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T-Mobile Dumps MS SmartPhone
burgburgburg writes "It seems that T-Mobile International, Europe's second largest mobile phone operator, has decided against introducing a Microsoft SmartPhone after all. T-Mobile had announced their plans in February to introduce the MS SmartPhone this summer. Industry insiders say that the software for the phone continued to have 'fundamental problems,' leading to a high failure rate. French mobile carrier Orange introduced a MS SmartPhone, SPV, late last year. It initially had software security problems which Microsoft has claimed are patched."
This is a more accurate story entitled "T-Mobile has NOT dumped MS Smartphone, just delayed it a bit".
Also, RCR says:
a T-Mobile spokesman said the carrier had never set a definite date, only that it would begin selling the phone sometime this summer. Spokesman Philipp Schindera said there are software problems with the phone, and that T-Mobile, manufacturer HTC and Microsoft are working to fix those problems. He said the phone has not been delayed, because there are still several months of summer left.
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No, it doesn't figure. It's not a French phone at all. It's manufactured by a Taiwanese company for a German customer. And with which part of the phone is there a problem? The software developed by Microsoft, a U.S. company.
What was "cool" became publicly known as C#, and it seems to still be alive...
Actually its pretty good already. I bought the Orange SPV in November and here's my experience so far:
Initially it was usable but fairly buggy. The battery life was appalling (the radio side of the phone was using more power than it needed to), the menus were slow, it kept pausing half way through entering an sms, the key lock didn't prevent the backlight from coming on when a key was pressed(making battery life even worse) etc etc.
Anyway by February they had a patch out which cured all of these problems (battery life still isn't the best but no worse than any other phone with a large well lit colour screen) and the only bug left that bothers me is that the T9 dictionay periodically loses all the custom words I've entered into it.
Where I think that Microsoft have got right, however is their positioning of the smartphone platform as a phone first and a PDA second. I've seen and used all its major competitors (sony P800, Nokia 7210, Nokia 3650) and they're all either:
phones with nowhere near the functionality of the SPV
or
PDA's with phone features, which are more powerful than the SPV but are bigger, more expensive and cannot really be operated one handed.
As a note on the security hole discovered that allows unsigned applications to run. Not to excuse Microsoft here but when Orange launched the SPV here in the UK they crippled it so that no unsigend applications could run and the only way to get your application signed was through Orange at an exorbitant cost(£200 per application if I remember correctly). The result of this was that pretty much everybody who bought an SPV tried to break the certification as most bought it due to the potential of running/developing their own applications. I also think that the method of breaking the certification required you to have physical access to the the phone, which puts into perspective some of the more hysterical stories of the time.
Wrong, When you update, all user data is retained. Even if for some reason it did lose it all, you can backup/restore to the SD memory card, your pc via active sync, or via gprs to Orange Backup! GPRS is free for SPV users as part of the promotion pack. Get your facts straight!
"IE got Microsoft the dominant position in the browser wars."
It also got them:
Zero revenue.
Hundreds of headaches and bugs.
Negative media coverage in the anti-trust trial.
Not worth it, IMO.
"And WMP has allowed WMA to become the "standard" for DRM and encrypted audio. "
Music and content thru DRM and encrypted audio could be less than 1% of the total music market. Setting a standard in a niche segment doesn't count for much.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Here where I live the Smartphone was officially introduced yesterday, and I've been using one for 24 hours now.
Say what you want about Microsoft, but this time I feel that their 1.0 product is very polished. I've not expirienced any instability, but perhaps I haven't used it enough yet.
Anyway, the user interface is much simpler, more to the point and more usable than competing Smartphone-ish operating systems, as the ones found on Ericsson P800 and Nokia 7650.
It's difficult to describe, really, but it's simpleness - with natural but (in this context) innovative functions as a home button and a back button on the keyboard - really makes it stand out. The browser "home" and "back" metaphor is uses throughout the OS.
I can't say I've often had this experience with a mobile phone (and I'm not sure that it's a good thing, money wise), but this made me _want_ to use it! *Much*. For mail (the Inbox is surprisingly good), for messaging (it has both SMS and MSN Messenger, as well as MMS), for contacts, for appointments, etc.
For years I've carried around both a Palm and a Nokia cell phone, but this is the first hybrid product that's a serious contender to the Palm.
The major gripe is Microsoft's ActiveSync software. I've never been able to make ActiveSync sync successfully with anything. It works the first few times, then it stops wanting to sync altogether. This happened with my HP Jornada 720, later happened with the original Compaq IPaq and now it happens with this phone.
It's a major let down. But the phone in itself is a joy to use.
They need a carrier to subsidize it so the price comes down.
I can see your reasoning that this advantage might diappear. Maybe it will, but there it a chance that it could stay an advantage for quite some time to come. It's actually a pretty neat concept.
Power consumption in CMOS logic is directly proportional to your clock speed, and how many transistors you have switching. This is proportional to how much computing you're doing. If your OS requires less computation to run, you use less power, and your battery lasts longer than the competition's.
Maybe Moore's Law will double the amount of CPU power availible in a PDA, but if your OS only needs half of that, your battery life is going to be double your competition's.
This isn't quite true due to the other components in the device that draw a fixed amount of power to keep them running (backlight for example), but power usage by the CPU is a significant factor in the battery life of most PDAs.
Anyways, the reason I was pointing out that Symbian OS was designed to run on small devices was not hardware requirements, but UI design. There are nice touches in the way they did Symbian OS that let it use the tiny screen more efficiently than a PocketPC.
For example, there's a menu button which hides/unhides the menu at the top of the window, in all applications. That's 10% more screen availible most of the time. It's also very easy to hide the taskbar as well.
In general, the UI was designed for a small screen, instead of trying to shrink the Windows UI. This is nice, because you can get more out of the small physical size of the screen.
I'm pretty optimistic about the whole Symbian thing because of things like this. It's just too bad Psion isn't in the PDA business anymore.
Life is too short to proofread.
The palm folks laughed but look at palms stock price now? It was $.80 a share the last time I looked! MS took over 75% of the market in less then 2 years!
;-)
According to this article from Gartner it's more like:
PalmOs: 55.2%
Windows CE (sic): 25.7%
That's as of January.
PC World has similar numbers:
PalmOS: 48.6%
Pocket PC: 30%
That's as of October.
What was your source of info again? And did you wash afterwards?
-chris
San Francisco values: compassion, tolerance, respect, intelligence
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And where is IE today?
Lets have a look....
And yet 90% of the net is still using IE? Why? Because features like that don't matter to Joe User. IE is "good enough", and inertia wins. They can't be bothered to upgrade.
There is a fundamental problem in WinCE which causes 90% of all the issues people see with these devices. The problem is that WinCE has poor memory management. Theoretically the OS is supposed to manage all memory aspects from stopping running apps to free memory to dynamically loading and unloading DLL's. The most serious problem however is that it restricts the amount of memory available to a DLL to 16 MB. On devices like the HP 5450 and these T-Mobile Smart Phones, this becomes a problem because of the numerous integrated devices the OS has to support. The 5450 has WiFi, Bluetooth and Biometrics which fill up 12 of the 16MB of available memory. As a result, user applications like Adobe Acrobat do not have enough memory to load their linked libraries. The only solution is to jump through hoops managing the memory manually and to disable unused devices like Bluetooth or the Biometrics (which negates getting to the device to begin with!).
.NET comes out which is due sometime this summer.
A solution to this problem is not due until WinCE
Its unfortunate that this problem exists. It has apparently been caused by these PocketPC devices growing in size too quickly for the OS. Talk about growing pains...
It also got them:
Zero revenue.
Hundreds of headaches and bugs.
Negative media coverage in the anti-trust trial.
Microsoft doesn't care about zero revenue, as long as their business objectives are achieved. Consider the XBox: they were losing money when they were selling it for $300, and they're sure as hell going to continue to lose money now that they're lowering it to $180. In fact, year-over-year losses for the XBox have doubled, but they're still in the market, looking for a way to outflank Sony and Nintendo.
Hundreds of headaches and bugs? What do they care about that? Apparently as much as they do about secure computing..... and if you've seen their scorecard for the last few months (the Passport and Hotmail fiascos being only the most recent examples), you'd realize this really isn't a major concern for them. They'll continue to insist that the NEXT version of [insert operating system / web service / application name here] will be much more stable, secure and robust -- and people will buy it.
Thing MS is scared of negative media coverage about the antitrust trial. It's over, and guess what? THEY WON IT. Yes, it cost a grotesque sum of money; yes, they received a Thanksgiving-sized helping of negative press. But they avoided some major potential liabilities: having to split up their company into "Baby Bills"; having to open up (or open source) parts, if not the whole of their operating system to competitors; having to unbundle Internet Explorer, or being prevented from integrating applications into the OS going forward; or being legally obligated to follow certain practices that would impair their ability to maintain a soft monopoly on the markets they currently dominate.
this is nothing new, just listen to any extreme programming advocate 'splain it to ya.
in any case, usloth knows all this but can't be bothered because they are, as many people now understand, simply a marketing shell around a captive (in the sense of bound and gagged) research and development core. but unlike the makeup of the earth, where the crust is relatively thin, and the mantle (and core) are relatively thick, usloth marketing is like the gases of jupiter; who knows what enormous pressures must be exerted on the miniscule core trapped inside.
if someone were to send a monolith and ignite usloth, perhaps all those nice minds bribed to remain silent could spark another star, to complement that which is already burning, i.e., free software.
According to this article the phone was delayed, not dumped... There is a difference.