Ten years ago Microsoft bought Nokia's phone unit – then killed it
theregister.com
theregister.com
Even in 2012 with the Pureview 808, Nokia had a pixel processing chip that could handle 1 billion pixel a second, with low power usage. Microsoft's inept driver architecture made it difficult to use, so later Microsoft versions of the Lumia phones actually had lower specs and power usage issues.
Elop was very likely Rick Belluzzo of SGI writ large; a mediocre thinker, a big-company bureaucrat who never cared about tech...
I would have had no problem paying more for a premium metal & glass case for it.
Ignoring the technical challenges and impossibilities of open sourcing it (Windows Phone 10 is Windows 10, and the Windows Phone 7/8 codebase was its own crazy beast that was tough enough to work with even when you were being paid to do so), mobile operators do not want you running custom code on their stack, and they are the ultimate gatekeepers of what devices are allowed to connect. There will never be a popular, easy to setup open source phone without a complete reworking of cellular service, at least in the US.
There is a whole world, besides the US.
But it doesn't matter because there would be no apps anyway.
Use an approved modem blob and you can connect. Easy peasey. VoLTE makes it a bit trickier, but not that much.
I mean, yeah, it won't ever be popular. If it's open source, there's no way to sell user data to subsidize the price. And who wants to pay full freight for a phone that probably won't ever fully work... I think I learned my lesson with OpenMoko...
I enjoyed Windows Phone, but I don't see how it would survive without big pockets and a dedicated, focused, and engaged team that can m move mountains. Big pockets alone weren't enough. Good hardware wasn't enough. Microsoft needed to have delivered on their promise of all WP8 devices getting an upgrade to WM10, and WM10 needed to be good on release. Incidentally, what I think was the final build for Lumia 640 was a lot better than the first build; if the first build was that good, the story may have ended differently. Mobile Edge was still garbage on that phone though; Mobile IE was ugly, but Mobile Edge put a queue between the UI and the engine, which meant when the engine was spinning on some page it could barely handle, you couldn't stop it... All your UI commands would be queued up and played later when the engine had finished whatever it was doing... Unless the watchdog timed out and the whole phone rebooted.
Then after killing the mobile platform, they messed up the desktop experience as well, killing the goodwill among the strongest advocates of the WinRT platform.
To be fair, Kallasvuo did try to build a software environment for Nokia phones. The largely open source Maemo operating system failed to take off
I think this was a massive leadership failure.
It destroyed Finland's economy in a way which it hasn't still properly recovered from. It was made worse by those managers moving to other companies after the crash, bringing their so-called culture with them.
It’s probably Some other app, but I don’t know what. My understanding is that Windows phone had a universal message search which would mean I’m not in this position.
I miss my Lumia and my Sony Ericsson k700i and just the simplicity of texting.
And the world would be a very boring place if everything everywhere looked identical
Embrace. Extend. Extinguish. The only things they do good. /s
Meanwhile pressing the "X" button on a maximized window causes the window and the one below to close.