Microsoft to release Android-powered Nokia X2 handset
bbc.com
bbc.com
"Here’s a fun game. Mentally rewind 5 years and see how likely the following sentence would have been: Microsoft has decided to make Opera the default browser on its new, Linux-based Android handsets."
We're now seeing that Microsoft may be starting to rid itself of the platform tax that's crippled so many of their efforts. In the case of the Kin, that even included Exchange support, which wasn't a desiderata for its market (and to make things worse, the code/libraries the Kin team was supplied were extremely buggy).
Is not not axiomatic that the Nokia Android phone is a temporary thing? They aren't trying to build a line of Android phones, they are trying to retain market share as a phone manufacturer until Windows Phone is more successful.
Either Windows Phone becomes a solid 3rd place Smartphone OS, and they kill their Android line, or Windows Phone becomes an obvious failure, and they sell the remnants of Nokia. Either way, 6 years from now MS will no longer be selling Android phones.
But I'll agree the long term outcomes you sketch out are likely. The article itself indicated this phone is in part intended to get you to later buy a higher grade and branded Windows Phone.
DevDiv's tools and frameworks is where it's at when it comes to building big multi-platform codebases - backend, front-end, desktop, mobile, cloud, whatever. Add to that the immense infrastructure and operations support I get from the MS business ecosystem and it's just icing on my Productivity Cake. I don't mind paying them because I get great stuff for the price.
I never understood how tech-intelligent people would hold so much hate towards a company that pretty much provides some of the broadest selection of tools and solutions geekdom has ever known.
Side Anecdote: A little bird recently told me that while working at Box, the attitude from management was so hateful against Microsoft that they were willing to blow through huge amounts of money just to roll their own HR system. What?! As an investor I want my investments to make me more money any way possible - and NOT be wasted trying to recreate wheels just to satisfy some sort of nonsensical personal grudge. This opinion people have with the brand loyalties (and grudges) they hold are non-sense through and through and bad for business.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer referred to Linux in 2001 as "a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_controversies...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Micr...
"Four years ago we had you writing all your apps using Silverlight. Two years ago we chucked that out the window (ahahahaha) and told you to switch over to WinRT. Now we're going Android. We hope you've got the message by now. But in case you haven't, let us restate it in plain English: Dear developers, GO THE @$#!% AWAY."
Either way, I'm not writing another damn mobile app or picking up another damn smartphone again. It's all totally crazy bananas now. I'd rather write win32 again with a broken-ass compiler.
I'm with Bob Pease at the moment: "My favourite programming language is solder".
"Hey, we're a company. We have things. That doesn't mean users use our things, or that developing for said things is going make you money or a userbase. That requires looking at the market and seeing where users are."
They create the supply side. If there is no demand, blindly working in their tools is just a silly mistake. I think it has been plainly demonstrated nothing Windows Phone offers entices the mobile market away from Android en masse at this point.
And part of the reason for the poor app ecosystem is that they've actively discouraged developers from developing for their platform. Heck, there's a huge number Android and iOS apps that are written in C# using Xamarin, and are therefore theoretically very easy to port to Windows Phone, but haven't for reasons as basic as the developers not wanting to upgrade to Windows 8.
If I were Microsoft, I'd give significant $$$ to folks who have created cross-platform app development platforms. Then I can improve the number of Windows Phone apps pretty quickly. I may not get apps optimized for my platform, but at least I'd have something, and then I could offer additional incentives for optimization. That's what Amazon is doing with the Fire phone and developer credits.
Xamarin would be one example, and PhoneGap (or whatever it's called now) can probably be made far nicer and faster. Last year Microsoft did announce a partnership with Corona, but as far as I know nothing has come of it yet in terms of a public release of the SDK: http://coronalabs.com/blog/2013/10/29/windows-phone-8-and-wi...
Apple aren't quite so bad, but they only get away with things like the iOS 7 UI change because so many of the people in that ecosystem are (I'm not knocking this) obsessed with stylistic consistency and will jump when Apple say so.
The runaway success of the iPad killed Silverlight and even much more stronger plugins like Flash. I am glad they killed yet another proprietary browser plugin. Plus, Silverlight XAML is very similar to WinRT and Windows Phone.
The iPad (and HTML5) did kill Silverlight and Flash (to some extent) as browser plugins, but not as platforms in general. Flash seems to be hanging in there outside of the browser plugin space, and Silverlight died because Microsoft thinks it's more fun to respond to market challenges by sweeping everything off the table and into the dustbin than it is to just pivot and keep moving forward.
Here's an alternative strategy that I strongly suspect would have been less expensive for Microsoft in terms of both development cost and social capital: Keep Silverlight as the mobile development API, and carry it forward as the platform for developing on both WP8 and Windows tablets. Pay Xamarin to incorporate support into their dev tools. Deal with performance considerations by expediting the AOT compiler for .NET, which clearly ended up needing to happen anyway. Deal with cross-language goals by . . . wait, you're still on .NET, cross-language is one of its core competencies. No need to sink resources into developing yet another iteration of COM, so that's a huge time saver. And as an free bonus, take advantage of the fact that Silverlight's already got an OS X implementation to let your developers use the technology to ship cross-platform desktop apps, similar to what Adobe's doing with Air.
What I am claiming is that Microsoft:
+ May have the killer smartphone app - carrier independent voice calls (aka "Skype").
+ Clearly has a more thoughtfully designed user interface in the form of Metro versus Android's WIMP on a phone mashups.
+ Could offer a more thoughtfully integrated suite of development tools should they get Android tooling into Visual Studio.
+ Already has a set of platform agnostic cloud services that are at least as good as Google's and since they include Office more attractive to general users.
+ Because of their B2B orientation, access to revenue streams other than advertising and therefore more latitude in providing a more appealing user experience in the consumer market.
Finally it is possible that Microsoft will play the 'bundling' card against Google's policy in regard to its platform, and by producing an Android phone, they get legal standing.
So does every Android and iOS device, unless Microsoft wants to remove it from the android matket and the app store.
> + Clearly has a more thoughtfully designed user interface in the form of Metro versus Android's WIMP on a phone mashups.
That's debatable. I prefer Android to Windows Phone. Sometimes, even over the iPhone.
And there are days I miss WebOS...
> + Could offer a more thoughtfully integrated suite of development tools should they get Android tooling into Visual Studio.
I kind of like the Android toolset.
> + Already has a set of platform agnostic cloud services that are at least as good as Google's and since they include Office more attractive to general users.
At least as good as Google means Google is still the standard. Attractive to Office users.
> + Because of their B2B orientation, access to revenue streams other than advertising and therefore more latitude in providing a more appealing user experience in the consumer market.
Only as long as they can indirectly monetize a lock-in from the handset.
There's about zero content in your response.
Just scattershot contradiction using the pick apart technique in hopes of trolling an inflamed response.
While I don't necessarily agree with their reply, you are both stating your opinions here. Saying MS has a more clearly though out user interface is highly debatable. And while I think the majority of people that have used Visual Studio would say it trumps the Eclipse based Android Toolchain, the fact that (s)he prefers it is still opinion.
> Just scattershot contradiction
It's appropriate when many of the statements are simply false.
- All competitors have Skype. This is not an advantage.
- The interface being "more thoughtfully designed" is debatable. I am hardly alone in preferring vanilla Android over Metro and it remains to be seen how well this interface mimics its big brother. This would create a halo effect if Windows Phone proved very popular. So far, it hasn't.
- A lot of people love Visual Studio. A lot of other people don't. I like it for C# work. I prefer Emacs for Python, JS and PHP. It's also not an option on two out of three major desktop OSs. I find the Android toolset very good for Android development and Xcode is unbeatable for iOS development. For Visual Studio fans, merging Visual Studio with the Android tooling may be a big thing, but for the rest of us, it's inconsequential. Most developers I know base their decisions on things other than what is the IDE that'll be used with a project. I fear for companies that do otherwise.
- Azure may be as good as Google's cloud offerings (haven't paid much attention), but how a platform agnostic cloud service infrastructure can be called a competitive advantage still seems an interesting question. I'd like to see some elaboration on that, because platform agnostic is, well, agnostic.
- Finally, Microsoft has a lot of B2B clout that allows them to throw money into other divisions until they achieve meaningful market share. However, unless Microsoft finds a way to monetize their Android offerings, they'll eventually give up and the phones will have to hold their own. This is an advantage in that Microsoft will offer all kinds of financial incentive to companies who develop for it or sign exclusives. It's money in the bank regardless of application or product success. Unfortunately, in my experience (yes - I have dealt with Microsoft) they are not the most generous partners. They'll offer mostly stuff that costs nothing to them (licenses) in exchange of stuff that has cost to you (effort, exclusivity). I've had much more attractive partnerships.
If you think the Android SDK is very good, have you ever started the emulator and tried to debug an app? It's horrendously slow and buggy, if it works at all. iOS and especially WP are so much faster and easier to develop for.
[1] http://www.drdobbs.com/tools/xamarin-3-enterprise-edition-re...
It really depends. The iOS emulator runs x86 code. The Android emulators are full hardware emulators, but, if you choose to run your software on x86-based virtual hardware, it'll use your CPUs virtualization facilities to run faster than most handsets (which may not be the best idea considering actual hardware is much slower)
The real news is that this is not just an Android phone, it's a really good Android phone. It has a front facing camera, a decent SoC, enough RAM, what appears to be an IPS display (according to some sources), likely very decent build quality, and a price that is likely to dip below €100 or even $100 soon enough. Android phones in that price range are generally extremely bad quality, but this seems to be a very decent package.
As someone who uses Windows Phone, I keep scratching my head wondering why Microsoft even bothers.
This is a market segment which can also easily be filled by Windows Phone - it's probably even better for that. That I also find baffling. Windows Phone doesn't seem to be compatible with the particular SoC used in this device, but that is a problem Microsoft should be able to fix...
My second would be hurting Google by not providing their services as default, while increasing traffic to their own cloud services.
My third guess would be increasing their global smartphone marketshare by entering the Android market and it's massive apps marketplace.
And a fourth guess, if 200.000 app makers enter the Nokia store, they could easily email all of them to consider converting their app to the WP market... With some clever subsidizing in place (eg. 0% cut the first 6 months, instead of the default 30%), it could increase the WP Apps quantity in a very short period.
China approved the Nokia acquisition only on April 8, what would have happened if they didn't? Without an Android strategy, Nokia would be left without any momentum for atleast a year in a fast moving market. Remember how FTC denied AT&T and Tmobile's merger?
The only interesting thing here is that Microsoft didn't immediately kill the X2 and lay off Nokia's Android team. They could do that anytime or sell that division to some other company. There would be a lot of people at MS calling for its head. The headline, story and most of the comments seem to be implying that it's Microsoft that conceived and implemented this idea which is wrong.
Do you seriously think there would be any other possible outcome for the burning platform memo?
I realize that's not relevant to the vast majority of the market, but I'm curious.
This phone is not aimed at people who a power users. This phone is aimed at emerging economies where people are buying their first smartphones. Nokia X has all the basics (music, free messaging, email, Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp), all running on some reasonable hardware.
>This phone is not aimed at people who a power users.
The only reason they are continuing to make them is because they got a lot of press for it, because a lot of people wanted "Lumia with real Android" - and most tech sites thought: "Not Lumia...and with a bad clone of Android, must be good enough, so let's write about it anyway".
Without that press and misleading hype about "Nokia with Android", Nokia X would've never launched.
I don't like the idea but I can see how this is consistent with the new Microsoft view of being more open.
http://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_moto_e_dual_sim-6323.php
Just because you're not looking, doesn't mean they don't exist.
Did I say really say that? And was that jab really necessary?
I'm well aware of the Moto E. It's definitely a competitor to this phone, but it's likely more expensive.
Even into the late 90s. I remember trying out MSIE 5 for Solaris circa 1999. It ran like crap, but that was probably just as much a function of the SS20 I was using at work at the time as it was IE's fault.
What happens to their patent portfolio they allege Linux infringes on?
https://www.simple-talk.com/iwritefor/articlefiles/1610-VM-p...
http://vmdepot.msopentech.com/List/Index
On the flip side of what you said, now that they're an Android OEM they may have the legal standing to complain to regulatory agencies about how Google forces Android OEMs(which was kept secret from the public until it came out recently in court cases) to have Google Search as the default in order to get access to important Android Apps and APIs including the Play Store to the detriment of alternate search engines like Bing and DDG.
http://bgr.com/2014/05/05/google-search-and-apps-on-android/
It's a good phone when you consider the price but let's not exaggerate the fact that its killer feature is its price, not its specs.
1. http://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=6323&idPhone2=...
Something I also thought was that the idea is to create a better opinion of the windows phone, and to confuse users to buy windows phones in the future. I also wonder how nice this pseudo-win-phone will play with all the other android apps.
(Disclaimer: I have used a WP7.8 phone and hated it, since then I developed a hate for the windows phone, I feel so limited when compared to android)
Are there some kind of licensing terms that prevent them from shipping forks like this with the Google Play store as one of two app stores available? Would they have to make the all the Google apps 'first class' citizens just to allow users the ability to install any of them ala carte?
Reference: http://www.androidbeat.com/2014/02/android-open-google-certi...
Just as with Microsoft and Amazon, I get why Google does this, but I think it hurts users and pretty much guarantees there's going to be limited Android experiences for lots of users out there. "Take all our apps, on our terms, or take none," pretty much guarantees the Microsofts and Amazons of the world are going to take none.
Andorid may be an open platform but it's primary app distribution channel clearly is not. It's an interesting contortion...they don't qualitatively screen apps, but they effectively screen what flavor of the platform can have the chief app repository itself.
My issue is that this phone has 1gb ram and front facing camera for the price of Lumia 520. I'll need to fork out at least twice that amount to get the equivalent hardware spec in windows phone.
To be sure, Android is more powerful in many ways, but with my Windows phone I can do all the same things I did on Android: SSH into my servers, VNC to support clients, etc. I'm missing a few games and novelty apps, but I don't use my phone as a gaming platform or toy, I use it to get work done.
And even on a fairly modern Android phone running JB, I've more than once had the same old issue I've always had on Android: If a call comes in when it's low on free RAM, there is simply no way to answer as the screen doesn't respond to taps. This has been the case on every Android phone I've used since 1.5 on a Motorola Cliq. Android is great when you need a mobile computer, but not so much when you need a mission critical device.
Rant: My first smartphone was a Lumia, and then when it broke i went to a Sony Xperia (with a rather clean Android 4.3 on it).
I never even realized how well-designed WP was until I went to Android. Examples:
- Operation. Nearly all of WP is easy to operate with just a thumb, single-handed. All important controls are either near the bottom or reachable by swiping. On Android, I have to reach to the top for all kinds of stuff. It's simply, apparently, an Android design pattern to put a bar with buttons on the top, as far away from my hand as possible. This is plainly ridiculous. On WP, there's a clear relationship between "how important is this action" and "how close is it to the bottom". As it should be.
- Consistency. All well-designed WP apps work the same. Swipe left/right for different screens/tabs, touch the left-side of an item for select-boxes, operations on the bottom and more operations by selecting "...". This is the same nearly everywhere, both for built-in apps and for most well-designed apps from the store.
- Cleanliness and clarity. The Xperia forced me to choose a home screen background picture, making it very difficult to read text and icons. I google-image-searched a "black.png" to work around this, but still, it's cluttered by default, and you need to do work to clean it up. Similarly, most good apps are really clean and uncluttered. I get the info I want to see or manipulate, no bullshit bells and whistles.
- Quick. WP's live tiles are a perfect middle ground for me between bloated Android widgets and app-icons-only like in iPhone. My homescreen only contains the stuff i do often, with bigger buttons for stuff i do more. All this, without cluttering the UI like doing something similar on Android would do (by hand-dragging around a combination of widgets and icons).
Needless to say, I went back to Windows Phone (anyone want to buy a Sony Xperia SP, btw?). Upgraded to WP 8.1, which added:
- The best mobile calendar app I've ever seen. The week view is simply amazing [1].
- Fix for every single thing I want that Android had and WP hadn't: better volume controls, action center for notifications and quick access to settings, stuff like that.
I'm well aware that none of the above includes the things you mention: customizability, open source, etc. WP indeed doesn't have that - it's much more like iOS in that respect. I thought I'd miss this, but with 8.1 fixing all the issues I had with WP, I realize that actually I don't want customizability, I want the thing to work great out of the box.
You only need customization if what you start with sucks.
On the hackability aspect though, WP app development is a very smooth experience compared to Android app dev (assuming you have a Windows computer ready somewhere). The API is very well designed and documented, and the tools are great (assuming you can stand Visual Studio).
[1] http://conversations.nokia.com/2014/04/17/windows-phone-8-1-...
> You only need customization if what you start with sucks.
Those two things make hard taking all of your other points seriously.
This is one of the things I hate about the >4" screens, the interfaces were all designed with things being reachable, but now, I with large hands even, can't do it.
I'd love to agree but still it hurts ,when one looks at the specs,dont you think?and if that phone is really successfull, what's next? this phone obviously cant run Windows Phone apps,so why did I get all these IDEs and Sdks on windows to produce apps for Windows Phone? I'd like MS to make it clear what is the strategy here.
The release of X2 should probably be viewed in a similar light as the release of the N9, which was a platform that basically got axed on release by Nokia, because of Elop wanting to change direction to Windows as the main platform. But that decision came too late to halt the release of the N9, just like the finalization of the Nokia sale probably was too late for MS to halt the release of this one.
Just because Samsung has bad market segmentation. it does not mean everybody else does.
As for why people would want this, it's actually good hardware for the price, and if it's ever rooted and flashed with a full Android ROM with Play support, it would end up being a nice phone overall.
It looks like some MS employees have been asked to do some dirty social media manipulation.
Seriously though. This is great news, good to see that Microsoft is opening themselves up. Whether or not this is because of the new leadership, it's definitely the step in the right direction for Microsoft.
That blade cuts both ways: By providing full/native MS cloud support on Android, you are allowing people who would otherwise be "locked in" to WP, to escape into Android.
Couldn't this potentially end up hurting their cloud services more than it helps?
http://www.doogeemobile.com/doogee-dg800-smartphone-android-...
I'm still wondering where Microsoft is going with this. I really don't see this working very well without the benefit of the Play Store
But seriously: I'm very curious to see where this goes. Perhaps a way of running Android apps on Win phones? That would be a tremendous boost.
EDIT: It's Opera Mini: http://gigaom.com/2014/06/24/microsofts-android-line-evolves...
I've got a dual SIM version of the Nokia X and it's about as bad as you imagine it to be. Side loading Google Play helped, but it's still not great. The Moto G is a much better investment.
Also, the company Nokia doesn't own a phone division anymore, they'll have to build one, if not from scratch, then pretty close to. That mean they don't have any competitive advantage over pretty much any other company in a similar situation.
Never mind that they really, really struggled to compete in the smartphone market - that's why they offloaded the mobile phone division in the first place.
In other words, I doubt very much that we will see consumer mobile phones from the not-Microsoft-owned bits of Nokia.
http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Adwaita+Cupertino?con...
This doesn't fly without MS at this point. Even if all the work was done prior to the buyout, that this comes to market when the Surface Mini keeps getting held back means there's MS all over it. Just look at the UI and say, "There's no strategy."
We can debate if it's a good strategy, but someone has obviously put time into considering placement and design of this product.
Is that the price with a 2-year contract or is this going to be a great value phone?
Will I be able to wipe this phone and install stock Android? Skype, Outlook, Bing, and all that other MS crap is unwanted. I'm actually a MS supporter and understand the need for them to create all of those services but I personally don't/won't use them.
Also, why are UK citizens against adopting the euro?
I'm only partially joking there. The Euro has had large amounts of turmoil in the past three years which has involved large bailouts of some countries. The inevitable path appears to be closer alignment of fiscal policy (including taxation and public spending) which is sovereignty that the UK public is opposed to giving up. There's a strong anti-EU sentiment in the UK with a significant proportion in favour of the UK leaving the EU.
I guess the UK sees itself as having a more stable economy that other European Union countries, so it would benefit from having a separate currency (but the other countries would be hurt by not having a very strong country adopt the euro).
The killer flaw in the Eurozone is not appreciating how useful different currencies are for dampening the effect of such differences. Greece is the classic example, where for them the Euro was too strong making them globally uncompetitive, leading to a nasty downward spiral, whereas Germany benefit from their exports being far more competitive than they would be if they were still using the DM.
I was thinking purely about efficiency at first but forgot how complex real-world economics really is.
Consider the case of Hong Kong, which has effectively adopted the US dollar (pegged in 1983). Despite the fact the economy has been growing strongly and inflation is running around 4-5%, interest rates are near zero, as dictated by the Fed.
As a result, fixed asset prices have soared, with residential real estate rising 100% over the last five years.
Those that own assets benefit and everyone else gets screwed as asset price changes feed into cost of living without wage growth to compensate. No surprise then that HK has the most unequal income distribution in the developed world. [1]
This also works the other way. So as others have pointed out, until there is a proper fiscal union (which I certainly can't see in the foreseeable future), the decision to not adopt the Euro seems wise.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equ...
Do you not watch the news?
If it's really important then I'll stumble upon it online or hear friends talking about it.
I'd rather see online news posts and people stating their opinion, then people arguing with them and providing sources as to why they're wrong or right.
Sailfish has had much better luck, no doubt due to running on top of the Linux kernel however.
If you want to please everybody you end up pleasing nobody.
So the Nokia X came way, way after...
But it's not necessarily true that Nokia X came "way after". Nokia could have put the project on hold when they started serious negotiations with Microsoft.
Many here are cheering as if this is good somehow, because Microsoft is open and what not. But look at it. It looks like Windows Phone, but is an Android phone. It exists to confuse customers.
What is the supposed end game here? "Hey, buy this and if you like it, we'll make you abandon all your Android apps, and switch to real Windows phone - because the home screen tiles look similar"?
I don't think so.
This project is more the result of a slow-moving corporate behemoth that started this project way before Microsoft announced it's buying Nokia. It was too late to turn that giant ship in time, I guess, so enjoy your mutant monster.
By the way, the startup sound is Ripley whispering "Kill me" in your ear.