Will Windows on ARM sink Windows Phone 7? Microsoft insists that its upcoming ARM-friendly version of Windows is no threat to its existing smartphone OS, Windows Phone 7. Windows for ARM is strictly for "tablets on up," Redmond says. But Intel CEO Paul Otellini sees Microsoft's mobile OS future quite differently. The tablets-on-up "Windows 8" will run on x86 chips as …
I will keep it simple. My girlfriend, who uses the Internet but does not know anything about computers now prefers Linux to Windows 7. Why? Because windows always has problems and its always a pain in the ass to fix. However, Linux rarely has problems, and when it does, its pretty easy to fix. Conclusion: the OS is irrelevant; all that matters is having access to the Internet.
I can also reaffirm this in other ways. I can pretty much do anything I want with an Andriod phone. I don't need a laptop or computer (although its useful to have a bigger screen, but then I could buy an Andriod tablet). I don't need Windows; in fact I don't need any OS; I just need a web browser, Java, and IP based services.
Thus operating systems are trivialized. All I need is a device to get to my services on the Internet.
My Girlfriend was in exactly the same boat.
Her laptop was bought a few years ago with vista on, and "going on to the internet" was treated as an event, like setting up a game of monopoly, not something that you just do, like watching TV or listening to the radio.
Vista had made her new-ish laptop run that slow that I could see why. It reminded me of the 486 with a 170MB drivespace'd HDD running Win95 era...
I installed Ubuntu and she is over the moon as it boots a lot faster. It does what she wants, i.e. has Firefox, she can use the internet, go on the facebook, youtube videos, check bank account, book cinema/flights etc, without it being an event, in the knowledge that the machine is a little more secure than a windows machine.
I will say though that I did have to tweak the distro to use an x64 Flash player. But apart from that, everything is out of the box and she doesn't even notice / care that it isn't windows! In fact, she enjoys the extra free games (klondike, mahjong etc.).
Maybe. But with Android and iOS getting such a large market share and with people putting more important data (bank details in the NFC?) on to their precious and increasingly powerful fondle slabs, they're going to be the juicy targets for hackers. There's already an Android botnet doing the rounds in China. And I think it will come as a nasty shock to the Android and iOS communities.
On the other hand Big Windows has been subject to the firey gaze of the hackers for years, and MS have been comparatively good at getting problems fixed and closing off the holes. And for WinPhone7 they've also said that they're issuing updates direct to handsets, not manufacturers or networks. They're much better at that than Apple and Google.
Apple don't bother fixing problems.
Google might fix problems, but the patches cannot be deployed to handsets unless manufacturers and networks are bothered to push them out. Guess what - they're not. Any flaw in Android will persist in large numbers of handsets around the world for years, and that surely has to be the juiciest of all incentives for attackers.
So which of those are going to be the easy targets? Which platform will see discovered problems sorted quickest? Probably not iOS or Android.
the only so called "legacy" required is app interoperability " legacy"... you know al those things MS dont like opening up fully....
OC if these new windows ARM dev's insist on keeping their old mindset and relying on the ported .net , and the ms/gcc compiler to catch all the slow and dumb code errors and badly generated output code rather than check its output for validity and speed then we are in for another mess down the line OC.
but developers are well known to be lazy and copy/paste masses of old code without understanding its interactions or in some cases even its input/out requirements for conformity to a given spec , or not even thinking to run a few benches to see if the newly compiled code actually perform's well etc....
still with the windows lazy cut and paste old code mindset, the ARM HW vendors will have no choice but to upgrade their spec's to compensate for the slower running app's from these developers.
and that a good thing for everyone else that does actually take the time to run regular performance test's and related bench app's over their code before release... as they get good feedback and people buy their app's.
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