Microsoft Ending its Short-Lived Tenure as Android Phone Maker
recode.net
recode.net
Running an internal project to get Android working with Microsoft's services as a hedge against Windows Mobile failing - a bit like Apple did with OSX on Intel - I can understand.
But to actually release it as a product only to kill it a short time later I don't.
Good though they may have been (I have no idea), they should never have seen the light of day. It demonstrates a lack of focus, makes it clear Microsoft isn't confident in its own platform and is a waste of resources and effort. Like the Kin.
I have a Nokia X1 and it's what you'd expect from a budget phone - low spec so a fair amount of lag. No Google Play but then the phone is aimed squarely at emerging markets (although there's a way to enable Play on the X1 anyway). The part I like most is that it's dual-SIM.
All Microsoft needs to do is come up with a way to support more than a very select set of Qualcomm SoCs. Bringing Windows Phone to the same markets as Android and maybe Firefox OS will go for is very hard if you stick to a subset of the SoCs made by one vendor.
Well, as someone who likes Major League Soccer, the inability to get MLS Live on a Windows Phone is a reason I as a user wouldn't see any point in buying a Windows Phone.
The point being that Windows Phone is kind of a failure, at least in terms of getting the ecosystem on par with iOS or Android, and it's been that way for many years with no signs of improvement. So I do see a point in a manufacturer of phones, even if you build your own phone OS like both Microsoft and Samsung do, making phones for operating systems developers actually care about.
This whole moving away from "devices and services" promise falls flat on its face in light of Microsoft investing more into Windows Phones. I don't think Microsoft has figured out that being only on 14% of devices means you should make software for other devices the focus of your company, not try to grow that 14% when the reality that this is very unlikely to happen seems kind of obvious.
I would have loved to buy a premium Nokia phone that runs Android.
You have to make compromises to hit these price points, and with WP8's memory efficiency, I think the often dramatic user-visible improvement from supporting LTE is a much bigger deal than being able to play certain memory-intensive games.
I remember when Elop was arguing that WP doesn't need to support more cores as it runs fine on a single core (when Nokia didn't have multicore SoC supplier and MS had only single core kernel in WP7). Immediately as Nokia signed Qualcomm and MS released multicore kernel in WP8, Elop started marketing the more cores, the better. I just have feeling that your argument is a different version of the same.
At that cost, the licensing fees eat up a significant chunk of profit. Not to mention that the OEMs now have a several years' of Android experience.
I'm one for Android though so I settled for a Moto G 8Gb which is just about the lowest price Android handset that actually works properly.
$50 is a more reasonable ceiling: http://www.aliexpress.com/category/5090301/mobile-phones.htm...
That said, from everything I've heard they're almost unusable.
[1] http://www.dx.com/p/m-h0rse-9500mini-w-e08-sc7710-android-4-...
Is it shitty? No, not if it's your first smartphone. Or it's the most convenient way to read Wikipedia / play Angry Birds.
>At that cost, the licensing fees eat up a significant chunk of profit.
Why go through the trouble of making your own Android phone when you make great money (some say $5 per phone, which is about $2bn) off of other people doing it.
There are absolutely huge issues with the patent system, but Microsoft's patent licensing profits are not among them.
Is this the kind of ideal use of software patents that rewards innovators and end-consumers?
But when it happens to HTC, Samsung, etc it's just: "why shouldn't they get a return from that investment?"
Microsoft (or any other company for the matter) demanding patent royalties after treating to sue a product they had no hand in producing, is wrong.
Earning more money form their patent extortion from a competitor's product than it's own implementation, it's just sad and pathetic.
They should get a return. But nothing they created contributed to Android, so they shouldn't be extorting money from Android vendors.
The patents that Microsoft has been willing to assert publicly against Android are dominated by FAT patents which describe a system for working around the limits of Microsoft's own file system. Nobody wants to use Microsoft's file system for its own merits -- plenty of free systems exist that have none of its drawbacks and Android uses them internally. Android uses FAT only to interchange information with Microsoft systems and others based on their backwards filesystem. The patent system has been abused to allow Microsoft to block compatibility without contributing anything technological. It's a classical failure mode of the patent system which was supposed to promote innovation and publication, not vendor lock in.
2. The oft-repeated "litigating instead of competing" meme is wrong. Windows Phone does compete on the merits. WP devices regularly get decent reviews. Most people who've tried them prefer the OS to Android. Personally I've seen WP work smoother on lower-specced hardware than Android on a more powerful device.
Windows Phone actually did something innovative when it came out and differentiated itself greatly from the the iPhone. Something that, you know, Android didn't bother with until Apple started suing left and right.
Arguably the only reason Android has the market share it has is because Google gives it away for free, because its search monopoly profits allow it to do so. When Microsoft did the same thing with browsers, they were being "anticompetitive", but when Google does it, it's not? If you think Google does not browbeat OEMs the way Microsoft did, look into the Skyhook lawsuit where a whole bunch of confidential licensing agreements spilled out.
3. If Google can attack Microsoft's business model, Microsoft can certainly attack Google's. People here just don't like Microsoft's attacks because they don't like patents in general. I mean, every patent ever is automatically deemed to be "broad" and "bogus", but nobody even knows how patents work.
In Q3 2013 Nokia sold 47 million feature phones (6 times more than their Lumias). In comparison, Apple sold 31 million iPhones in that time frame.
Pulling the plug on that seems crazy to me. Big opportunity for Firefox OS though, as it was created to compete at the Asha price level. If there is no competition from Nokia/MS anymore the only offering between 30-50 USD will be FFOS devices.
Unfortunately, this also closes off an avenue to Nadella to prod Windows Phone to become truly competitive as a mobile platform, and for Microsoft's ecosystem to have an in-house target for platforms other than Windows Phone.
There is a good case to be made that Amazon is a better competitor against Google's media products because Amazon's native platform is based on AOSP and development uses the Android toolchain.
Nothing against windows phone but it doesn't have the apps I'm used to and I don't really want to switch to it.
The brief experience i had with it connecting other peoples phones to the WiFi the menus didn't seem very intuitive.
(for the comically-challenged, this was a joke)