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back to article Nokia's WinPho 8 double date announced

Nokia will unveil Windows 8 phones during its joint event with Microsoft this September, sources stating the bleedin' obvious revealed. The two handsets – codenamed Arrow and Phi – will form part of the firm's Lumia range, with the former joining the mid-range party and the latter succeeding the Lumia 800 and 900 as its …

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        1. Richard Plinston
          Reply Icon

          Re: What's the difference...

          > Who cares. It's a phone.

          Who cares? People buying phones, that's who cares.

          > I expect technology to move on in the mean time...

          The problem with WP7 is that technology continued to move on after WP7 was released, but the WP7 phones did not, they were limited to what MS dictated. WP8 is a catch up to what other phones have had for some time.

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          1. JDX Gold badge
            Reply Icon

            Re: What's the difference...

            >>Who cares? People buying phones, that's who cares.

            I doubt it. Most of them have no idea what an OS is.

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Windows

    Very doubtfull developments

    I have a Windows Phone (WP7.5) and quite frankly I like it. Its my first 'real' smartphone and although I'll be the first to admit that it has certain limitations it also has plenty of advantages (at least for me).

    But there is something bothering me. WP7 as it is now not only has certain limitations in comparison to other phones; its functionality is also heavily depending on the country you're in. In some countries the so called "Bing services" will operate as expected, in others they don't (think "Local scout" (what is around you), speech recognition in other languages than English, the ability to look up sound phrases, etc.

    The part which bothers me is where MS apparently couldn't manage (?) the gaps were quickly filled up by other companies in the form of apps. Nothing wrong with that of course, but it does raise the question if MS will ever fill in those gaps themselves.

    When looking at WP8 we get stories of a dozen new features, stuff like e-pay and being able to quickly pass information between phones and such. Strange in itself since bluetooth has always been a good protocol for that yet MS totally ignored that part (it seems it was only added to support headpieces and hardly anything else. I couldn't even get my laserkeyboard to work).

    But that does raise the question: will all those features be available on all platforms in all countries, or are they going to try and pull the same stunt: promising features, adding small print that "it may not be available" to end up with something which only seems to work in the States and hardly anywhere else (at least in the beginning) ?

    But just as important: what about all those promised features on WP7? Cool that, say, local scout now also works in Germany and the UK, what about France, Spain, Denmark or my home country of Holland? Will those ever get added or can we totally forget about all that because WP8 is what matters now?

    Considering that WP8 uses the same Bing services as WP7.... Maybe this is now "good enough" because of all the new features in WP8 ?

    Quite frankly I would be very careful with all the promises made by MS. While what they say maybe fully true; they seem to have a very nasty tendency these days to make things sound much better then they actually are.

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    1. Fuzz
      Reply Icon

      Re: Very doubtfull developments

      The different behaviour in different markets is definitely annoying. The one that gets me is that my phone isn't capable of downloading new podcasts over 3G, it can only download them over wifi. If I lived in the USA my phone would be capable of doing this.

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    2. RICHTO
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      Mushroom

      Re: Very doubtfull developments

      The exact same thing is true of the iphone. Siri doesnt work properly outside of the USA for instance.

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  3. Rick Leeming

    I rather Like Windows Phone!

    Picked up a HD7 about 18 months back when it was just WP7, not 7.5. On the same day I picked up a Galaxy-S. I've still got the HD7, and the Galaxy got traded at CEX.

    My wife has a 3GS, she's OK With it, but after playing around with my handset (and stealing it for a couple of weeks) she's rather more impressed with it. Prefers the menus, the battery life, and the software (Zune isn't bad really, it just takes a little getting used to).

    In the past 2 years I've had Symbian, Blackberry, iOS, Android and WP7.5. I'm still using the Windows Phone, and I'm a demanding user*. Likewise I know a number of other people who are converts to WP7, because it really does "just work".

    If you're slating it (like I did when it first arrived), you've not used it for more than a few minutes. Give it a chance, you may like it!

    *My only gripe is being unable to use Mass Storage Mode.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I rather Like Windows Phone!

      That's the problem, people have only watched videos, seen screenshots or just assumed that because it is Microsoft it must suck. They really need to drop the Windows moniker as it doesn't really apply.

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      1. JDX Gold badge
        Reply Icon

        Re: I rather Like Windows Phone!

        I've continued to be impressed by WP7.5, especially when I found the built-in music search which is basically Shazam but totally free.

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        1. JDX Gold badge
          Reply Icon

          Re: I rather Like Windows Phone!

          Please children, do grow up and stop downvoting people because they like something you don't, rather than because you disagree with their opinions.

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    2. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: I rather Like Windows Phone!

      Rick Leeming,

      Please don't be so nice about the Zune software. I too have a WinPho 7 phone. But in my (not so) humble opinion, Zune makes iTunes look superb. I dislike iTunes, although it's apparently a lot better if you have a Mac. But Zune is slower, harder to use, had a messier UI, and is generally a pain in the arse.

      WinPho 7, on the other hand, is great. The People Hub is the bit that sells it for me. There are limitations of the software that sometimes annoy me, but to have such simple control of 4,000 work contacts and about 100 personal ones is great, and beats any of the address books I tried on Android, or the one on iOS. First and foremost, it's a phone.

      It's also really good for social networking, if you like that sort of thing. I tried out the Facebook link, and it's very good, although horribly intrusive, which is exactly what you want if you check your FB page every few minutes. If, like me, you use Facebook reluctantly, maybe logging in once a month - then it's not good. I don't have a Twitter account to test.

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  4. Christian Berger

    It would be semi-trivial

    Release an Intel Windows 8 phone with an open bootloader and the possibility to get it without Windows 8. That product will then be bought by the thousands by companies searching for an easy way to get specialized mobile devices like cryptographic telephones and the like.

    Unfortunately the Windows licensing agreements mean that such a phone would then have to have an x86 CPU.

    There are lots of unchartered seas in the mobile device world. It's not all just Android/Blackberry/WPx/IOS.

    If I had the skills I'd design a series of Raspberry Pi "phones". Small portable devices with different form factors containing the hardware of a Raspberry Pi, a decent display (something perhaps 800x480-ish or so) and either a built-in UMTS modules (tricky) or some clever way to add third party UMTS dongles. Some of those hardware versions would have keyboards.

    The main problem is of course to design a case. If you de-solder the connectors the Raspberry Pi board might already be small enough.

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  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Nokia is dying, and it will die.

    Windows Phone 8 will be the final nail into its coffin.

    RIP Nokia. Too bad you had to become a soulless OEM bitch of Microsoft.

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    1. RICHTO
      Reply Icon
      Mushroom

      Re: Nokia is dying, and it will die.

      Rubbish. WP over doubled sales in the last year, and got to 100,000 apps faster than Android did. That will only accelerate with the release of WP8. Nokia technology like Pure View will help propel them to the front of the WP ecosystem.

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      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Nokia is dying, and it will die.

        @ RICHTO,

        Q4 2011 Microsoft had 1.9% and saw their OS on 2.759 handsets. Q4 2010 3.4% and installed on 3.419 million handsets. Doing a great job aren't they?

        How about all of 2011?

        Q1 2011: 1.6 million WP and 2.1 million WM.

        Q2 2011: 1.7 million for WP with 1.6% of the market.

        Q3 2011: 1.7 million for WP.

        Q4 2011: 2.8 million for WP.

        So, WP was on less than 8 million handsets. How did Symbian fare on Q1 2011; 27 million. Q2 2011 saw nearly 18 million. 2009 was 100 million and 2010 was 134 million. So, take Q1 or Q2 2011 and Symbian sold more in a single quarter than WP saw the entire year!

        So the WP is ecosystem is quite small. On average in 2010, Nokia sold 367,000 Symbian handsets each and every single day. The entire WP ecosystem saw almost 22,000 a day.

        How many free handsets did Nokia give away on the Lumia 900? How much was spent on marketing? AT&T spent between $450 and $500 on each and every Lumia 900 on marketing alone. They didn't sell all that many and they spent more money on the Lumia 900 than they did for any phone in their history. The ROI on it was poor to say the least.

        Q1 2012: 2.7 million; 1.9% for WP.

        Q2 2012: 4 million; 2.7% for WP.

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        1. Richard Plinston
          Reply Icon

          Re: Nokia is dying, and it will die.

          > Q2 2012: 4 million; 2.7% for WP.

          My understanding is that the 4m was for all Lumias. While most Lumias are WP7 I think that in the China market they have Belle instead.

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          1. dogged
            Reply Icon

            Re: Nokia is dying, and it will die.

            All Lumias have WP(version*).

            The Belle phones are marketed without the Lumia moniker, even in China.

            *7, 7.5. Who knows whether the WP8 variants will be named "Lumia" or not; seems feasible though.

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