Microsoft's uncloaks Phone 8 developer preview Microsoft held its developer preview of the Windows Phone 8 operating system on Wednesday, and revealed that it is shifting the platform to share core kernel features with Windows 8 for better integration. At the rollout event in San Francisco, corporate vice president of the Windows Phone program Joe Belfiore said that …
Place your bets folks, which handset will Nokia stop supporting first;
In the UpVote corner, we have the camera phone to end all camera phones, the OS may have a few miles on the clock, but there's still life in it yet... PureView 808!!
Aaaand in the DownVote corner, we have the new flagship on the block, with clean, crisp lines, and the freshest Look and Feel around, It's the tough sell from Washington State... Lumia 900!!
Actually, sod Nokia, I'm stopping supporting *them*. I have a Lumia 800 which was only released in November '11, then there is the Lumia 900 which is newer, if you're on contract you have at least a year to go before you can upgrade. It's a kick in the teeth that the 8/900's wont be getting WP8 but will get a theme to make it look like WP8 so sod Nokia, they have lost my custom forever due to their insistence on bringing out devices then drop support after only a few months.
Oh well, maybe I can get a few quid for it on Ebay.
So I am both a MS and Nokia fan, I have a WP7 phone. But I agree with this comment, if you have just signed a 2 or even 3 year contract, you have been shafted.
That said given I was an early adopter my contract is up in 3 months, just in time for the new software and hardware :)
My 3GS went through several OS upgrade without fuss. As the man once said (ok, he said it many times), everything just worked. Even iOS6 is slated to work on the 3GS.
Will the same be true of my swish, new Galaxy S3 when the next major revision of Android is released? Somehow, I suspect not (so thank goodness ICS is good for a year or two). Samsung have no incentive to make it easy. I suspect the same is true of Microsoft's partners.
The Galaxy S3 will most certainly get the next version of Android. To think otherwise is just looking for reasons to bash Android and Samsung. Yes, Apple may do better with updating their products but it isn't like they have a large product line to support. Most Android manufacturers are now supporting devices for 18 months which is a step up from what it used to be but if they don't you can usually fall back to the community produced ROMs. It isn't an ideal option but it's still an option you won't get with Apple or MS.
I'm guessing you don't know that this is to prevent programs breaking that rely on OS version numbers. I don't understand it fully but it's something along the lines of programs only working on version 6.x and if they released Windows 7 as version 7.x it would break a lot of them for no good reason.
I don't know where to begin. Nokia and MS made a big deal out of getting the Lumia line out there after other manufacturers struggled to make a dent in the market and as a 'thank you' for buying into the Windows Phone market MS now says existing customers won't be getting the new version. Nice way to build your customer base MS!
Isn't this like saying they knew WinPho7 wasn't good enough but they wanted something in the market that wasn't Windows Mobile until they could decide on a better strategy? Regardless, what's to say next year they won't do the same with Windows Phone 9? They can offer all the promises they want but the chances are, at least in the US, that most who did buy into it will be stuck using a dead end OS and at upgrade time (or before!) will be going elsewhere. You can say what you like about Android but almost any mid-range handset released in the last few months will get the next update. Can you say the same about Nokia's? No. In fact all current Windows Phone handsets are now boned the same way Symbian was with the Nokia announcement.
This next bit I'm talking about something I don't know so this is questionable and open to correction. Doesn't having the same kernel on a phone and your main OS make it easier for malware and viruses to spread to / via phones? That was the first thing I thought when I saw they'll be using the same kernel. If so doesn't that just scream of more bad decisions? As stated, I'm clueless about this so open to correction.
Strange to think Nokia killed Symbian and other projects to concentrate on Windows Phone 7 handsets for MS and now MS have effectively killed Windows Phone 7 handsets and all of Nokia's current lineup when it seemed to be gaining traction. No wonder MS were so quiet over updating to 8 on current handsets, they've likely been dreading this information coming out.
Golden rules about Microsoft's dissemination of information:
When Microsoft is very quiet about something, that means that the answer is negative but it doesn't want the people to know.
When Microsoft is very noisy/upbeat about something, that thing is probably hyped out of proportion.
Really ? The Windows phone I have for work is just a phone. Not one of the apps I would have wanted, which is available for iOS and Android is available for WP7. It can't even send a contact by bluetooth FFS. (Apparently this "may" come with Apollo, according to wpforums).
I got the wife a little HTC Wildfire S for Xmas, and it's an amazing piece of kit, thanks to the apps you can get.
I don't know about him, but here are some of mine:
AdAway, Titanium Backup, Angry Birds space, HD Widgets or BeWeather, a good dropbox or box client that can sync my photos automatically (skydrive doesn't cut it, too cumbersome to work with linux), google plus, fring or nimbuzz, a good voip app, a decent gmail client, etc...
"AdAway, Titanium Backup, Angry Birds space".
Check. Ad removal is non-existent. Being a wp7 user it also struck me as odd but backups... non-existent. Angry Birds Space; yups... As in nope, but "yups; you're right there".
"HD Widgets or BeWeather"
This particular app. isn't available to my knowledge, but in all fairness there are plenty of very good alternatives. My personal favourite being WeatherMaster (which GPS location weather works quite well IMO).
"a good dropbox or box client that can sync my photos automatically (skydrive doesn't cut it, too cumbersome to work with linux)"
Cumbersome? You do realize that you can access SkyDrive from within Linux using any decent WebDAV client? You should easily be able to access this using KDE or Gnome filemanagers.
"Google plus, fring or nimbuzz"
Both aren't supported, correct. However, when it comes to IM and such there is the alternative to utilize Live's messenger or Facebooks chat features. Not the same, you're right there, but I figured I'd mention it nonetheless.
"VoIP app"
There is Skype but... With the limitation that it cannot receive incoming calls as if they were normal calls (app doesn't continue to run in the background).
"Decent gmail client"
GMail / Google Mail is natively supported by the OS.
However; not being familiar with gmail myself keep in mind that I have no idea if you refer to specific features which could very well be supported in a native gmail client and not in the default WP7 mailclients. In all honesty; wp7 mail clients have some pro's (IMO) but also con's (for example; you can't easily use your gmail account and tell it to use "mydomain.com" as sender because it will force you to use your gmail alias; even though "mydomain.com" can also be mapped to gmail).
Thanks for your comment!
Ah the old "why would you *want* to ?" school of hiding your products deficiencies. On that basis, why have any functionality in anything ?
I had a contact in my windows phone I wanted to share with my wife (android phone). So I started going into the contacts menu, and pretty soon discovered there was no "Send to" menu, let alone "Send to using bluetooth".
Seriously. NO ****ING way to send a contact from one phone to another. Not by text. Not by Bluetooth.
I can call that contact. I can email them. But can I send them as a vcard. No. And because my wife is partially sighted, I had to get her phone, and mine, and transfer the number stone-age style.
That alone - quite apart from anything else going on with Windows Phone - should have told people all they need to know.
\the little sales WP7 had (strange how all the talk from Nokia and MS has stopped about how well the phones are selling) are dead - who wants a phone that is the end of line. At least Apple and Android do not kill the platform every few years and start over (MS seams to be having a hard time getting it right)
Second it is a phone, not a desktop and no one cares if it is running the same OS as their desktop. Well maybe the few techo geeks here like to go home and curl up with a nice spreadsheet or write code on a 4 inch screen.
MS is way to focused on the "windows everywhere" religion and not enough on designing phones that 99.9% of the world want. The world has moved on and MS is fading into the past.
Amen. My old Desire was the best phone I ever owned but I was ready to give WinPho a whirl only to find it didn't support external storage. That's a deal breaker for me - got a cheap HTC One V instead and am frankly regretting it a bit (the web browser is pretty poor - which is pretty much the main thing I use it for).
Yup, I'm trying out Dolphin now. I think that the issue is really one of the phone being under-powered, though. Every time I double tap to resize it hangs for a few seconds (sometimes up to ten to fifteen seconds on the stock browser, which is deeply tedious).
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"Desktop Windows either loads a single-CPU or a multi-CPU at startup depending on the hardware"
Only if you're still running Windows NT 4.0 or earlier, as since Windows 2000 we have a unified HAL that serves single-processor/-core and multi-processor/-core equally.
All the fun to be had baiting the Microsoft apologists, all now frantically treading air cartoon style after the ground was snatched from under them, distracts from the big news here.
Microsoft just administered the killing blow to Nokia. Who in their right mind will buy todays Lumias now? This is the 'burning platform' all over again. Except this time they have stock sitting unsold in warehouses waiting for a loss making fire sale.
When it hits $50 I might even buy one as a keepsake.
Screw the Lumia phones and buy the real keepsake: Nokia 808 PureView. A high-end camera that happens to let you make phone calls and surf the web... what's there to dislike about it?
And if you like the Lumia 800/900 form factor, go grab a Nokia N9.
Let the Windows phones collect dust on the shelves, in the warehouses and in the bargain bins.
My sister used to work as a marketing droid for the Windows Phone division. She still says that iPhones 'are all fart and no poo'. Personally I think that's the probably more complimentary. The first time she said that was the first day I realised my sister is in fact an idiot. Some of the MS PR she forwarded to me was comical, the way they trimmed quotes to make things sound good... shocking. Bought every line of MS stuff... even seemed to think Ballmer knew what he was doing.
Whilst I have no great love for Apple, they have created a system that does work for many... just not my preference. I do tire of my mates attacking each other over phone preferences. It's a blasted phone!
I'm a Nokia owner, but I'm not burnt. You see, my OS is supported till 2016* unlike WP7 which appears to be supported just for the next few months.
* Unless Nokia goes bankrupt or Elop manages to take an even worse decision than he has done already, he's probably capable of killing Symbian off now just so he can claim that WP7 was supported for longer.
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