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Microsoft Enters the Cell Phone OS Market
PuZZLeR writes: "Today, Microsoft unveiled a new operating system for mobile phones (named 'Windows Powered Smartphone 2002') and plans to fully enter the wireless data devices with voice capabilities by utilizing both cellphones and PDA devices. TI already created a reference design for the Ms powered phone. While this sounds like Microsoft is going after Handspring, RIM or Danger, cellphone OS manufactures, like Nokia and OpenWave are expected to counteract to the announcements. Today, Nokia announced it will offer mobile phone makers its own development kit and OS."
Oh. Wait a minute...
Got Rhinos?
I cant wait till I awnser the phone and get
"Hi, How are you? I send you this call in order to have your advice"
Yeah!!!
#include sig.h
Man that is going to suck when your trapped out in the wilderness, flat tire, and no food.
Where is the hotswap redundant PHONE?!!!
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
How is this a "familiar Windows environment", other than a vaguely-XP scheme?
Got Rhinos?
Ok... I thought that when Windows CE came out that it was a horrible name:
WinCE
This one is just as bad...
Winmps
"Windows Powered Smartphone 2002"
lol, why not call it "super-great windows CE awesome gnarly future-smart-phone 2002"
I mean, seriously.. why not call it like "Smartphone XP" or just throw an XP at the end of a decent brand name (nokia 7100XP)?
ok, I'm done my ignorant comments.. time to read the article and see how far off I really am.
OK.
;)
:)
Most cell phones don't have that much data storage... right?
... but what about IE? IE can't be separated from windows so they will have an extra 20M there...
Right...
If anyone's ever read Bill Gate's book "The Road Ahead", this will sound chillingly familiar. In this book, he described how he'd like to see every appliance integrated into a central system (all of course designed by Microsoft ;-). This is just one more stepping stone.
His vision, then, would be that you turn on your phone, log into the Hailstorm cellphone server, check your hotmail and sms in one, perhaps unfold your laptop running XP and download the messages, go home and turn on your TV running a microsoft-style tivo, put on your MS Stereo running off an XP music server, and so on. Total saturation, with total control from Redmond.
Actually, no. Nokia just announced their alternative to Microsoft's junk...
"Hello Ma, how are you?" ..."
....
"Hey, I'm fine but
*Piiiieeeepppp*
"A fatal error occrued at 00x24624, press any button reboot your phone"
Jeeezzz
Life sucks.
Why not spend the effort advertising the Sanyo SCP-5150 instead, a very cool, full-feature phone that can meow out of the box, in addition to the normal wireless web, color LCD, blah the fuck blah.
Or maybe we could concentrate on the Kyocero palm-phones, available for sale right this very instant, interoperates with all your stuff, and is a really cool phone.
Let's stop watching MS pull out the same old bullshit, but with a start button, and start advertising products that matter, and don't support monopolies!
So.. were are they going to put the CTRL, ALT, and DEL keys on my phone? Cuz i KNOW i'm going to need them to kill the damn KaZaa Spyware runnin in the background..
hmm.. that'd be too easy to bug...
Let's remember the words of Mr. Burke:
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." -Edmund Burke
Go buy someone OTHER than Microsoft's phone, please!
--Grrae
"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be." -Douglas Adams
And I thought having minesweeper on my Siemens S35i was bad enough. At the beginning it diplays this message: With greetings from Microsoft!
Here.... The short version:
.NET (Microsoft) versus Java (Nokia) on the mobile front too...
" Top-ranked mobile phone maker Nokia said on Monday it would offer other mobile handset suppliers a complete design kit for making Internet-ready phones, seeking to stave off a push by Microsoft Corp. into the mobile market.
The move by Nokia, maker of one of every three mobile phones sold globally, takes aim at computer software giant Microsoft, which said earlier on Monday it was offering phone makers a standard kit of software and computer chips to build new "smartphones." "
The article also mentions that out of the top 5 mobile phone manufacturers, only Samsung is coming out with phones based on the Microsoft junk, at the end of this year.
It'll be
just gave me a good laugh. ;-)
It's been that kind of day, sorry
Sinepaw.org: Grape Winos
Message GPF32. The phone customer you are atempting to reach is temporarily out of service. Error GPF at 0x0F07021. Please try your call again later.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/02/19/184720 8&mode=thread&tid=100
Of the top five cellphone manufacturers, only Samsung Electronics has said it would use Microsoft Windows-powered Smartphone 2002 software.
From the looks of things Nokia has a decent shot of keeping Microsoft out of yet another business.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
"The cell phone you are trying to reach is currently rebooting (or, has just crashed because you called)."
"I mean, honestly, for a site that bitches about MS so much, slashdot gives them a helluva lot of free press."
Amen brotha. You know why? More people love to bitch about MS that anything else. So far I have seen about 15 posts talking about BSOD's, Ctrl-Alt-Delete, viruses, etc...not a SINGLE ONE talks about the technology or the phone.
sad ain't it?
Sent from your iPad.
Nokia sold cellphones with GEOS on them for years. Then Microsoft threatened with Windows CE, so Nokia and a few other cell phone combines got together and wrote Symbian. Nokia's been shipping phones based off it for about two years now. SDK's have been available for a long time from Nokia's developer's site. Altho I will say, I signed up for one multiple times and never got it. Had no problems getting the SDK for their GEOS phones (even wrote an HTTP server for them). I know others have gotten them with no problems tho.
So what's the news here?
"Windows Powered Smartphone 2002?"
If nothing else, one had to respect the Microsot marketing department for being able to shovel crap onto the consumer by the pound at the consumer's cost. But after choosing a product name like that...
Gee... if
I refer to this comment.
I referred to better pictures of the Journada 928,
- infoSync's article [infosync.no] has a much better picture of the Jornada 928 [infosync.no] than the token thumbnail Forbes provides.
And then went on to talk about the OS on it:-
They also have an article about what has been added to WinCE [infosync.no] (guess I know why MS calls it PocketPC now...) to turn it into a mobile phone-integrated PDA. There are six (!) pages of screen shots in that one. You can also look forward to "...Mobile Information Server (MIS) 2002 Enterprise Edition, which adds Server ActiveSync..." -- here's ANOTHER pie MS wants to sell you pieces of.
Oh well... if they can cut-n-paste, I guess I have to as well.The interesting thing is that ringtones -- which phone companies want to charge you for -- aren't there. Instead, you can assign .WAV files as ring tones, and specific files for specific callers. Wonder what the motivation for that move is...?
Still... I want one!
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
While consumers tolerate their desktops crashing, I don't think they'll tolerate it in their cell phones. Dropped calls are bad enough.
Of course, as folks have mentioned, virii are also a problem.
Perhaps what could actually happen is that this could cause MS to take a harder look at software quality.
-jbn
Just thought I'd drop you a line about the sort of things I would like on my cellphone.
Some features I don't want
- Internet Explorer inextricably embedded into the OS
- Visual Basic scripting
- .NET, or
.anything for that matter
- Any sort of web server
- Outlook, Exchange, or Hotmail
- Buffer overflows
- Passport authentication
What I would like is- to be able to enter a number and make a phone call
Thanks,Intro.
I don't know, will we ever see ANY news posted here regarding Microsoft and not have to wade through the hyperbole posts about how many cliche posts we have to wade through?
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
*Phone boots for 15 minutes
*Displays the "Who do you want to call today" welcome message
*Hangs for a further 5 minutes
*Refuses to call non MS cells
User hurls phone out of car onto the pavement
:)
Anyone know if Nokia's move to provide a development kit will include an SDK? (Or does one already exist?) I'd love to be able to write some additional games for my cell phone. By the look of it I'd say it would require some special hardware to copy them over as well. Going to have to look into this...
Talk about vaporware? What's to say? It doesn't exist yet. As for technology, the M$ part of it is well-known. It's the same old M$ stuff so it is easy to talk about.
We can discuss the hardware/tech once it exists...but I'll stick with Motorola or Nokia or...anyone that doesn't have an M$ finger dipped into it. I am proud that not a single penny of my money for the last 6 years has gone to M$ and I intend to keep it that way until the beast is tamed by the courts.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
With domestic appliances becoming smarter everyday and now embarking more computing power than NASA had when Armstrong put foot on the Moon, it is no surprise that all the major operating system vendors try to conquer this new market. This trend has been going on for quite some time now.
The real news here are that Microsoft is again trying to conquer that market. This is a big challenge for them, because the OS design there is at the opposite of what they usually manufacture: you can't put a system that crashes randomly, or that eats all the CPU and all the batteries of the device. It seems previous incarnations, that is mostly Windows CE, failed to do that.
They have good designers and the fact that "this is Windows" makes it easy to sell the devices. If they manage to make an OS that stays afloat, they might very well find themselves in a strong position in this market. At least, I think they have much more chances to win here than on the server market.
Is this the REAL name of the Stinger phone or have they gave up on Stinger???
Gorkman
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
from this page:
Is it possible to develop games for the Nokia mobile phones?
The only phones that games may be developed for are the 9110 and 9210 Communicators. The 9210 has a symbian operating System which is an open platform for developers.
This means that anyone may develop games and other add-on applications for the device. This is the same with the 9110, however it has a different operating system.
Additionally, several Nokia phones support Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), where games and information can be programed for mobile viewing.
For more information on the Communicators SDKs and other Nokia tools, visit the Nokia Forum (www.forum.nokia.com).
That is a GSM phone. In the US, Cingular on the west coast and VoiceStream on the east coast both offer GSM service.
With software like Microwindows, PicoGUI, and Qtopia available, a lot of companies will probably be finding Linux useful on PDAs and smaller embedded devices like Cellphones.
-- 2 + 2 = 5, for very large values of 2
I want to be the first one with pictures of the Blue Screen of Death on a cell phone.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
First of all, OpenWave is not a cellphone OS manufacturer. OpenWave makes a whole bunch of mobile middleware solutions and an embedded microbrowser.
However, Nokia is in good company as far as cellphone OS-es go: in fact, they use and work on the same OS: which is Symbian. I hope that now the uninformed will start to see the wisdom behind Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola, Psion, Siemens, Sony, Matsushita ETC. uniting on the issue ofa single cellphone OS that is Symbian OS: not to pay the MS tax. Sure, they had to pay up fronttens of millions of dollars to found Symbian (the company), but that's small potato compared to the money they would have paid Microsoft, if it got hold of the mobile market. That would have been a cut on the revenue on each sold unit! I can tell you for certain, that would have been the nightmare of any cellphone manufacturer.
On another note, I am really glad Microsoft is openly stepping on Nokia's toe. Damn that's a good feeling! Now the big bad bully just picked a decent adversary! Nokia is not only big enough, it's also nimble and potentially dangerous for Microsoft. It also has a brand recognition that rivals Microsoft's.
Sigged!
Is Microsoft going to include WPA in this software? If so, what happens if I switch my battery or plug it into my car lighter and it requires me to call Microsoft? How would I call them if the phone is not usable?
NT was their attack on the RISC-nixes, Linux half got in the way there.
XP is to take on Mac OSX
Pocket OS is their attempt to kill Palm
Now they want to take on "Symbian", a beaut little OS for PDA/cellphone crossover devices developed by little old Psion, the maker of the best PDAs in the world (maybe now past tense), & now taken on by Motorola, Ericsson, Nokia, Matsushita/Panasonic & Sony.
Can't they just be happy with owning the PC desktop?
So, instead of call waiting being one of the most annoying new phone features, we can now expect "Hang on, I've got to reboot my phone" , too.
*sigh*
Jezz, not one yet. i'll give it a shoot.
if you goto the Smart Phone site. then click on the Developer link. You'll notice that this is a rebranded Pocket PC.
Which is what it looks like (and i'm 99% sure) it shares the exact same subset of the Win32 API that the current PocketPC/WinCE API does. Which means a relativly sophisticaed OS, capable of real internet browsing (complete with DOM, scripting, GIF animation, etc..). Windows Media player, so WMA and mp3 playback. MSN Messenger (for those who are into that kind of thing). But at the cost of high resources, like 32 megs of RAM min, not to mainstreem with cellphones at the moment.
and i'm not sure, but i'm guessing all of the current pocketpc apps including Quake, which is also shown in the SmartPhone Tour. Will be available for it, which would be pretty darn cool.
-Jon
this is my sig.
Technically, the phone powers Windows, not the other way around. When they make software that produces energy, let me know.
"My phone just trashed its code segment. Can I call you back ?"
"Ph33r my l33+ h4x0r 5k!||z wh3n ! p!ng f|00d j00!"
"Could you call back in just two minutes ? I'm in a heated Solitaire round."
Ahh the blasphemy!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
DO-DO-DO... Your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please Reboot and try again.
.
Too late. Sprint already has such auto-update, and it is free.
Too big to fail? Does that make me to small to succeed?
I mean they can't really grow their market share in desktop PC operating systems ... In fact these days if they don't move into other related sectors they'll shrink heheh
WinCE is far too fat/slow/power hungry to run as a cellphone OS. This means that either you need to go with something like Intel PCA (essentially once CPU to do the phone part and another CPU to run the WinCE PDA part) or you can achieve a sigle CPU solution by using a really tight little OS to run the phone part and use WinCE to do the PDA stuff. Even Symbian phones do this and Symbian is much more efficient than Wince.
I don't think the WinCE PDAphone will win any friends through its nice UI. Start buttons just don't work nicely for phones. In Europe the Symbian phones outsell all other PDAs.
Likely though M$ will make some inroads through .NET FUD. Big mobile operations (eg. the army of Cocacola sales reps) could easily go for this kinda thing.
Also of interest is Microsoft getting in the sack with Qualcomm with their BREW phone application achitecture. Again, this could likely lock people into a proprietary Microsoft back-end. Depressing stuff....
I write custom web-based information management software. I have a number of products whose value would increase exponentially if they could truly be accessed anytime, anywhere.
I need a phone that
I've seen some that are close. WAP is a joke. My biggest problem is that "deer about to be run over" look when I bring up my needs to just about any Cellular reseller....
Anybody?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
.. that on the last page of the Feature Tour, called fun on the run, they have a screenshot showing a modified version of Doom running? Are there other phones available today that can do that?
Well, it could still be true. For one this is a PR release, not really a product release. What you see on the website has probably been feature complete for some months now. If this is true then it means that the only thing the developers have been doing for the last few months is fixing bugs in RAID (MS's bug tracking software). being that it's an OS, i'm sure they we're also doing some security incedents as well.
-Jon
this is my sig.
"From the looks of things Nokia has a decent shot of keeping Microsoft out of yet another business."
Yes.. Finns fighting Microsoft in the server & desktop OS area (Linux) and Finns fighting Microsoft in the mobile space (Nokia)..
Well, having to boot your mobile isn't excatly new or unknown.
I have a Nokia 9110 Communicator, which sometimes can be very annoying.
Half a year ago almost half of the calls would simply halt the phone. So I had to disconnect the battery every time. This behaviour simply disappeared after a few weeks.
Microsoft isn't responsible for all bugs in the world...
please proff read !
Didn't Nokia, Ericsson and Siemens (not sure about Siemens) agree 2-3 years ago to standarise on symbians epoc?
If they are still honouring this deal microsoft is going to have tough time getting their Os into phones as Nokia/Ericsson/Siemens probably have more than 80% of cell phone market, here in europe at least...
-- http://electronicintifada.net --