No Windows 8 Update for Existing WP7 Users | Hacker News Reader

No Windows 8 Update for Existing WP7 Users

anandtech.com

30 pointscygwin9847 comments

Well that's sabotaged Nokia and WP7.5 nicely. No one is going to buy a current handset with that on the way. Way to go microsoft!

I genuinely think someone has a 90ft long crack pipe over at Redmond. They've made so many bad decisions lately its scary.

Absolutely! I was thinking of buying a Lumia 710 recently after owning an iPhone and an android for the past few years. Glad I didn't pull the trigger.

Seriously don't buy one. I've literally just sold mine and went back to a basic phone as the battery life was crap, the mic doesn't work properly.

Here: http://www.t-mobile.com/shop/phones/?shape=smp Go to tmobile website and find the phones that are rated as the best by users and choose the top ones instead of taking the recommendation from a stranger on the internet

I'd ignore that entirely as well - if it's a network they are biased instantly. How to pick a phone:

1. Write down what you NEED, not want.

2. Find a phone that does it on gsmarena.com which has LONG term reviews and doesn't try and sell phones to you.

3. Buy it off ebay second hand unlocked therefore saving on the instant purchase depreciation. If you're lucky like me, I bought a Nokia 3310 a couple of years ago new in box as a backup for 10GBP. I'm now using that as my full time phone. Buy 2 or 3 for that price TBH.

4. Get a cheap PAYG deal. In the UK, you can get a T-Mobile deal for 26GBP/month that gives you pretty much unlimited everything.

Anything else is just retarded if you ask me.

Works probably for you but unfortunately that's not how millions of buyers get theirs.

I was with you right up until you called everyone who doesn't do it your way a retard.

Note that the ranking is busted, so it puts e.g. a refurbished Blackberry with a single 5 star review above a popular phone that might average out to 4.99 over hundreds of reviews.

Same here. I was planning to buy a 710 just to keep up with WP. Seems pointless now.

It still is getting an update with most new features with WP7.8.

Apart from WP8 apps won't run on it, which most will evolve into and it won't do native C/C++. Instant market fragmentation.

Only the apps that use native C/C++. The rest should still run fine.

WP8 release is Fall 2012. OEMs won't begin to have WP8 hardware on carrier shelves until end of 2012* at the earliest. Microsoft just killed Windows Phone for at least the next 6 months.

I wish Microsoft would see the damage they do when they inappropriately pre-announcing products.

* Mango had a similar release scheme last year.

With iOS 6 announced and Jelly Bean just around the corner, Microsoft can't really afford to just sit there poker faced until it's done. It's a wise tactic, to maintain interest when it's clear their competitors are moving forwards.

Not only that, but end users probably appreciate knowing that anything they bought today would have limited future support --this alternative is better than pulling the rug from under them come 4-5months. That is to say, it hurts MS and partners initially but benefits customers short-term and long-term.

What they could announce is some kind of voucher for future phones if they buy now --giving customers a kind of indemnification against obsolescence. Not saying they will, but they could.

So what do you think customers are going to do? They're going to buy an iPhone or an Android device, instead.

It's likely preferable to having their (customers') money but engendering lots of ill-will a few months down the road.

I have an iphone 4. With this announcement, I'm willing to wait a few months before buying a WP8 device.

> Jelly Bean just around the corner

Is it? It’s a real question.

Currently ICS is installed on < 10% of the devices in circulation, but (I hope) it’s safe to assume OEMs and carriers are working on new devices based on the new operating system and will eventually stop to ship new devices with Gingerbread.

If next week Google releases JB, I don’t think they are going to scramble to change their plans to merge the new version, they will probably just wait until they’re done with that and then eventually upgrade, possibly delaying JB even more than ICS already is.

I have been wondering what Google plans to do to improve the situation.

I guess next week I’ll know the answer.

Currently ICS is installed on < 10% of the devices in circulation

If you're in the market for a device it's available on almost all of them.

No, what they need to do is have releasable products ASAP.

Pre-announcing hardware/software that won't be available for several months is not a competitive strategy.

So, Adam Osbourne does a facepalm [1] from his grave?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect

I bet they think that lost sales of 'old' Windows phones will be offset by a gain in sales of Windows 8 phones by customers who otherwise would have bought a non-Windows smartphone in the following months. Given the relative size of the markets, and assuming they manage to stay in the press (should not be too hard, with Windows 8 shipping, Surface being seeded to bloggers, etc), I think that may be a reasonable idea.

So WP7 in WinCE-based, and WP8 is WinNT-based like the rest of Windows 8.

Can't say I didn't see that coming. WP7 always seemed like a bit of a dead-end platform because of it.

At least WP8 will have a compatibility layer for running legacy WP7 apps. But if you're a developer do you continue to target the legacy .NET Compact Framework for WP7, or do you target the new SDK that will run on exactly zero of the Windows Phones devices in circulation today, but will run on Windows 8 Metro tablets and desktops?

This is not Microsoft's finest hour, to be sure.

How different is it to target WP7 vs. Win8 when it comes to .NET/WPF/Metro? I'm sure a few developers around here have started playing with Win8 and have done some phone development. I would think that it wouldn't be a radical change.

Windows Phone 7, or as I like to call it now, the Osborne I.

For reference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect

The big story is not the new start screen or even WP8. It's whether WP7.x users can download and install new apps. Can a non-native C# app that does not use any WP8 hardware features compiled for WP8 run on WP7.8? MS needs to clarify. If not, MS just screwed all their existing WP7 users and have effectively killed off all new sales of WP7 devices. Developers will continue to develop WP7 apps and any benefits to switching to WP8 for development are moot.

More alarmingly, if they did this for WM6.5 and WP7 within such a short time frame, how can any customer feel safe in buying a WP8 device? What happens when WP9 gets released? Why would anyone buy a WP now? My iPhone 3GS may not support FaceTime, Siri or Notification Center, but at least I can download new iOS 5 apps from the App Store.

It's important to note that apps will work on both platforms according to this article. This sounds like a pretty minor issue to me if I need a new device for some of the newer features, many of which require new hardware anyway (SD card, NFC).

There's an update to this article about a few minutes ago: Update: Microsoft has clarified, and appliations built for WP8 will not run on WP7.5/7.8 (native C/C++ appliations), we're asking for more details.

That would bother me if those new apps can't be run on WP7.

Only the new apps that use features (e.g. native support) not available on older phones will not work on older phones. Is that not how iOS and android upgrade too?

No, that's not how iOS or Android upgrades work because those companies specced out their platforms before launching them to market.

You can't just "add native support" after the fact. That's a major addition which should have been there from day one.

So basically anyone who is writing an app for WP8 will have to start with a market share of 0% and 0 units in the market.

Nope. They start with market share of all installed windows phone.

Plus they have all the windows desktop/tablet users who could use their app as well.

Well, you're wrong because WP7 is now pretty much dead.

So there's literally no reason to target it, and anything written in C/C++ is only going to run on WP8.

So they've pretty much killed off their already lagging platform in preference for a new lagging platform with 0 installed base.

Microsoft are smoking some serious crack. I'm glad our company didn't spend a second developing for WP. What a clusterf*ck.

That update is confusing in itself. I think it means that native C++ apps will not run, but others will. Still unclear, though.

Apps made for windows 8 will not run on wp7, even when not using the new hardware features

I've heard a lot of conflicting info about this. How can you be sure? Could you link to your reference? Will apps for WP8 that use only WP7 API work on both? Or is the WP8 APi too different? What would a exactly dev need to do if he wants cross compatibility?

Why? There is a Manifest file where you specify the features your application is using. I would imagine that if you leave out the new, hardware dependent stuff it should run just fine? You can do something similar already by opting out from supporting phones with constrained RAM. Those applications are then made unavailable to certain devices in the marketplace. I admit that there has been no mention of this how it's supposed to look like with regards to WP 7.8/8 so it needs some clarification.

I don't think this is entirely correct. If you write in Native (C/C++) then true, it won't run on WP7. But if you write in C#/Xaml you could have targeted your app to WP7 and I believe it will run on both WP7 and WP8 -- of course this will preclude you from using whatever now hardware capabilities in WP8 only.

I think the Native C/C++ is the right move though. The "easy to port to IOS/Android" point is important, and I think going forward that would/should be the model for web development, unless Webapp is sufficient for your purpose, or that you're willing to develop your app in 3 languages (ObjC, Java, C/C#).

That said, I'm sad that my (otherwise very nice) Lumia 800 is getting the WP6.5 treatment.

Even if you stick with C# and XAML and use no new hardware features, WP 8 will produce a different binary than WP 7 simply due to the differences in the .NET frameworks. WP 7 runs Windows CE with .NET Compact Framework. WP 8 runs Windows NT with the full .NET framework. The Compact Framework is a subset of regular .NET, so 8 will be able to load 7 apps, but not the other way around. (Try making a .NET project that shares code between WPF, Silverlight and WP7 and you'll see what I mean)

This has to be a first for Microsoft. I know my first instinct is to say, "how crappy of them?" But they should have done this with Windows 10 years ago.

Then no company would have bought anything beyond Windows XP (released 11 years ago) or Windows 2000 Server.

But they should have done this with Windows 10 years ago.

The humorous part to this is that WP8 adopts a kernel that is the offspring of Windows NT's circa 1993 (19 years ago if you're keeping track).

Windows CE was essentially the "reboot".

Not a big deal. I'm tired of the HD7 as it is.

There probably should be an article like this every time a new version of android is released. :)

I think there are . . .

There are, but maybe they aren't always posted here :)

With Android the situation, as always, depends on which device you happen to own, in which case you may or may not get the update. Of course there's always rooting and ROMing, but that's not going to apply to most users.

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