Microsoft Strikes Back? | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Strikes Back?

5 pointsdageshi2 comments

Over the weekend I watched BBC Click and they had a section on the KT Spiderphone

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006m9ry (10:35)

Not sure if people outside of the UK can watch that so here's another article about it.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/239631/unique_kt_spider_phone_transforms_into_a_tablet_laptop_or_handheld_gaming_device.html

Basically the tl:dr is that it's a smartphone that slots into a tablet which can then become the screen of a notebook.

Imagine being able to buy a bundle of hardware (phone+tablet+notebook) which costs under $1000, has permanent net access courtesy of the phones 3g and which you can really use for work (notebook), play (tablet) and communication (phone) and does all of these things well.

It seems to me this could very quickly make Microsoft a major player in the smartphone & tablet space while retaining its existing desktop dominance.

Microsoft's WP7 is not Windows 8. They are 2 different OS's, so they'd have to use both, on the phone's hardware. So far I haven't seen anything more powerful than a single core WP7 phone. Plus, are you asking for an Atom-based phone?

However, I do think docking a phone into different screens has potential. I was thinking before how Google could do like 3 "UI add-ons" for the core Android code. So you get your phone UI add-on by default on the phone itself, then when you dock it to a PC screen, you see the Honeycomb UI, and when you dock it to a TV, you see the Google TV UI.

I think different types of devices and form factors mandate a different UI. You can't really shoe-horn a UI from a 3" screen to a 50" screen. But of course, they could still be made so you transition painlessly from one to the other, and have the same design style. But they should all be optimized for the form factor, device type and screen size.

Your right, I confused the ability to run metro with the ability to run win8 on a smartphone. But according to the BBC clip the KT Spiderphone apparently runs a dual core 1.5ghz processor although I assume that is arm and not atom.

So perhaps not seamless all in one package yet.

Although the phone and tablet could work together fine, the notebook would need its own hardware but could still utilise the tablet for screen & graphics card. I still think there's a compelling case for such a combination.

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