So much noise on WinMob, but Microsoft's silent on lovely WinPhone I came to Barcelona to take the pulse of Windows Phone - which I’ll confess I've grown to like quite a bit - I came away trying to make sense of the following paradox. A decade ago, and for some years either side, Microsoft had a terrible mobile device platform but noisily insisted it would succeed. Perhaps because it was …
Perhaps, but they are clearly idiots copying Sony from 2011..
" Nokia has a cardboard pyramid with a small aperture to show the Lumia 920’s capabilities in low light conditions."
http://www.xperiablog.net/2011/02/16/great-demo-shows-off-exmor-r’s-low-light-camera-abilities-video/
Anyone that's used a wide range of phone (and not just Apple or Samsung) will know that Nokia's camera performance claims are totally overrated compared to where Sony was even 2 years ago.
The Xperia Arc from 2011 is roughly onpar with the Lumia 920. The latest Xperia Z (which costs the same price as the Lumia 920) is miles ahead
With message alerts I assume you're referring to broadcast messages aka CB messages?
Because that's supported, on Windows Phone 7.5 no less. However, there is a caveat here; many WinPhones have specific features not supported by the OS itself but provided by the manufacturer. To make it even easier on the customer there's no way to find out if a certain feature is out of the box or not..
So; on my Samsung Windows Phone (Omnia W) I have the option "Advanced text messaging" located under the 'Settings'. There I pick anything I'd need; from channels, to countries.
People might get confused and think that apps will run faster on a phone with multicores. People don't realize multicore is barely supported by any mobile OS and what is there is bloody hard for devs to implement so they don't bother
Supporting multiple cores is as simple as spawning some threads. It obvious requires some understanding of multithreading (e.g. synchronization, race conditions, semaphores etc.) but no more than any other platform.
Anyway, even if your app is single threaded, it is still competing with the display, system services as well as other background activities for CPU time. More cores means the experience feels smoother. Even Windows Phones acknowledge that or they wouldn't be dual core - and that's in a system where *only* the foreground app is active.
Yeah, playing for better stock options when they get bought.
What chuffing differentiation? WinPhone == Nokia to me and no doubt many others.
Oh my, the camera on the Nokia telephone is so much better than… a good camera on a phone is now taken as a given but if I want a really good camera then I buy a camera. The phone stuff and apps are more important.
Firefox and Tizen are very welcome alternatives to the Google juggernault, I hope they will get it right.
Interestingly enough Firefox, Tizen and Windows Phone's best chances are the developping countries if you ask me, where potential customers are more Platform agnostic and do not have a huge iOS or Android bias yet.
Windows Phone must be an embarrassment, quite clearly not ready for prime-time. Anyone that's owned one and is truthful will know this.
Whilst it LOOKS nice, that's really about it, everything else is sub-par. Battery Life, yep running a cutdown Windows kernel really takes it's toll there. Lagginess - ditto.
Bugs, don't even get me started on the bugs. You should expect random reboots several times a day. You should expect the proximity sensor to have a mind of it's own, making it tiresome to use in-call keyboard, several times it's been impossible to hang-up a call, having to rely on the other person to hang up, the touchscreen simply didn't respond at the end of the call, and the power button didn't wake the screen either.
Then there is the apps (or lackof). Very few companies even have plans for Windows Phone. There isn't iPlayer or BBC Sport apps (and won't be, unless Microsoft drive up with a dumper-truck of cash and free devices like Apple do), most of your other major apps are missing too.
As a phone, it's really poor, as a smartphone it's even worse.
THAT is why consumers have gone elsewhere. When you can buy a Nexus4, SIM-Free for £230, and it's 10 times a better phone than any Lumia, including the 920 (camera excluded), or if you care about the camera, you can buy an Xperia Z for about the same price and still end up with a MUCH better camera than the 920 and a MUCH better phone
consumers are clearly shop savvy...
My £150 WP lasts about a week between charges and has rebooted perhaps 4 times in the 6 months I've had it - I'd rather it rebooted than just locked up :)
Why does it need an iPlayer app, isn't iPlayer going HTML5 which is supported in IE10 (this is a guess I haven't tried).
It's got niggles and flaws but I've not really spotted bugs as such.
Sorry but you clearly don't know what WP is aimed at. It is communication centric, people hub for seeing what people are posting on Facebook and other sites.
Even going into someone's contact entry lets you swipe across to their pictures and view their pictures from various sources.
It has an interface that is fairly unique, you can easily move a conversation from SMS to Facebook or email. Something that Palm did until HP killed them off.
It is an optimal communication device, not a dumb app launcher like iOS and Android.
It is an optimal communication device, not a dumb app launcher like iOS and Android.
I'd suggest you've never used Android's widgets. You know, those things that Microsoft ripped off, limited to blocky squares and called "tiles"?
You want the mail icon to show you how many unread mails? It does that.
You want your contacts all on a home page of their own complete with pictures? Not hard.
Perhaps a media player with its controls on the widget?
A flashlight app that works by tapping the widget rather than launching an app?
Social networking widgets? Device hardware toggle widgets? Calender widgets? Map widgets? Browser widgets? Widgets for things you'd never have even thought of?
All there, you just need to look for them. I suggest long-pressing the home screen and selecting "widgets". Or just selecting "widgets" from the top of the app drawer on an ICS or greater tablet. The phone manufacturer has likely included some. The Play Store has a load more.
And Beautiful Widgets is rather nice.
Not sure about your other points, but the can't-hang-up problem is something I've also heard of from users of Windows phones.
One person asked me to have a look to see if I could figure it out, but the phone seemed to work fine when we tested it calling both landlines and other mobiles, so it's likely one of those bugs that shows itself enough to be extremely irritating, but too intermittently to actually get fixed.
What a load of bollocks. I'd suggest that you've never actually seen or used a Windows Phone. I've had a 7.x and currently have a WP 8 from Nokia. I know about eight or nine people who have them and no-one has complaing about anything you've mentioned.
I've never seen a random reboot. I've never had a problem with proximity detection. There are plenty of apps, no BBC released iplayer, but there are alternatives. As a phone it's just fine.
If you want me to carry on with all the problems, I can.
Bluetooth audio streaming, VERY erratic, common disconnects to both speakers and headphones, lots of stuttering of the audio playback. LED flash stuck on after taking a picture on a couple of occasions, dismal platform integration ("lets call it Xbox, and hope users think they are getting Xbox Live on their phone"), did I mention the total lack of apps?
I'm sure some people will convince themselves that they didn't buy into a dead platform, and equally, there will be posts from Microsoft's viral marketing team pretending that everything is fine, but the reality is, Microsoft HAVE dropped in marketshare from the dismal 1,7% they had the previous year, it's now closer to 1%, and the platform is less relevant than ever.
It's a two horse race, and as much as Microsoft and Blackberry shareholders don't want to admit it, that's how it is.
I would actually give Blackberry more chance of making a 3rd place that Microsoft given the total lack of interest show by consumers for this years incarnation of Microsoft's ever changing mobile strategy.
sounds like you have a dud phone there. Which one was it you said you had..?
I'm sure you are not just making up a laundry list of every problem that you think you have read about on the internet despite no personal experience, in an attempt to score some unspecified points from somewhere because that would ridiculous.
I had a Lumia 820 and a Lumia 920 at different times. Neither of them bought thankfully, work gave them to me. (Microsoft are throwing them at us like they are sweeties, they are so desperate for us to push them out to unsuspecting punters). Both phones suffered pretty much the same faults. (the 920 didn't stutter as much when Bluetooth streaming would be the only real difference I spotted).
It's clearly NOT a single bad phone, and the devices were provided 4 months apart, and both suffered pretty much the same bugs and faults. I never even got into the real usability problems with Windows Phone.
We don't push them, as we know the punters will be straight back. Sell them a iphone, Galaxy, Xperia, HTC One whatever, and they will be happy punters. Sell them a Windows Phone = grief.
Consumers aren't idiots. 90% of them don't walk into a phone shop without doing some research, be it online, or more often talking to a tech-savvy friend or relative. The very few people that want a Windows Phone on entering the shop, are soon dissuaded when you show them the other better products on offer that are far more suited to their needs.
Again, I've not seen a single one of the problems you're seeing. I use the phone to stream music/podcasts in the car, it also does hands free through bluetooth with no problem. The platform integration is excellent, that's the whole point.
There are loads of apps, certainly there's been one for anything I care about, yes you did mention it, but you only suggested that the iplayer app wasn't there, which others do you want?
Assuming you're not just making this up, you've had a very bad phone, but as I've never heard of any other phones behaving like this, so I can only assume that it's a dodgy individual device, rather than anything else.
He was probably referring to:
Speedtest.net,
All of the catch up TV app,
Foreign newspaper apps,
Native Youtube app,
his banking app (from any bank)
the clubcard app from his supermarket of choice,
Google Maps,
a proper Push based Gmail.
Basically there is absolutely zilch on the platform.
Really?
YouTube seems to work as well as I want on my WP8, anyway it's Google who are actively preventing 100% functionality.
There is an alternative to Google Maps in the Nokia offering, it's much, much better.
Again push GMail doesn't work because Google took their bat and ball away.
The rest - That's pretty much clutching at straws, if you want them, fine don't get a WP, but really Speedtest app, TV catch up apps, clubcard apps? I'd give you banking apps, however there is a web browser that seems to do the job for me (Co-op).
speedtest.net?
> Again push GMail doesn't work because Google took their bat and ball away.
My understanding of this is that to push to WP8 requires a protocol that Google has to pay MS for. As MS won't let Google use it for free for MS phones then Google will not subsidize this usage. I understand that you can get if you pay for a subscription rather than the free service.
Seconded Neil B
Myself and my wife both have HTC Trophy phones. Not the biggest, newest or shiniest but definitely work well in all regards that we use them for - which is usually texting or the Mrs sending me pictures of the children doing something (usually hilarious).
Wife discovered the calendar functions yesterday - so the calendar on my phone is going to get a solid hammering in the near future (with things like Kindergarten lunches and the like...)
Although I do have to say that one of the OS updates seemingly broke the true heading API call for the compass. "Raw Compass Data" showed the compass itself was still functioning perfectly, but the true heading value was very out (North became West) which appears to be an Integer wraparound issue of some description.
Also - don't feed the trolls. Hit them with a shovel instead.
Just wondering, which phone and network are you on?
i've had an Omnia 7 on Orange / EE for about 2 years now and have not had any of the issues you're mentioning. the battery lasts about a day with moderate / heavy usage, but once the battery saver kicks in it stretches the last 20% out to a couple of days (albeit with light usage).
not had random reboots, nor any problems with the screen or sensor. Performance from it has been really good, smooth and reliable, even though it is "only" on a single-core 1GHz chip (which i know seems to put a lot of people off, even though performace is still good).
The app sitiuation is often mentioned, but i've not really noticed anything that i am missing (though i admit, iPlayer would be nice).
as for cost, i'm afraid that i just don't see your point. Last week, o2 were selling the lumia 620 for £120. for the shopping around that i have been doing recently, i don't think that you would be able to get a comparable android phone for that.
I've had an Omnia 7 since launch (October 2010?) and apart from a bit of screen burn it's been pretty much faultless and still used daily. Just waiting for the Win 8 prices to drop, which seems to be happening, as well as that O2 deal you mention Phones4U are doing a HTC Win8 phone for £120 in store.
Really? I've got an HTC HD7, a Lumia 800 and a Lumia 820 - I use these for development, so while they don't get the same workload as my day-to-day device, they do go through periods of hard use when I'm testing.
I've had a few glitches here and there, but nothing to the scale you're implying in terms of lagginess, bugs, reboots and so forth. Yes, I'll admit that there are a lot fewer apps out there, but all the stuff I would use day-to-day is pretty much covered - and you have to remember that the WinPhone is a) a lot younger in it's lifecycle than iPhone and Android and b) is trying to gain a hold in an already well populated market.
Plenty of trollbait in the article, I'll agree, and there's still room for improvement on the WinPhone platform, but what you're saying sounds a lot like FUD-spreading to me...
Perhaps they realise lots of people wouldn't want a Microsoft system on their phones, regardless of how good it was? There's just a common dislike to the brand thanks to their desktop garbage. Besides, I would be highly surprised if I was the only punter to whom WP is so ugly that there's really zero inclination to try it even far enough to see if it works well or not.
You're definitely not the only one that finds WP outstandingly ugly (fisher price, poor UI design, lousy repeatability and consistency). Which is a shame really, as some of the underlying concepts are quite good.
If they had actually put a good looking UI on the phone (a skin really), tidied up the inconsistencies, not foisted sodding Bing and Xbox Live everywhere you looked it would be a good phone OS (not that Apple or Google are angels on this regard either). Yes, there are crashes and odd things that happen, but as long as you get a good build quality phone then these don't happen too often so they appear to be more spurious hardware related issues than direct OS problems. There are fundamental holes in the OS functionality compared to other phone OSes, as have already been pointed out here, and unfortunately the locked down nature prevents most of them being resolved by 3rd party apps, but this is also true of some other phone OSes as well. While Android is pretty open, some things need the kernel to handle and not at the application layer and while you can install complete custom versions of Android, this is beyond most users.
After all the attacks on Elop, it seems he hasn't done a bad job. People are once again aware of Nokia. Their product range is roughly 6 months ahead of BlackBerry.
And Microsoft may be right. Their name is a bit of a turnoff for a lot of people. But who other than a few IT people really care what OS a phone is running? Better to let the manufacturers promote their wares.
Mrs Dan 55 mentioned a special offer for some Lumia model a few months back. Without going too much into specifics I said no way would I want a phone with Windows and asked her whatever possessed her to think I did? Her reply was I liked strange things like that as I'm an IT geek. In return I asked her if she would want a phone with Windows and her reply was no, definitely not.
The average customer may not know technically that WP8 is a dog's breakfast of MS technologies which is still missing key functionality but they do know that Windows is a byword for a world of anguish and annoyance on computers and it can easily be avoided on phones.
The best thing MS ever did was not mention Microsoft or Windows when marketing the XBox. Amazing how they managed to forget in such a short space of time.
Citation
Kantar Worldpanel’s December smartphone market share numbers are out... Windows Phone’s [US] market share also ticked down to 2.6% in December from 2.7% in November... it is surprising not to see a substantial boost in Windows share considering the marketing support and new devices from AT&T.
(http://bgr.com/2013/01/22/smartphone-market-share-us-december-2012-301514/)
Market share drop can be caused by two things - negative growth, or the market as a whole growing faster than the specific product.
At the moment, WinPhone is still relatively young, and I think it's too early to write it off completely, regardless of what the anti-Microsoft brigade says. Another year or so, I think, and then we'll see where things are... after all, it took Android a good 3 years to take off, and that was with a much less saturated market.
> Neither of those started on seven, you dolt.
Nor did Microsoft's phone devices. WP7 had the same underlying core as WM6.x so it was just an increment to the series and had the next number. The fact that MS dumped on WP6.x users and developers by making 7 incompatible at the app level and at the hardware level so no WM6 phone nor app could be upgraded to 7 did not make it a new system, it just showed users that MS doesn't care about them. Then they did the same to WP7 users and developers.
@Richard Plinston - which way do you want it?
Either it started on 7 or, as you say, because 7 was built on CE (the core of WM6.x and previous), it started on... 8. Which is not built on CE and came out in November 2012.
I mean, you can play the picky-picky game in an effort to score cheap points if you like but even doing so won't change the reality of the situation. Which is that a) you pretty much always post pseudo-technical badly thought-out and often untrue critiques of WP and b) you're wrong.
> Either it started on 7 or, as you say, because 7 was built on CE (the core of WM6.x and previous), it started on... 8. Which is not built on CE and came out in November 2012.
Microsoft smartphones started in 2002. As you, say, every few years MS dumps the users and developers and starts again. They did that with 'Pocket PC', with WM5, with WM 6.5, with Kin, with WP7. And they could do it again.
You point out that 'Android took a couple of years' and then project this into claiming that WP has taken (if WP7 is the start) or will take (if WP8 is the start) a couple of years and then will replicate Android's grow.
The counter to this is that many products took a couple of years and then failed completely. Some might even say that WP7 was one of those given that just a year ago it was projected to have 9% for 2012 and now it is dead, replaced, as you say, by another different system.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/19/isuppli-agrees-with-idc-gartner-windows-phone-to-surpass-ios-by-2015/
> a) you pretty much always post pseudo-technical badly thought-out and often untrue critiques of WP and b) you're wrong.
Stamping your little feet and calling others 'dolts' because they don't agree with you is not going to raise your ratings here.
sniff* I thought winmob was actually pretty decent if you were a bit geeky. It was pretty powerful, you could shoot, process raws and email them all from a phone strapped to your leg. At the time there wasn't anything else that could do it, even umpc's were hamstrung by poor battery life and the need for additional connectivity.
WinPho, seems like they rushed it out and are running to catch up. I like it, its far more consumer orientated than winmob (which was always a nerdy geek business toy) which is a good call. It has a great interface (until you stick it on a desktop) and some decent hardware. They probably need to work on adopting higher screen resolutions but otherwise they have a chance at it working out long term. Good luck to them, they should keep Google and Apple more honest than they are.
I agree. It wasn't a "terrible product".
Ok, it was pretty bloody dreadful OOB, but once you added a sensible skin to it (like SPB's excellent Mobile Shell), it was fine. You could hack it, fiddle with it, load what you wanted onto it and there was a healhy community cooking updated ROMs for most devices. I have to suspect that MS tacitly supported this latter, as there was a never ending source of image leaks from Redmond to help it along.
Funnily enough it was very like Android. Uncannily so with said SPB Mobile Shell installed as the stock Android UI looks suspiciously similar, to the extent that if SPB were Apple I'd have expected the lawsuit by now. Moving from WinMo with Mobile Shell to Android was a fairly seamless experience, once I'd found MyPhoneExplorer which does a sterling job of substituting for ActiveSync.
For some reason, the new WinPho platform seems to have left its user base to Android and set off down the iPhone / Blackberry route of total lockdown. I suspect that may be due to WinMo's (and to a lesser extent, Android's) achilles heel, dependancy on the OEMs to ship updates and the resulting perception that the platform was unstable. Instability was invariably caused by shite OEM driver implementations and the fact that OEM updates were like hen's teeth meant you were usually stuck with the cockups supplied.
And there we have the phone OS conundrum. If you wish to push updates centrally, you need to provide very little leeway on hardware. If you allow any hardware and hand the driver side over to the OEMs, you leave your user base at the mercy of a bunch of tossers who see work invested in updating anything bar their latest offerings as money down the drain.
I was sent a Win 7 phone to try by O2 when they first came out.
It was ok. Not great, but not bad either. Nothing to prize me away from my existing choice.
One thing though I've never understood with MS on this one - Win 7 phone adopters who took a chance and bought in early got royally screwed by no upgrade path (I assume this is still the same). Nice on MS. Kick the very people who were trying to support you.
Windows CE (the basis for WP7) was not multi-core capable. They could have re-engineered it such that it was at a vast cost or use the new Windows 8 kernel which was stable, ready and has more support for hardware.
A single core would never handle the new kernel. They could have done an Apple and released a snail slow update for WP7 phones, but that would just mean as many complaints as not releasing an update.
I consider NOT having NFC a positive point.
NFC == No Frigging Chance that I'll ever use it on a phone or pay-by-bonk on anything other than a pre-paid card.
If you have ever had your bank account emptied by some hacker then you will probably agree with me.
Luckily this hacker was an idiot and I got all my money back due to the fact that there was no way I could have spent £5000 in Harrods when I was half a planet away and the bank records proved it.
Just wait until the tube is full of people syphoning a few pence of everyone in their rush hour train. Then lets see how long this lasts.
I agree completely with TonyJ.
They did screw over customers with Win Phone 7.
I seem remember all the promises when it got released that WinPho 7 wasn't at all like Android, and you would get continuous upgrades to the latest version of WinPho no matter which manufacturer you were using*
*Until the next Major OS release comes along. Then we'll dump you like a ton of bricks.
I used to love Windows Mobile and have had a fair few WinMo phones dating back to the good old Orange SPV (HTC Canary), but I wouldn't touch WinPho with a bargepole now.
So far WP7 units are still getting updates and patches. They are not getting an UPGRADE to WP8. Acceptable if the updates come for 2 years after "end of production"(2) and so far it looks that way. Compare to Android where top of the line phones get abandoned as soon as the follow up is announced(3)
An Upgrade is needed in Android since elder versions basically get abandoned when it comes to patches so you either change to stuff like CyanoGen (1) or hope that you get the Upgrade. With WP it is more the "Windows way" where a version gets patches for x years but if you want the new version - buy a new licence.
(1) That has other problems. Including unwanted functions (The last was detected quickly but made it out) and lack of support for some functions
(2) Typical contract length
(3) Note 1 has a serious bug and is still stuck at Android 4.0.x. And it is one of the "not fully supported by CM" units. Thanks, Samsung
I have been very satisfied with my HTC Titan from the start (except for the non-upgradability to WP8) and I still think integration with social networks and practicality of use of WP is second to none, with a fantastic bing search, notably local search, almost always right on) and absolutely great free applications such as bing translator, which frankly is a jewel, not even counting that you do indeed need very few "general apps" as WP7.8/8 is absolutely sufficient for many tasks.
Now an acquaintance needed a new smartphone and based on her budget and excellent reviews, I recommended her a Nokia 620. But in the end she chose to go with a similarly priced HTC android phone because she feared it would be too hard to learn WP (of course the salesman in the phone shop didn't even care to demo WP8) and because she was told by the salesman Android had much more apps (she uses a single store app, a game which is indeed also available on WP8 for the same price).
That's how hard it is to get people to even consider or try your product. So as you wrote I think that without a very big marketing push, and huge financial incentives for salesmen, it will be very hard for the WP ecosystem to grow, despite outstanding products availability, and despite perfectly competitive prices.
I had a very similar experience recently - my girlfriend, a long time iPhone user asked me one day if I'd ever heard of Nokia Lumia. I laughed as i actually had a Lumia 710 for a while (really liked it but managed to snag an N9 so decided to sell it)...she had obviously not really taken any notice at the time. Anyway, she'd been demoed a Lumia 920 by a client and was really impressed and decided she wanted one...but when it came to the crunch , she just couldn't get away from the iPhone saying “well...i know it and it's just simple and easy”.
i completely agree that it is really hard for Nokia to get people to switch...but they have gained ground because more and more people seem aware of Nokia Lumias now - a year ago my girlfriend would not have known what Lumia was (and she works in tech marketing )...it's looking much better for Nokia now, they just need people to take that last step. I genuinely think WinPho Nokia are a much better fit for people shopping in the mid-low end of Android devices, so hopefully their new lower priced models will make a decent impact
So as you wrote I think that without a very big marketing push, and huge financial incentives for salesmen, it will be very hard for the WP ecosystem to grow, despite outstanding products availability, and despite perfectly competitive prices.
err... correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't Microsoft financed a HUGE and unprecedented marketing push for Windows phones that has so far cost them hundreds of millions of pounds??
My problem with the iPad wasn't that it was an iPad. It was that I was expecting something more like a Mac and less like a games console.
Maybe at £500 I was being optimistic about something like that coming from Apple.
You're having a laugh aren't you?
Ads for Windows Phone 7 and then 8 have been plastered everywhere, websites, billboards etc. There was a reported $0.5million marketing budget for Windows Phone 7 and $1million+ for windows phone 8.
There were also reports of a great deal of money pushed towards partners such as Nokia for their Lumia launches. Which through empirical evidence would appear to be true. Microsoft are pushing money into commission for sales staff to sell the phones and app developers to promote their apps. At one point almost every phone store was running big Windows Phone 8 or Lumia displays.
I would readily believe that the marketing budget for Microsoft Phones outstrips Android phones and iPhone put together.
Quite a few tech companies are spending less on trade shows and opting to spend the money on their own events instead. Your product doesn't then get lost the mass of news that floods out and you can time your announcements strategically when you want to rather than when the show's date is.
The problem is despite all this money being put into it, it just isn't selling. You can't force consumers with a free choice to choose a phone they don't want to buy. Advocates for the platform claim it is amazing but this doesn't translate to sales, so maybe consumers are a little more savvy than the "journalists" and "respected tech reviewers"?
Android and iPhone sold due to their platform, their word-of-mouth marketing, their features and their position in the market. As a general rule most sections of the market have rejected Windows Phone 8, this doesn't mean it is dead.
As the apps grow, as the system gets better as more people buy it it might gain a bit of traction. But to say it's because Microsoft or its partners haven't tried or aren't trying is disingenuous.
I have gained the impression that it's the overall shit-fest of bad software, global price gouging, stupid improvements to the cash cow... and a ton of other crap - that really has resulted in a lot of people going "Uggghh Microsoft? Uhhh fuck that" - towards anything Microsoft.
The phone being regarded as another bucket of Microsofts regurgitated bullshit.
Just out of curiosity, how do you know it doesn't have one?
Because even when you deliberately hack the firmware so that it asks for OS disks (an NT error message), it doesn't bluescreen. It's a black screen that nobody who hasn't hacked their firmware (badly) will ever see.
The bottom line with WP8 is that as with WP7 they are just not developing it quickly enough.
I bought into WP7 in Jan 2011 shortly after release, the UI was like a breath of fresh air but it was horribly limited in many ways. Part of the reason I took the gamble was Microsoft's promises of regular updates and I wanted to see the platform grow and improve. But they took so long to deliver 7.5, especially with their ridiculous rollout process that I got fed up and bought Android.
Then the early adopters get shafted with no path to WP8. And WP8 itself is so similar to WP7.5 that it's not worth getting excited about. They might have rewritten it on a new core OS, but the experience of using it has hardly changed.
They urgently need things like a proper notification system, multiple pages of tiles (that can be coloured differently), and a less simplistic app list screen.
Work gave me a Lumia 800 and it's a really nice phone, but I got so sick of waiting for the 7.8 upgrade to roll out I had to install it manually via Nokia Care Suite which wiped the phone.
And then there's the shortage of apps...
"Another grumble is that change is slow"
But first!
What operating system is used on those handheld devices in Tesco used to monitor shelf stock movements and relay that information (automagically?) to some locally centric stock controller?
From not too afar they sound like WinCE to me - even look a little bit like it too.
Now then,"Another grumble is that change is slow"
Yes, partly true for Nokia, Motorola, ... but not so partly true for Apple and iPhone, iPod and iPad?
The secret seems to be "catching the imagination and aspirations of the public to the degree required for lots of people to choose to part with some of their hard earned dish, no?"
Andrew, I'm shocked that you are only now waking up to the clusterfuck of the Windows 8 release, or Vista 2.0 as it might be better known as. Fucking up the desktop with pretend tablet integration really damaged the brand: enterprises won't touch and everyone is now worried about losing their investment and inverse lockout- "I have Office, will it work on this device?" The phones got hit in the fallout. You might think it's a wonderful OS but I've read very few other positive reviews.
By all means release Metro as the default GUI for the mobile devices, make it optional and release IE 10 for Windows 7 at the same time as for Windows 8. It's not that hard but it's the difference between Apple and Microsoft. Mac OS is looking more and more like IOS but it isn't IOS. I-Tunes (the IE of the Mac world) is released simultaneously for all platforms, and mobile and desktop product releases are deliberately separate.
"Andrew, I'm shocked that you are only now waking up to the clusterfuck of the Windows 8 release"
Ahem, ahem. I guess you've not seen one of Andrew's previous articles about Windows 8 - in which he described the new OS as "a rather an elaborate kind of torture".
C.
I do remember reading it but I chose the word clusterfuck specifically because of the fallout of the very poor handling of what could have a been a nice update for Windows 7. The phones were collateral damage in the Surface debacle that did nothing to Apple or Android sales but seriously undermined Microsoft's reputation, well, across the board (consumers, manufacturers, enterprises and software developers) really.
The bottom line: Andrew likes his Lumia, I like my Samsung Wave (Bada still sells more than WinPhone) but neither bring enough to the game to change it.
...hardly anyone in the real world seems interested. Maybe there's a message here for reviewers and analysts.
Just a thought...
I subscribe GrecC words. The reporter whants to deny the reality no matter what. At the time of the first Android phone, what we have? iOS, Symbian and Windows 6.5. The carriers started to hate Apple and one manufacturer, HTC, started to release good android phones. Samgung jumped in, Sony Ericsson, LG...why? No iOS to license, symbian messed by Nokia...Windows mobile 6.5?? What a joke. Everyone learned a lesson, deal with Microsoft and you are screwed. So Andrew, you can praise Windows Phone and badmouth any other phone OS (iOS exception of course). but you will go nowhere. A simple thing like not having a file manager just puzzle people who purchased a Windows Phone. I know that because my co-workers bang on my door asking for help. And if you want to manage your phone on windows, you need Zune. More and more layers of bloatware.
A simple thing like not having a file manager just puzzle people who purchased a Windows Phone. I know that because my co-workers bang on my door asking for help. And if you want to manage your phone on windows, you need Zune.
This! +1, spot on.
I really like my Omnia W, it does what I need it to do (though in all honesty I do wish it could sync a little more data) but I hardly update my media contents because, as you very well mentioned here, that part is totally fucked up.
The reason I'm responding is that your message could make people think that you can then use Zune to somehow copy files back and forth but you can't even do that :(
Instead you need to point Zune to a folder on your PC after which it'll keep that folder synced with your phone. Which shows the completely screwed up design; I don't want each and every one of my mp3 files to be stored on my phone. As such I can't simply tell Zune "there's my music, go sync".
But you also can't easily tell Zune "there's my music, I want this, that and that". Because Zune doesn't work with files and folders; it'll use the information retrieved from the MP3 files. So now you need to somehow give your MP3 files some info so that you know what you have, THEN copy it over. I don't have that because I didn't care for that; I ripped some of my CD's and simply let a player randomly play files (these are files from a time before we had id3.org and such).
As such you'll soon find out that the easiest way to do all that is to copy your stuff to a folder, point Zune to it and then try to get it to copy stuff. More than often it won't because you don't copy; you synchronize. That translates to: "You click a button and hope that it'll copy the media across that you want, but there's no way to be sure but to disconnect the phone and see for yourself".
And don't get me started on "What happens when you discovered that you wanted that extra file to be included afterwards?". Zune will eventually spot the changes; just not one minute after you copied a file to a directory. What idiot thinks that I want to wait 5 minutes for Zune to cope? I want my media copied NOW.
SO you're eventually done, all is well. Because you don't need the bloat you remove the folder which you made with all the mp3 files because there's not much sense keeping the same files on 2 places at once. Waste of space, no ?
And then, several months later, you connect your phone somewhat casually to your PC to charge it. Normally you'd use the adapter but you're in a hurry; you simply take the adapter with you. Then sitting in the bus you want to listen to a nice piece of music...
WTF?!
All of that got neatly synchronized and therefor is now also no longer available on your phone, just like its gone on your PC. Microsoft couldn't have made it any easier; apart from the fact of course that I didn't WANT my files to get removed like that.
Zune is sheer hell. Yet required for WinPhone, go figure :(
"Not for Windows Phone 8, which shows up as a device which you can drag and drop to/from."
Yeah, I know that, played with a Lumia 800?...but you know, I had the same stupid problem again, installing certs...no file manager, no access to the files.
If you want to use a locally installed cert here are three options:
Skydrive it onto the device.
Email it to the device with a temporary account (say outlook.com or gmail etc.)
Connect to a local mail server on a local wifi network and mail it to the user.
There are also some file manager apps, but I've not tried these.
The 3 first steps are forbidden. Please, can you point me any of those file manager apps? I looked at the Store and no one was present. And not so long ago I read this thread...
http://forums.wpcentral.com/windows-phone-apps/212016-do-you-want-windows-phone-8-file-explorer-manager.html
"The paradox is this: when Microsoft had a terrible product (except perhaps as a second device, or as an enterprise terminal) it was a lot noisier than it is today. But Microsoft doesn’t do noisy any more."
I'm sorry but I just don't see it. Because you could also turn this around: MIcrosoft makes noise when introducing new products (which, as we all know, are usually "so so") and makes less noise when releasing newer versions of the same product.
And when talking about the Windows Phone; have you already forgotten about that huge Winphone being placed in (iirc) New York where all sorts of stuff went down? Or the several "Smoked by Windows Phone" advertisements ?
Microsoft made a lot of noise with Windows Phone 7.
> People might get confused and think that apps will run faster on a phone with multicores.
When there are multiple tasks running then with a single core the processing is shared out across those tasks and each gets only a part of the time. If there are dual or multiple cores then an app may get full time use of one core and thus finish earlier.
WP7 avoided the problem of sharing the CPU by killing apps that were put into background so that only one task ran.
But quad core is _not_ about performance, it is about power saviings. The OS can shut down core so they use no power and then put the final one into sleep mode so that standby power is a smaller fraction of the full processing power than a single or dual.
> People don't realize multicore is barely supported by any mobile OS
Nonsense. Android kernel is Linux and fully supports multicore. The new BB is based on QNX which is a Unix like OS, iOS has a Darwin (Unix) kernel.
Android Dalvik has Thread class and asyncTask which are just as easy to use as on any other machine, so your claims are nonsense.
House Rules
It's bizarre that with all the negative reaction to Office 365 they are pushing so hard subscription to my own documents? no thank you!
It's does seem to be habit of theirs to neglect the stuff that is better and just keep shoving things like Windows 8 on the consumer that has no choice as that's all they can buy.
The Upper Management of Microsoft think that they own the software industry and therefore everyone will do as they are told!
Barnie
WinMob had Windows Mobile Device Center which gave perfect sync with Outlook email, calendar, notes and tasks OVER USB CABLE. WinPho can do none of that! Outlook Hotmail connector gives a kind of a workaround for some of it (not Notes) but it creates a messy set of duplicate calendar and diary entries that are impossible to clean up and don't sync with accepted invitations.
WinPho developers should be sacked for treating loyal user base so shabbily!
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