Windows Phone 8 stands a chance as Apple, Android dither The markets have delivered their verdict on Nokia. Failure is priced in, and the company is deemed to be worth little more than its intellectual property portfolio. The Finns may as well pack up their bags, go home, and whip themselves with birch twigs in the sauna – there’s no future to compete for. That’s also the …
It's probably not only you, there are usually a few other luddites hanging around here for some reason, but that doesn't mean you have a point. You're obviously either a) in the camp that just wants to use their phones to make phone calls, and spurns apps entirely, or b) one of those people that has too much time on their hands, and is therefore happy to deal with purchasing apps from all sorts of different sites, dealing with all sorts of different payment mechanisms, giving your payment and contact details out all over the place etc. For everyone else though, the benefits of the app store model, with a single central portal to purchase apps from, a single payment mechanism, a single entity getting your details, a consistent installation and update mechanism etc, are just too obvious.
The point you missed was "are a lot of bad apps really of worth?" A good number of good apps that you can find without too much trial-and-error are indeed worth it. A morass of badly implemented me-too clones that hide the gems is not. The clue was in the title: but it seems you are keen on hot air, so at least we now know who's downloading them.
"A morass of badly implemented me-too clones that hide the gems is not. "
The point is, without an app store, how are you going to find these gems on the Internet? You need to know about them before hand. An app store is no different. Go read some reviews to find the best apps, then download them from an app store, exactly as you would if there was no App store, except see the points Tony72 made about multiple payment mechanisms.
I don't think he's arguing against download sites, just that it's stupid to rate a platform by things like raw numbers of applications. Since who cares how many fart apps or website wrappers there are - it tells you nothing about quality. And if you can find what you want, why does it matter if there are 100 more irrelevant apps? Isn't that what Apple Mac users have been saying for years - why does raw software counts only matter when all of a sudden it's something that Apple are winning at?
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It's better that you need to search out the gems from thousands of apps in an app store than the previous alternatives which were (on Symbian as I remember):
- Google for one that probably doesn't exist.
- Stick with a handful of manufacturer sanctioned apps which aren't much good.
Wonder all you want, about the usefulness of apps, or the quality of them in general but the fact is app stores are popular with the people who buy phones and therefore *are* a must have if you want to sell phones.
I've never found a fart app incidentally, but then I've never searched for one...
I can't believe some people are still ranting on about how Apple has 800 million billion apps in their store, Android has a trillion and eight apps while windows phone has Angry Birds and three dumb HTC apps. Apps, as far as I can see, have been put out to pasture. Yes. The latest and greatest idea is the live tile.
You no longer have to search for an app in your Apple-esque, desktop-like rows and columns of static picturesque icons for the right app, tap it, wait for it to load and then click through to find the information you need. No. Now, with live tiles you look at your screen and the information's there already. You don't have to find your camera icon, press it and wait for it to load. No That Kodak momement has passed. Instead you push the camera button and click the shutter.
So apps are dead. And while it's true Apple and android have more apps than all the atoms in the sun, how many live tiles do they have?
No, it's not you. What's more, most of the "Apps" will disappear as HTML5 standardises, browsers improve, and an "app" is therefore no longer needed to look at a website that doesn't render properly. A few good developers will make money, but I suspect that most of them will end up out of pocket. History is repeating itself - this is exactly what happened with Windows: loads of shareware applications to get round the weaknesses of DOS and early Windows, almost all of which either become OS features or part of popular applications. Remember the guy who got rich with a DOS app that enabled you to use the £ sign because Bill & co. had never been outside the US and didn't know not everybody in the world used the dollar?
"What's more, most of the "Apps" will disappear as HTML5 standardises, browsers improve, and an "app" is therefore no longer needed to look at a website that doesn't render properly"
The best apps integrate with features of the phone and are not just UIs, although admittedly there are plenty of bad apps which are, and do it badly too (Facebook springs to mind).
A website for example won't let you listen to music with the screen off, or sync offline in case of signal loss.
>What's more, most of the "Apps" will disappear as HTML5 standardises, browsers improve, and an "app" is therefore no longer needed to look at a website that doesn't render properly.
That's the exact opposite of what's actually happening - browsers on mobile are moribund other than for static and very basic RIA. IRL people don't get excited about their web presence, it's necessary work, full of chores and frought with inevitable compromise on design....on the other hand app publishing excites the same kind of reckless enthusiam and optimism as the early web gold rush.
What your analysis also fails to include is that however wacky and dumb the publisher's idea, they pay developers to write their free apps. Characterising iOS developers as self-publishers spinning code in their lofts doesn't account for the serious money currently pushed into the development of free apps which are downloaded in their billions every day.
You obviously didnt read the specs. The Lumia 920 has the best screen (Higher res and brighter than Apple Rentina), the best camera (F2.0, Optical stabilisation), the best touch capability, the best maps, the best navigation app, and the best augmented reality app of any phone. Not to mention the best, fastest, newest and most secure OS.
Mildly surprised about your comments on contact cards. My Lumia 800 pulled in my Google, Facebook, Twitter, LInkedin, "Live" and Outlook contacts and calendars and synced them up extremely well. No cases of over linking, even in the case where I have contacts who share a group email. I linked a half dozen accounts, maybe ten. The calendar syncing is particularly awesome.
Agreed
I have facebook, gmail, hotmail and exchange/outlook accounts on mine and have no problems. Editing the contacts is easier because they're cloud based. If there is a limitation in editing those contacts it's not the fault of the phone but the cloud provider. The gmail tools for editing are pretty decent and support import and export to csv for more complicated edits or transfer between systems. I've never noticed a problem with editing contacts via outlook and owa is pretty decent.
Yeah, you lost me on the contacts thing too. Not only is it really easy (and mostly automatic) on Windows Phone, I think I had two or three cases I had to add manually, but if (when) you go to Windows 8 all that translates directly into the People hub there too. It's the first time I've ever known a contact sync process that is so reliable and seamless, regardless of which computer/device you're accessing it from.
And, in my experience, it errs heavily on the side of caution when it comes to the initial auto-linking (which is only done when you first add an account), so managing to have all the contacts linked to one is either the sign of an exceptionally strange set of contacts or something done deliberately .
@ Boris Winkle, HMB:
Just thinking the exact same thing. Seems some commentards will downvote you simply because of your choice of handset.
Wonder what it would take to create a bunch of native apps to detect and downvote/upvote all comments in these threads automatically, and would it be worth developing one for W8?
agreed - the way that they linked up on my phone is pretty slick. Yesterday i added a new person to my contacts in hotmail. click save on the web interface. I immediately picked up my phone and her card was already in there... .quite impressive.
That's not to say that vcard support would nt be a good thing (though i believe that is coming in WP8).
It took a little bit of effort to get Google calendars to sync with my Lumia (the phone needed to be set to American English for m.google.com to recognise it as a WP7), but since then it has been spookily good. Since my last experience was the 'will it? won't it?' syncing of iCal, this has been a breath of fresh air.
I dropped and broke my Windows Phone - leading to it being wiped when it was repaired. No problem to relink it to my Gmail contacts/email within a couple of minutes, including it's ability to use nicknames for people. And what is even better is that my photos are automatically synced to my skydrive account.
Nokia have done a hard reboot of their business, and now they have a more or less blank sheet of platform to do whatever they want. Apple had that advantage in 2007 with the original iPhone, but now the roles are reversed.
The thing with the Lumia 920 is.. well, it's so *compelling*. It looks great, the camera is very desirable, every single component seems to have been made without compromise. Sure, the application pool is nothing at all at the moment (a problem that early adopter will have to deal with), and it's a damned heavy handset too. But for the first time since I had an E90, the Lumia 920 looks like a device that I would want as my main phone.
NOK shares took a dump when the Lumia 920 was announced for various reasons, but now they've bounced back to pretty much where they were and AAPL stocks have been dead flat. I think the markets are waiting to see what happens next..
OK, so that is the high end sorted...
From the original article... "We have not seen how well the revamped operating system translates to smaller screens and smaller batteries – for punters with smaller hands and slimmer wallets."
Nokia sell a lot of S40/S60 phones in India, Africa and parts of the far East.
A lot of people in the UK like to buy phones around the £100 mark (or get them 'free' on 10 quid a month contracts), that territory is Android/Blackberry at present.
Any guesses as to what a £100 Windows 8 phone will be like?
> Maybe, and this is just a wild stab in the dark you understand, a bit like the £120 Lumia 710 and £100 Lumia 610?
You mean 'remaindered in the bargain bin' then.
That's unlikely to happen until, oh, mid 2013. They will actually try and sell them at full price until then.
AAPL stocks dead flat? They have doubled this year. Doubled from $350 to $700.
Nokias 'hard reboot' was flirting with the end of the company. For Nokia to get a hold in the market is almost impossible, because once Apple had set the standard for ALL future smartphones in 2007, there was never going to be any more new ideas. Not for a very long time.
We are now in a mature Smartphone market, and the leaders will stay in the lead. NFC and wireless charging and a higher spec camera will not shake the world at all.
In fact, as wireless chargers use up to 30% more electricity for the same effect, I expect them to die out on the wings of a Greenpeace attack...
Now its down to smaller smartphones for less money to get all the people who cant afford one in on the game.
Dont bet against Apple - that would be foolish.
AFAIK MS' music store sells you music in non-DRM MP3 format the same as Amazon does; you need to use their special software to copy stuff betwixt phone/PC but you CAN copy it onto your PCs and other devices freely (please correct if wrong).
Does that count as a plus to those who like to whinge about Kindle/iTunes walled gardens, at all? That you can have a Windwos phone and be safe to move your music onto an Android later?
So sorry for not owning an iPhone.
If that's the case why does everyone cry about Apple's evil walled garden then? Music is by far the biggest area of content paid for and if you're not locked in to Apple, what's the problem for most users (i.e. not including the few who buy lots of video on their phone)?
I always thought the 'Walled Garden' referred to the inability to put things on there unless they were bought via Apple's own store. Before Apple, remember, it was usually the case that you could install something from anywhere. The walled garden seem to be Apple's one area where they really did pioneer things. (Mostly unfortunately, imo. Now MS is following suit).
Confused at the apple walled garden comment, as I can import any songs I want into an iTunes library and sync it happily with my iphone? Where you do struggle is, as mentioned if you want to move music off your iphone to a PC that isnt your main PC. simple answer to that is move it to that PC and copy/send, yes it's irritating but not a massive problem I ever get stressed about.
Lots of things to get irritated at apple for but this isnt one!
You're mistaken about this. Apple isn't leading the pack: Nokia have been well ahead of the game here. They supported wideband voice calls in the X6, which dates back to 2009. Today most Android handsets support the standard too.
Network support is still patchy though. In the UK, Orange branded the technology as "HD Voice", unveiling it in September 2010. Three implemented it in June 2011. On both networks it's only available with a 3G signal, and there is no cross-network connectivity, so if you're on Orange and you call a mate on Three, your call gets downsampled to narrowband.
Needless to say there's no support yet on landlines, although a few plucky VOIP providers support wideband voice for intra-office environments.
A solution attempting to fix a problem that doesn't exist"?
"Darling, I'm on the train". "Can you get some milk and a dozen eggs on your way home?". "We're out of bogroll, nip downstairs and bring a newspaper to the bathroom". Usual conversations.
HD-voice. Gonna make a difference?
WHY?? Assuming the recipient also has a HD-enabled phone, it might make fuc*k-all difference. If the recipient does NOT have an HD-enabled phone, It'll make fuc*k-all difference..
Personally, if the often poor voice quality can be improved, I'm all for that. Mind you, I liked HD over SD as well and I remember the vast numbers of posts on here that angrily argued how it was unnecessary and they couldn't see the difference or you were an idiot to care about it if you could.
How is it difficult to update WP contacts on your PC? If you have a hotmail account, it takes like 2 seconds, 1 to open a hotmail browser window, another to switch to contacts.
Not tried a non-hotmail account, but surely its just a matter of logging in to Microsoft with a non-hotmail account.
WP8 looks like its going to cure a lot of the issues with WP7, but the biggest problem is always going to be the whole app eco-system. If the whole sharing of kernel between Windows8, Tablet, xbox and phone works, WP8 will quickly start to catch Android/iOS on app development, and WP8 stands a chance of being a 3rd eco-system candidate. If not, i'd imagine Microsoft will drop WP in a couple of years.
Wow, yet another article extolling the virtues of the Nokia Lumia and Windows Phone 8 from Mr Olowski. If the phone is good it won't need this many editorials, surely?
The point of the article seemingly suggesting that because it has a slightly stabilised camera lens and good low-light photography it's got a winner on its hands?
However Sony had similar results for low-light image capture with some of their Xperia range the Exmor R lens which seems to have been forgotten about.
AT the end of the day, if the phone is great, the software is great and people are prepared to forgive Microsoft for the way they treated customers, suppliers and the industry in the past then it will sell. I've yet to be convinced of that but we will see.
"people are prepared to forgive Microsoft for the way they treated customers, suppliers and the industry in the past"
A big gamble, unfairly or not, for many people, Microsoft==bluescreen.
When my wife and I were talking about her next phone, our thoughts were:
iPhone - "If my Macbook is representative of their build quality, it or the charger will fall apart if someone looks at it wrong."
Android - "OK, I guess."
Blackberry - "..." (Aren't they for chavs and suits?)
Windows Phone - pause, then simultaneous burst of laughter from both of us
Some of us stuck with Amiga computers despite Commodore dying off and the hardware falling behind. What hardware upgrades did appear were often costly. I can't remember exactly how much, but costs of about £500-800 for a CPU upgrade board weren't unusual.
Why didn't we use the Mac or PC? both had very similar bad OSes. Mac had very primitive multitasking until OSX and Windows 95 may have tried to introduce full multitasking but it wasn't flawless. Plus it was slow and unstable (who remembers explorer.exe dying all the time? they never did fix that one).
So given iOS is like Mac OS of old (simple and falling behind) and Android is like the unstable, overcomplicated mess that Windows used to be and requires a lot of grunt to get it to perform, I'm glad there's a third option.
WP may not have as many apps, but there's enough to do what I want. The OS is fast and efficient even on a single core.
As a fellow Amiga user used to say to me about him using the Amiga, "It's not better, it's just different". This is something Fandroids just can't appreciate.
Well I thought I was a a rare beast, an Amiga user until 2000 and a Windows Phone 7 User!
I remember them days well, £600 for a Blizzard 1260 or something ridiculous like that, never afforded one of those, had an Apollo 1240 with a 40MHz 68040, had to prop one side of the A1200 up to keep some air flowing to the CPU. Eventually put it all in a tower with a second hand PowerUP card from Phase 5, a downgrade on the 68k side (25MHz 680LC40, amazing the difference 15MHz made in them days) but the 603e 160MHz was useful for playing MP3s and Quake.
Part of me remembers it being happy days saving all my paper round money for that 20MB hard disk that cost me £199, other parts just think, I've just paid £6 for a 16GB SD Card! :)
Anyway I digress very badly, choice is good, and Windows Phone is a good product, like like iOS and Android are, I just prefer Windows Phone at the moment.
Yeah, I did, until Holger Kruse started putting backdoors and code to wipe your hard drive into the Miami and Miami Pro TCP stack. He couldn't see what could possibly go wrong, and the remaining user base trotted out "if you have a problem with this, then you're obviously a pirate". I wasn't, I owned multiple licenses for the damned thing.
That was the last straw, when the pond is that small, if the remaining developers and the largest proportion of the userbase are fucking arseholes, it's time to bail.
So my A4000 with a Cyberstorm 68060 card and SCSI controller, Picasso IV and ethernet card became a rather esoteric Linux box for a while. When I could afford it, I bought a PC, slapped Slackware on it- which made kernel builds a lot less tedious.
Sorry, somewhat OT, but it was a rant that I have been nursing for a bit.
Uh, no. Microsoft did NOT bail out Apple. NOR did they give Apple money by buying stock out of the goodness of their heart or in order to make sure the government wouldn't think they were a monopoly.
Microsoft's $150 Million stock investment was the result of a settlement of a lawsuit. In fact, the investment was just an initial payment for other "substantial balancing payments" that would be spread out over then next few years, then Apple CFO Fred Anderson said at the time.
The exact amount of the settlement is still unknown. Estimates range from $500 million to more than $1 billion.
What was this legal action that gave Apple so much leverage over Redmond? It was the Apple Computer v. San Francisco Canyon Co. lawsuit.
Nokia needs to leverage its strengths in imaging asap and get that camera from the 808 into a Lumia. Imaging has been huge for the iPhone but Apple has done relatively little to evolve this while Nokia has gone from strength to strength. As for WinPho 8, I'm sure it will be fine. Microsoft can usually be relied on to get something right enough by the third attempt.
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"can be counted on the fingers of two hands. (I challenge you to get past a dozen"
Good to see long traditions of ancestral inbreeding bearing fruit among Reg staff.
Sadly readers without such adventurous (unadventurous?) forbears are likely to struggle to get past 10 with only two hands (and a conventional decimal counting strategy... though using a lower base would seem to remove some of the punch in the initial statement)
I can count to twelve on the fingers of one hand not including my thumb.... there are three fleshy bits on the inside of each of my (four*) fingers, separated by the knuckles... It also leaves my right hand free to prod them as I count, if I needed to.
I think I've heard of this being put forward to explain why many units are based around 12 or 24, or maybe, as Issac Asimov noted, 12 is conveniently divisible for the purposes of sharing things out.
*Still four, despite the ambitions of a spirited angle grinder. Had it been successful in its objective, I would have been left like a Spinal Tap guitar amplifier...
Challenge accepted. The Sumerians had a counting system that could be used to count to sixty on two hands with no extra digits required. The thumb on the left had was used as a pointer to the bones of the other fingers, thus you can count to twelve on one hand. The right hand counted the number of twelves. Thus with five fingers on the right hand, 5 x 12 = 60. Incidentally, thats why we have 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour.
"I challenge you to get past a dozen, counting Adobe Creative Suite and Microsoft Office as one app apiece."
1) Adobe Creative Suite
2) Microsoft Office
3) Autodesk AutoCAD
4) Mindjet MindManager
5) Real Software Real Studio
6) Claro ClaroRead
7) Quark QuarkXPress
8) ABBY FineReader
9) Kaspersky Anti-Virus
10) Avid Media Composer
11) Steinberg Cubase
12) NewTek LightWave 3D
13) Pixar RenderMan
Inspiration (inspiration.com) (redmond, fruit)
Smartboard Notebook (redmond, fruit, penguin)
ActiveEdition (redmond, fruit)
Audacity (redmond, fruit. penguin)
Ardour (fruit, penguin)
GIMP (redmond, fruit, penguin)
As well as...
Gvim/vim (redmond, fruit, penguin, various spacecraft)
Emacs (redmond, fruit, penguin, various phones, your fridge)
R (anything you can compile code on, so a bit of a cheat, along with rsync, wget &c)
LyX (redmond, fruit, penguin)
Gnumeric (redmond, penguin, fruit with some fiddling) OK cheating its a basic spreadsheet but very lovely approach to chart creation and styling, including box plots.
Inkscape (redmond, fruit, penguin)
Basically, I could duplicate most of my software on a fruit or redmond computer tomorrow if the penguins died out. Portable apps mean that I can run most of my preferred applications from a USB stick in redmondworld.
NB fruit implies native Quartz, not X11.
I have wondered about apps myself - I have probably a dozen paid for apps, but I probably use the free ones more. Also having reinstalled my Galaxy S a number of times, I dont always put the same apps back - there are functions I need but not specific apps.
Oddly the major barrier to me changing these days would be does the phone support the 2-3 games that my kids play on the phone, and that could be addressed simply be keeping the old handset and letting them play with that.
The other thing that's suprised me so far is that nobody seems to have considered an "Android Emulator" or compatability layer, you can run one on a PC for development purposes so why couldn't a Win Phone run one locally and allow access to an Android App library. All the code is public domain after all (and it would be an entertaining inversion of WINE). If the app library was that important I can't see this being that hard to do.
For WP7, at least, the much stricter sandboxing present on WP7 coupled with the requirement that all applications were in .NET code would have pretty much ruled out an Android emulator type app. That might change to some degree in WP8 (though I suspect the sandboxing will still be too strict) but only the elite few who've been granted access to the SDK could know for sure. At least for now.
Three dedicated hardware platforms, yes. But when you talk about "flourishing ecosystems" in that segment you also have to factor in the fourth, the PC.
Then again, when it comes to dedicated gaming hardware and its associated software you've overlooked the handhelds which have a significant chunk of that market too, not always in happy coexistance with their larger cousins.
So in that contestable market there are already more than three players happily coexisting and competing.
Four ecosystems, including the PC - though Crytek amongst other developers are saying that they don't actually sell many games, due to piracy. Those PC gamers who don't pirate often wait til a game is about a fiver on Steam. I don't know, but I suspect many XBOX users spend more on the Live Gold subscription that they do on software.
And there is the stirrings of some other systems in the works, such as streaming from the cloud, or Valve's rumoured Linux box (though this could arguably be considered a PC)...
Nice read. There is another dimension to this whole debate, as I was reading on another site that a recent survey shows that 22% of android user are willing to dump their platform in favor of Apple, it clearly shows that in the longer run if this trend continues it will mean trouble for Android.
I have owned several high end droids over the years (including my current SGS III, previous droids include SGSII/Sensation etc), and not one of them have been reliable, stable or able to provide consistent performance. Almost every one of these droids suffered from unexplainable reboots, slow downs, crashes, hang ups etc. (and I only use about half a dozen apps). To top this off, WP on Lumia 800 with its ancient SoC feels snappier compared to most top end droids.
So, there is surely space available for another ecosystem, especially since, WP is whole lot more stable, and efficient OS IMHO.
I have a ZTE Blade which was subject to all the faults you mention. It used Orange's flavour of Android 2.1. I suspect that many of the Mobile operators' Android versions are similarly low quality. Since I installed Cyanogen Mod 7.1 (using Android 2.3), all these problems have gone away except for the operating system going kaput when the battery runs down: I get round this by occasionally backing up the system using ROM Manager & (after installing App Backup & Restore) set it to automatically backup (to my sdcard) any new/modified apps. However, I suspect that very few users will install another ROM let alone do backups.
So as has been the case since time immemorial, the operators are ****ing up perfectly good phones with their pointless and awful additions.
I genuinely think that the best thing Apple did to the iPhone was telling the operators they were not allowed to ruin customise it.
Almost every complaint I've had and heard of about Symbian, Windows Mobile and Android was "Why the hell can't I delete this useless <insert name here>?"
When will the operators learn?
In terms of mobile calling(*), what Apple are calling "HD Voice" appears to be nothing more esoteric than support for the 3G AMR Wideband codec.
This isn't new. I believe my two-year-old Nokia N8 supported it out of the box, which is natural enough, as they invented it. ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6HsGyKU46c is PR bumpf, but has a sample audio sequence about a minute in). My mobile network, sadly, does not offer the service.
I don't think it's a case of Nokia being "left in the cold" on this one, rather that it's such old news that they didn't consider mentioning it as a "new technology". It'd be like someone in 2009 claiming MMS as a-- oh, never mind.
(*) Apple are using a different codec for FaceTime audio, and putting that under the same "HD Voice" brand umbrella. Also, Apple being Apple, nobody's entirely sure *which* codecs they support on the mobile interface, but based on carrier support it appears to be AMR-WB [ source: http://hdvoicenews.com/2012/09/12/apple-delivers-hd-voice-on-the-iphone-5/ ]
I really liked the hardware on the Lumia 800 once they'd sorted out the battery life problems but I found I just couldn't get on with Windows Phone as an OS. I moved to Android as an alternative, having never used it before and haven't looked back.
That isn't to say IOS or Windows Phone OS aren't any good - I just enjoy the freedom of Android not being tied to an iTunes or Zune application to get stuff on the phone :)
It's easy to forget that Nokia aren't the only manufacturer making Windows 8 phones... Samsung are keeping a toe in the water... not sure who else because all news is about Nokia.
You mention developers not wanting to develop for more than one platform... just wondering how hard it is to reuse code from Windows 8 RT to Windows 8 phone, or even Win8 x86? This question might be more relevant if/when Win8 RT has some market share, and obviously things designed for a tablet don't necessarily work well on a phone...
If Microsoft could really pitch this as a great corporate phone OS with good Office etc integration, tempered by some XBOX fun and games, then maybe it could work out.
Huawei are also confirming at least one WP8 handset.
I'm not quite certain who it is that's downvoting raw verifiable information given in answer to a query but it does make one wonder (even more) at the kind of educationally subnormal individual on the internet these days.
Overall a good interesting and balanced article... this is a rapidly evolving market and I'm pretty sure there is indeed room for 3 large players. Windows Phone is well liked by those who use it, so while the installed base is certainly smaller than Microsoft or Handset vendors would like, they are steadily building a solid platform with several million happy users prepared to evangelise the product... with new competitive W8 hardware, they just need to gain more attention from the phone sales reps and operators to start to see some significant market share gains.
on which note, I'd agree with Mike Taylor's post above - in my experience contact linking is one of the big plus+ points of the 'People Hub' approach of Windows Phone.I really like the way it links together your contact info different data sources (Facebook, Exchange etc.) and presents them all under the one contact - perfect.
How exactly is Android dithering? NFC, taking pictures while recording video, first with dual-core and quad-core CPUs, phones with HD screens from 3.2" up to 5.5" and that's just what I can recall quickly. I'm not saying these are unique to Android but they're being pushed by it a lot. Dithering is releasing a new 'magical' phone with a bigger screen, upgraded CPU (still behind others) and expecting the world to go nuts.
I'm all for putting forward a case that Duplo 8 has a chance but after seeing that bit in the heading I wasn't really interested in the rest of the article. I'm still surprised that they're being given such an easy ride after killing future updates to Duplo 7 / 7.5 beyond a few ported features to 7.8.
People don't want Windows on their phone.
They don't think of Metro as being Windows, and the more MS tries to drag it back to being a Windows phone, the more baggage (both emotional and code-complexity) it will accumulate.
People - mostly - don't LIKE Windows. They don't necessarily hate it, but it doesn't inspire much affection in the general populace. Why saddle the 'new broom' products and OS with this association? Especially the utterly perplexing "Windows RT" for tablets...
Apple, for all its faults does at least know when and how to kill its own babies. MS could learn a lesson or two there - but it may well be Nokia who ends up paying for it.
People don't want Windows on their phone.
YOU don't want Windows on your phone. The public don't buy a Windows Phone or an Android Phone. They buy a Nokia or an HTC or a Samsung or whatever. The only exception is that they do buy an iPhone, although most still don't know what iOS is, merely that Apple stuff all works with other Apple stuff.
They don't know what Android is at all and Windows is just the thing on the laptop.
A phone that I can make calls on,
Send/recieve texts
Not have my location tracked
Not have my web activity mined
Not scan for wifi networks and send their IDs along with geographical location to the NSA ^M^M^M Google.
You know, a bit of privacy, where it's assumed that I'm *not* a criminal* that hasn't been caught yet.
Hello 6310i
* Criminal: Someone capable of free-thought.
Competition is good, and Android handset makers have pushed apple to make these incremental increases to their iPhone, both of which are actually pretty darn good phones. Now MS/Nokia have stepped in with something that everyone says is a pretty good (and even revolutionary?) OS/Phone.
I think though if this new iPhone 5 is the best apple can come up with NOW, and in 1 years time they come out with an iPhone 5S (or whatever) that's another small incremental upgrade, then in 2 years time Samsung and HTC will have stepped up and eaten Apple's breakfast!
The other thing is, if you want expandable storage... go for an Android handset. If you want a swappable battery... go for Android. A really good camera? etc.
The real question is though, which phone makes the most profits for the sales droids in CPW? That's what's going to get pushed to the masses. I wonder if we're heading for a "phone mis-selling" scandal.
Provided MS don't try too ape the apple approach too closely developers might find it possible to share common code between windows8 and android.
There seem to be tools out there to do cross platform app development its just that apple really don't like them
to be used for the iphone.
Its the apple no-emulators rule that makes it necessary to develop every app twice. A 3 way ecosystem does not necessarily require 3-way app development.
Not sure why a technical blog has decided to miss out one of the biggest mobile OS`s in the world from your article.
Blackberry 10 is already in development and will hopefully be pushed for release this side 2013 not that
the iphone 5 hasnt really impressed lots of people.
Nokia has not announced any products. It has announced 2 model numbers, and a faked camera demo. When we have full specs, release dates, prices, and fully working demo units we can start thinking about products. Until then it's vapourware. Meanwhile Google is registering close to 1 million phones per day, and Apple goes from strength to even greater strength.
> Then Google would have to keep making Android better and better
Gingerbread, Honeycomb, ICS, JB. Yeah, Google has sat on its hands.
In fact it is the competition between HTC, Samsung, and many others that keep the improvements coming.
One problem with WP7 was that MS dictated what could and could not be done, such as limiting it to single core, 800x480 (or 320x480) so that all WP7 phones were the same reducing the competition between OEMs.
If you say the same of the Iphone 5, sure - let's wait until release.
And yeah, obviously Nokia have no track record of releasing phones, it's not like they were the number one phone and smartphone company until this year.
And Apple go from strength to strength, now they're so good, they're 3rd place behind Samsung and Nokia.
I have finally got my N8 and it's fantastic. Built in SIP VOIP.
It completely blows away my BlackBerry, yesterday I opened more Apps at once (including internet radio and skype) than my Blackberry 9700 would cope with and it still felt smoother than the BlackBerry.
What is needed is a proper review, so that anyone moving from an N8 knows whether they are taking a big step down or not. (From everything I have heard it sounds like they would be with Windows Phone 7. Is it the case for WP8?)
You can do more with the N8 than any current Droid/fruit based device.
Nothing comes close on the call handling, the camera, the hard baked GPS, USB on the go, FM transmitter etc etc...
The Lumia 920 is getting there but I think the next upgrade again will be the one to best it.
"That’s also the conventional wisdom of most technology pundits, who see no prospect for anyone outside the two "ecosystems" of Apple's iOS and Google's Android. "
Indeed, though they really are clueless. Up until 2011, Nokia's Symbian was the number one platform. It then continued to outsell Iphone until late 2011, when the WP switchover began.
So whilst we are now in a situation where Android and Iphone are the top two, this really is a very recent thing - yet the so-called armchair technology pundits have been harping on about Android and Iphone (or worse, just Iphone) for years, which shows you how clueless they are. That doesn't mean that WP will replicate Symbian's success - who knows, but I really care little for what these people say.
Also note it's misleading to put Iphone on the same level as Android. Android outsells Iphone by a factor of 4-5 now. The market is basically Android and that's it - and if you want to count Iphone too, then sure, but also count WP and Blackberry, and so on.
Nokia have fallen, but only from 1st to 2nd place (overtaken by Samsung), so all this talk of a comeback is a bit overblown anyway. Plus the media have been spreading this myth that Nokia went away the moment the first Iphone appeared in 2007, and for years have been asking whether Nokia will make a "comeback", despite Nokia being the number one company all that time (and still outselling Apple today).
Oh, and just to add - it's also ludicrous to see this talk of "Is there room for more that 2 platforms", given that for years, we've had 3, 4, 5 or more major platforms. And for most of that time, Iphone was 3rd, 4th or even 5th.
Personally I use Android now, but I don't understand the arguments against WP - did we have years of people saying about Iphone: "Is there room for more than Symbian and Blackberry", or "more than Symbian and Android"?
Perhaps there is some hypothesis that long term stability is only possibly when we have one major platform, one smaller platform, and everything else is much smaller (similar to the Windows vs OS X vs Linux etc ratios). But I think we're still a few years from seeing what the final long term state of the phone market is.
I don't think so: if you managed to read the account of the iPhone launch without being sick, you would realise that what Apple is good at, more than any other phone maker or computer maker by far, is PR. They can afford the best graduates of the best universities to represent what everybody else has done for years as new because it has an apple on it, and people swallow it. Companies like Nokia and RIM never knew what hit them. Nor did Motorola or HP. To a degree, no matter how clever they were, their ability to explain it to journalists and Joe Public was dismal by comparison.
This time round Nokia seems to have improved somewhat. If RIM can improve on their inability to promote their products, BB 10 might surprise everybody - the developers are enthusiastic and it's already known that the first BB 10 product will be higher spec than an iPhone 5 and smaller than the Lumia 920. But at the end of the day it all depends on who has the best psychologists, copywriters and ego-flatterers. Cupertino seems to have cornered the market there.
People want Apple stuff - it's not that they are being 'told' they want it - it's genuinely good. I've been in IT for longer than I care to remember and the Apple stuff just works better. Apple have done a lot to drag the market up / forward - we jumped a few years forward when they came out with the iPhone, same with the iPad and Macbook Air. You may pay a slight premium up front but TCO is generally far lower when the kit generally has a longer life, lower support, better resale value etc.
It's defined by the app market(s), not the phone markets themselves.
Apple and Android both have massive momentum now c/o their app repository. To the extent that phones are becoming task devices, proper computers, this is where the relevant comparisons are to be made.
Windows Phone 8 will be dead on arrival.
The following weeks will be dominated by the iPhone 5. Nokia Lumia 920 will hit retail only in mid-November, earliest.
It's over. Nokia should sack Stephen Elop, and go for Plan B - Android. Do it soon or Nokia's share price becomes utterly worthless.
Like watching a bunch of idiots trying to see who can piss the farthest into a hurricane.
The world has moved on since the 90's. The Desktop (Microsoft) is no longer the driving technology - it is now mobile. The days of sticking "windows" on a product and MS bullying the market to follow are over.
So now MS has a <5% market share with a product that has been totally rejected by the market (why does not matter) and all you MS lovers think that just because they are finally coming out with a product that may not totally suck all the IPhone and Android users are just going to throw out what they own today (and in many cases love), shout "thank god - MS has saved us" and run out and buy one. All because it looks like a desktop product that only the MS love children care about.
I know, just wait for WP 8 (WP 7.5, Nokia, WP 7, ...) - they should rename WP to "JWF"
Wow. It never ceases to amaze me how quick opinions from all sides fly on every rumour. You haven't seen W8 phone so don't slam it down so hard.
I'm an Android user, currently on a Nexus S that went from Gingerbread, to ICS, and then to JB). It's a great little phone, does what I want and I can count on regular updates without bloatware. It's not the newest, and it's not perfect,...but it suits me perfectly.
I'm a Windows 7 PC user, not a Mac user (my son and his girlfriend both have Apple laptops)
Things that keep me away from Apple
- Same programs I have at work, and wide range of products available
- Games (there....I said it)
- I build my own computers as a hobby and am always tinkering/upgrading. Apple won't let me do that.
- I am free to choose any hardware components I want, at a good price, from a highly competitive market
- iTunes - this alone would keep me away from Apply products. I like the freedom to drag and drop files/media from any computer to my phone with a (very) standard USB cable.
- If I want to transfer files or charge my phone and I don't have my cable I can easily borrow one from almost any other smartphone user out there
I like Apple products. They are well designed, easy to use, and very standardized. They are just not for me.
You can have your opinion, and others can have theirs, and you can both be right. No solution is perfect, you just have to choose the product and the company that works for you. You can prefer the flexibility or Android and deal with late upgrades (if/when they are released), or get walled in by Apple's "Do it our way" but have a more standardized product. You can support a company like Samsung who copies another company's designs and denies it, or Apple who is out to use silly patents to crush competition and stifle innovation.
I love and hate aspects of each. I don't know what will happen when MS/Nokia release the new phones, but at this point a third choice looks like a pretty good option. I may not go that way, but I will certainly have a look.
The article writer dismisses pundits on prospects for Windows8 Phone, but never mentions Blackberry 10 based Smartphones that the pundits also give little chance.
What is it about Rim that this tech author feels needs to be totally omitted from any mobile discussion, or is Andrew Orlowski just another one of those writers with a myopic Microsoft view that has become nauseating to the point of distraction?
Let's remember a major reason the WP7 Lumias failed is because by and large they never did appear on shelves. Even the shops that stocked them kept them all in the backroom out of sight. I've still never seen an actual Lumia in real life, despite trawling through shops looking around launch time.
Will it be any different this time? Seems pretty unlikely, apart from EE signing up not much has changed to make buyers want to stock them or shop staff want to sell them. Unless you believe Microsofts cynical Win8 scheme will work... I tend to believe not trashing all their existing apps will be more important to users than some imaginary Win8 bonus.
One thing that's not really been mentioned is the developer experience and cost to market for a given application.
Microsoft's dev stack really is light years ahead of android and iPhone in terms of language features, framework and tooling. Its simply quicker to knock up equivalent apps. Not to mention that from win 8 onwards web developers can target the OS natively as well.
Even if Windows phone 8 is the greatest OS the world has ever seen, doesn't mean it will be successful if there are no good apps for it. BeOS was technically much superior to Windows when it was released but because no one wrote any programs for BeOS it eventually died a death. Its a vicious circle, a new OS with hardly any users so developers you don't want to write apps until they know they will sell so wait until the install base increases. But end user buying a new phone don't want to buy a phone with no apps available so go with Android/Apple or Blackberry.
As each platform has game exclusives.
This is something that you can not found on the other platform.
Enter the internet connected devices, the key here is that most if not all the important applications are available to everybody.
Now enter the exclusives:
Apple has polished posh experience, and it is the right eye of the publishing world, and the favour of the masses, they can get away with murder.
Android has the backup of the majority of phone manufacturers, it is free and you can bend it to your liking, it has many shapes and sizes as a fighter jet has buttons in the control panel.
Now what does Winokia has? No applications, an excessively wide margin, and a once wonder camera not so great this time.
Sure MS can make a stride, but seems difficult.
I can only presume that this statement about the new iPhone was intended to be sarcastic. I am British and apparently understand sarcasm but don't think you made that one very clear.
The fact that Apple brought out little new is slightly less surprising than noticing my dog has farted. That is not what Apple does. It looks around for ideas and combines them in ways that they calculate will sell.
They noticed that smartphone screens are getting bigger.. They did not copy this and make an iPhone with a big screen. Instead, they brought out a screen that was not quite so small. This will be important when someone else updates a phone with a very small screen to merely a small screen. Their lawyers will pounce.
"Behind this belief is the view that application developers do not target more than two platforms, and manufacturers of companion products such as music gear and TVs don’t hedge their bets either."
Hi, Andrew,
In global marketplaces with universal spaces and virtual reality areas, do SMARTR ProgramMING Application Developers target Any and All Platforms and Plan Phorms for Currency and Power with Present Delivery of Future Product Placements to Render the Past a Memory to be Lost in History and Ignored at One's Peril and at Leisure for Pleasure.
Do you know if Nokia and Microsoft are into Great Danegeld Game Theory Play and the Delivery of a Present with Future Product Placements to Render the Past a Memory to be Lost in History and Ignored at One's Peril and at Leisure for Pleasure, or is that to be supplied by someone else and others, for that is what is available today.
And it is an edutaining and illuminating ponder to wonder why the mainstream media and governments are avoiding mentioning it, and badly ignoring it whenever there is such a clear and transparent chain of command communication linking them to the development.
So iOS and Android have dithered by breaking sales records - Android now being the largest mobile OS with over half a billion activations, and Microsoft have a chance because so far hardly anyone has bought a Windows Phone and Nokias sales are still in decline.
If it isn't too much of a stupid question, what on earth is this article talking about ?
Definitely probably my last words today, on your thoughts as shared on the page http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/14/windows8_phone_ecosystems_analysis/ and this thread of comments, Andrew.
And thanks are due to C, El Reg, for the heads up and confirmation of successful stealth supply of steganographic applications/prime invisible transparent programs in virtualised operating systems …… "No, it was simply completely unintelligible, sorry.
C." ….. diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Posted Monday 17th September 2012 11:54 GMT … http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2012/09/15/google_j2objc_tool/ ……. and of the certain true nature of the last three paragraphs shared in the post alluded to there and entitled AIPinging of the White House for Intelligence, Opportunity and Curiosity. ……. and which was disappeared in moderation?
And the question mark is placed there quite consciously, for one would just love to be surprised by intelligence services which may actually be considerably smarter than they will ever seem and/or be generally perceived by any other than themselves and those extremely active and effective in the field and their fields of Great Game[s] Play ….. ARG MetaPhoria :-)
But I digress somewhat, and that is another tangent and parallel program of thought, and I just wish to provide you with the information that virtual reality is another ecosystem which supports world markets and is a response to your sharing of If I were Redmond – or Nokia – I’d be reminding the world that markets are pretty unruly, dynamic and volatile places, and sometimes they can support three ecosystems quite nicely.
Slightly more on the matter is left out in the open and posted on 09/15/12 10:15 PM here/there ….. http://www.thedailybell.com/4290/Who-REALLY-Produced-the-Film-Desert-Warrior-That-Is-Now-Convulsing-the-Middle-East ….. where the ecosystem highlighted and currently being supplied with NEUKlearer HyperRadioProActive IT is simply complex and "the Future as IT Presents it as Fabulous News to replace the Ignorant and Arrogant Follies which extraordinarily rendered the Past." with IT now deliverable with Default Supplies for Advanced IntelAIgent Imaginanation too. …. 4AI2 C42 Quantum Communication Control Systems.
For with the Command and Control of Computers and Communication in Creative CyberSpace [C42] what cannot be Presented as the Future and a Great AI Virtual Reality, with any number of particularly and peculiarly well-spun realities available for Orders and Order on Earth, with it and IT being more IntelAIgently Designed than by Primitive Pedestrian Human Beings/Man of Woman. [Another one of those enigmatic circular chicken/egg conundrums to waste time in space pondering on who begat whom whenever it matters not a jot whenever all is invented with Big Bangs as IT needs such things to be.]
Oh, and you have not mentioned at all that BT are a global communications player hosting everything that the likes of Redmond and Nokia, Apple and Sony, Huawei and Samsung or whoever you can mention, invent and provide/imagine to supply. That sort of provides/leaves them in a lead rather than support role, does it not, with future direction from head office honchos, an area of interest ....... or concern if not up to universal resource leading standards.
The InterNetwork is the Virtual Computer Operating System.
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