Re: They missed their chance
You want ARM devices to run emulated x86?
The fastest ARM smart phones now are about on par with a PC from about 8 years ago, like a Core 2 quad. That emulator is going to soak up a lot of cpu cycles and memory, so the user experience will be of a PC considerably slower than that. Will it even be able to run any reasonably modern x86 software quickly enough to make it worthwhile?
Will the limited internal storage of a phone be enough to cope with the installed size of several Windows programs? Will the limited RAM on a phone be enough to run the OS, the emulator, and an x86 Windows program that was not written for such constraints?
Then there's the fact that Windows x86 programs are meant to be used with a mouse, not a touchscreen. Many of the buttons and controls will be far too small to tap reliably, and kludges will have to be installed as part of the emulation layer to make click and drag, right click, hover, etc., work with a touchscreen. It will be klunky and inferior to the touch experience with native apps and to the desktop experience running a mouse.
The keyboard, too, will have to emulate an actual physical keyboard. Windows has a lot of key combinations built-in, and you'll need to have the ability to simulate these too.
Not only that, but building a full emulator for something as complex as Windows is going to be hard. Look at all of the work that has been put into WINE over the years, and it's not even a full emulator-- it's just a compatiblity layer, since it operates on native x86 hardware. It still can't seamlessly run a lot of Windows programs. Building something that will translate x86 to ARM will be harder than that.
I think the only chance MS had for an x86 running phone evaporated when Intel kneecapped them with the termination of the Atom CPUs in question. It's probably just as well-- trying to use programs written for a regular PC with a large screen would be miserable on a tiny phone screen without a real mouse and keyboard.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
