Re: Uh oh, El Reg...
"The market has spoken..."
This is the IT industry. History only shows us where we've been, not where we're going.
In 2007, Apple came out of nowhere and completely rewrote the book on smartphone design (particularly the UI). So much so, that the team behind Android had to go back to the drawing board. As did Nokia, BlackBerry, and everyone else. It still took them *years*. In BlackBerry's case, they were the kings of enterprise telephony at the time. Today? Not so much.
Microsoft have just launched a phone that does everything a smartphone needs to, including all the bells and whistles of 4K video, high-res camera, high-DPI OLED display, etc. But it also runs the same familiar Windows (10) OS as a Lenovo or Asus laptop... and can connect to a monitor, keyboard and mouse (wirelessly if necessary) to give you a desktop computer experience when you need it.
That last point might seem esoteric here in the West, but in India, it's not uncommon for a user's tablet or smartphone to be their *only* computer. In the developing world, ready access to a stable power supply can be hard to come by, let alone (wired) broadband Internet access, or even sufficient space for multiple computers. The moment Microsoft start including Intel CPUs in their smartphones, you'll be able to run the exact same enterprise apps on your smartphone as you are on your laptops and notebooks, and let's face it: few of those apps need an NVidia graphics card and a quad-core i7 CPU. This could be *huge* in developing markets.
Forget the glamourous design boutique products Apple produces: MS aren't playing that game any more.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
