that point there wasn't a fantastic successor to the 1020 from the camera perspective, so many users just left.
For a period of time the Lumia 520 was the best low cost ($50 - $100!) smartphone on the market. People actually really liked it, but once again it was unsupported when it came time to upgrade to Windows 10. This meant that a large portion of the Windows Phone install base was fragmented. Microsoft decided they didn't want to win the low-end, they wanted to win the high end (high m argin!) so they stopped making cheap phones like the 520.
I think Microsoft's problem is they continuously changed strategies all the time when they weren't seeing returns. They wanted Windows Phone to be "Microsoft scale" instantly. It seems they felt that as one of the world's largest software companies they should be instantly successful and if they were not then it was better to refocus their efforts elsewhere they could make more money. When they didn't see instant sucesss with Windows Phone there would be a leadership and strategy change resulting in whip-lash for users and developers.
I really think they had to take the under dog approach and make a few users love them, then a few more, then a few more. At the time there would have been a class of users for whom the benefits of the platform would outweigh getting the trendiest apps. Microsoft had enormous opportunity: Android phones were unusably poor on low end phones, iPhones were really expensive and more restrictive. The "app gap" to me really seemed like putting the cart before the horse. Even a company as large as Microsoft can't brute force a grass roots sort of thing like an app development community. The "app gap" is used by many to excuse Microsoft's failure to not develop a competitive platform. From my perspective Microsoft's desire to have instant success, to make a device for everyone, meant they made a platform that ultimately failed.
The crazy thing is they still haven't pronounced it dead yet. Perhaps they have a final hail mary device they're going to try, or perhaps some lingering arrogance means Microsoft would rather leave Windows Phone on life support then declare it dead.
They also make statement this spring "no new devices this year" and this is yet-another-example-of-market-alienification.
For a while WP devices actually had more market share than iPhone on some European countries, because they were the only affordable alternative to Android.
With all these missteps they managed to drive both the consumers that enjoyed WP, and Windows developers that had fun coding apps for it.
I have this gut feeling that since Windows 10 tablets and hybrids are actually more successful than Android based ones, they would like to try a "mini-tablet" that can make phone calls.
But they burned us so many times, that most likely it will be UWP apps that happen to run on such "mini-tablet" by accident, than being made explicitly for it.
It amazes me that every model Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga I've worked with (four generations now) has some issue along this line. Every refresh requires some driver troubleshooting on my part to find the one that fixes machines that sleep and don't wake up.
At work, I only buy Thinkpads and Think-series PCs after they've aged 6+ months. I can't imagine how people get by being early adopters. We early adopted a Carbon laptop once. Borderline unusable wifi and trackpad. It took 6-12 months for Lenovo to release the updates that fixed these issues, and even then the trackpad never felt right to me (misses taps, misses drags, fails to detect two fingers, etc.)
Every generation has some variety of stupid power management issue. Their 2014 & 2015 model ThinkPad Yoga both had a problem where there was some fault with the system board that frequently caused the trackpad to stop working after sleep/wake. Fix was to replace the system board. The 2014-2017 models have all had sleep/wake bugs that involved a driver and/or BIOS updates to resolve later (often not completely). It doesn't help either that they regularly leave critical drivers out of their SCCM packages.
So naturally it failed.
Elaborate on counted vs mattered?
A mid range WP Nokia would be a great secondary phone to me (disclosure: I'm an iOS developer) if it would have any traction.
The upcoming mobile version will have something called CShell which means that the interface will be shared among desktop and mobile, meaning that there will be no differences aside from x86 support.
It hasn't been advertised to regular consumers because it's targeted at business users but the HP Elite x3 is the current flagship Windows Phone device.
.NET and UWP sound like they'll be unaffected by CShell, except that developers targetting CShell will want to ensure their apps work on a larger range of display resolutions.
I'd like to still hope that the Windows team knows what they are doing this time and the results will work out, but yes, things look pretty bleak today.
http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-earns-2-billion-per...
Every time they made a huge change in the OS (for the better) basically none of the existing phones go it. So every time they updated they were basically throwing away the previous platform. If apps weren’t compatible (I don’t know) they may have been resetting that as well.
Combined with how late they were to the party that was just a death sentence.
What next ?
Only because Linux happened, businesses were happily moving from proprietary UNIXes into Windows NT and 2000.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/25/16361628/apple-siri-bing-...
If they emulated Android (like Blackberry)... why not just buy an android phone?
I believe that Microsoft will dominate in AR, and quickly become the leading platform.
If UWP takes off, their mobile app support will follow. New Windows 10 S devices only running UWP apps will encourage this progress a lot.
If anybody will actually buy them.
Disclaimer -- I've never used a Microsoft phone. Indeed, I only know one person that had one - and even then it was an employer decision. Nor have I ever heard anyone wish out loud that their phone was more like their Microsoft Windows computer, or that it integrated better with their existing Microsoft systems. People who want to 'think different' could have embraced Maemo, BB, Sailfish, Firefox, or various other niche platforms. And then observed the same problem -- lack of people developing applications for them.
The one place I want microsoft to succeed is smartphones. Android spies on basically everything you do. Both android and iOS are vendor lock-in in a way we've never seen before. Compared to the current smartphone OS offerings, Windows was (and is) an incredibly open platform.
With the source to Android available and decoupled from the device-specific code it should be easier to create alternative Android distributions. This should also make it possible to upgrade Android on devices which have been abandoned by the vendor and those which never got any updates to begin with.
This is not just theory by the way, I'm using a number of Google-free Android devices myself. They run just fine without those Google bits, they don't spy more than any other device. This does not mean it does not spy at all but that problem is present in all mobile devices from all manufacturers and under all operating systems: the radio interface layer is a black box closed source blob in all commercially available devices that I've come across.
[1] https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/05/here-comes...
The Android you get without Google Play Services are more like Firefox OS, or Ubuntu Phone, or chrooting into Debian and calling that your "OS", interesting things for developers, but not really what the average end user would consider a serious phone option that's even on their radar.
Now if there where a way to combine these two worlds - that of the 'it just works but it knows more about me than I do myself' and the 'it does exactly what I tell it do do, no more and no less' - it would be feasible to offer such a device to a larger section of the general public.
A stripped-down Android distribution - sans Google-specific bits, with some replacements where needed - which does over the air updates just like devices on the other side of the wall would be a good start.
I think more people who have a passing interest in privacy would rather take a walled garden on some of the best hardware out there with a rather enjoyable, if not powerful, OS.
While it is hard - and getting harder - to evade profiling it is still preferable to minimise the amount of personally identifiable data collected by commercial or governmental organisations. Using an Android device without Google-specific code can help here.
I think the conversation has shifted from my main point. When the average user hears "Android" or says it, it's "Android + GPS". The GP said Android but seeing as the most common Android devices competing with the other two OSes they mentioned come with GPS I find it disingenuous to try and imply that it's not "Android proper" if it has GPS. If anything Android without GPS isn't "Android proper" in this context because of the amount of functionality it provides that people include when they compare those OSes
Someone tell this guy about Win10 telemetry and store app tracking.
* - Admittedly I also have 10+ Android phones, 20+ iPhones, and 2 WebOS phones.
You're forgetting that Microsoft _was_ the smartphone leader around the time of Windows Mobile 5 and 6, after defeating Palm. At one time, there were over 100 models of of Windows Mobile phones on the market. (Android's fragmentation problem was entirely foreseeable because it happened to WM first.)
They lost the market to Apple and Android through a mixture of complacency and stupidity, which is something of a shame. WM was just as open as the Windows desktop; no walled garden, no app store eating a third of your revenue, no vendor lock-in shenanigans, just load whatever software you want and run it.
Now that Microsoft has talented hardware people working on really nice products like Surface, they could probably do an in-house design on a new phone. Borrow a page from Motorola/Google's Moto X Pure Edition and put a wooden back on it - it's grippier than plastic or glass, and looks classier too.
US Cellular doesn't like to activate non-branded phones, though I guess they have started doing some. They share the same tech so I don't know of any technical limitations that would prevent it.
I will need to replace mine. It is running 8 (.1 maybe?) and I guess it can be upgraded but I'd rather not risk it and it is getting long in the tooth.
I should add that I'm in an unusual position where I don't even carry my cell phone very often. I often even forget to bring it with me. I don't depend on it, am not chained to it, and it frequently goes without attention for days or weeks at a time. I don't actually install anything on it. The stock apps do everything I want to do, and more. Right now, I think it's in the cab of the tractor, though it might be in the car.
They are. The HP Elite x3 is the current flagship Windows Phone 10 device, although it's primarily aimed at business users. You can get a package that includes a Continuum dock for about $700 online.
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/microsoft_on_the_issues/...
More examples:
* Deceptive ads all over the web telling people to switch to Chrome
* You can't use any other search engine but Google from Chrome on Android
* The insane amount of Google integration on stock Android
Google has almost total control over a typical internet user's experience
He was carrying a laptop. No case.
It was well before cell phone ubiquity and way before smartphones.
I thought "wow, the richest man carries an unprotected laptop, no briefcase, his hair even uncombed (probably because he just came from heliport)"
I felt "LC" because i cared about a celebrity (and even noted my diary).
Later, the parking guard said it was to be a low key meeting. We all speculated and believe it had to do with using unused bandwith?during overnight hours...
I still feel LC because i read the article...