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Microsoft to Attack RIM with Magneto
An anonymous reader writes "At this week's Mobile and Embedded DevCon (MEDC) in Las Vegas, it's anticipated that Microsoft will finally unveil 'Magneto', widely expected to be dubbed Windows Mobile 2005. Magneto is rumored to merge the Pocket PC and Smartphone versions of Windows Mobile into a single platform that combines smartphone and PDA capabilities. Consistent with that strategy, Pocket Office will reportedly be renamed Office Mobile, with other key apps similarly redesignated Word Mobile, Excel Mobile, PowerPoint Mobile, and Outlook Mobile."
X-Men jokes go here.
Maybe I should have known that but I didn't..
Shut the fuck up already. Every cellphone-related story has a few idiots like you bitching about modern technology, while ignoring the fact that every major phone manufacturer has an extensive lineup of budget phones with black&white or greyscale screens and almost no extra (useless) features. They aren't going to turn into Windows Mobile smartphones overnight. Go buy a $60 new phone and quit complaining.
Nope. There is and always will be a huge market for basic phones. They just don't make slashdot front page.
Can anyone accurately predict what protocols, air interfaces, and file format standards will end up winning in this (now) mobile free for all?
I'll bite. Well, they all have mail and web access, so they are fairly standard, use IMAP for your mail of course. Files get stored on SD-cards, which is a standard format. Notes are txt files. Emails in the inbox are stored in a unique way, just like every other mail package on the planet (with the exception of direct-access stuff like Maildir of course). Recorded audio is plain wav with a choice of codecs.
The only thing that you might actually have to export manually would be contacts and schedules. Both can be dumped to XML IIRC. I've helped people export data from a variety of phones, and these things are very open compared to others it has to be said.
Thing is, I can't think of an alternative office are appliction that encompasses shedules, contacts and tasks in an easily workable format, and allows synchronization between mobile devices. I'd be happy to use one if it existed, but hate it or not, Outlook is actually very well featured. That's half the problem here; the competetion isn't all that much of a competion. Yet.
My real fear is that in the future you won't be able to get a phone without windozeXX on it, or be able to use any air interface not supported by M$ pocket-mobile-crap software.
Sure, lack of choice bites, but I wouldn't go so far as to say "pocket-mobile-crap software". Have you actually used one? Personally, I think they are the dogs bollocks and there is nothing else as good as them on the market right now. Zealotry aside, that's all that matters.
It is the worst operating system I have ever encountered. For example, when you click on the close button, programs do not actually close. They just minimize. To close a program, you need to reset the handheld or go to the memory management tool in settings and force them to quit. This is ridiculous. Also, if things don't have the right extension, they won't open period.
I'm surprised nobody's put this link here yet but... http://www.mobile-review.com/pda/articles/wm2005-m agneto-en.shtml
This is a link to a preview of a Magneto beta build.
You can also download it for the XDA 2 [HTC Blue Angel] at http://forum.xda-developers.com/
Have fun!
- Some nasty Samsung phone back in the mid-90s
- A Nokia 5190 (for which I had a faceplate that matched my indigo iBook G3, the toilet seat edition)
- A Nokia 8290, still one of my favorite phones ever
- A Nokia 3390, which I never really liked (too big)
- Another 8290...
- An Ericsson T28 Worldphone (hands-down worst UI I've ever seen on a phone, but at least I could make calls from Italy on it)
- A 1st gen Danger Sidekick (actually, I had four of them... They kept dying on me)
- A Motorola Mpx200 running Smartphone 2002
- An Audiovox SMT 5600 (aka Typhoon) running Windows Mobile 2003
And I've never been happier with any phone than I am with the SMT 5600. It's fast, stable, and feature-rich. It's totally changed my perspective on how I interact with my phone, since I am now completely dependent on it for reading new emails and finding out where my next meeting is, instead of having to yank out my laptop and pop into Outlook. I think for a lot of users it's overkill, but in the corporate environment it literally changes the way you interact with business information. I love it, and it will only be replaced by another Windows Mobile phone someday.That said, I am pretty envious of the visual styling on the Moto Razr; those things are incredibly cool. But being able to sync to an Exchange server, and write C#-based managed applications in Visual Studio 2005 for my phone are totally killer features in my book.
I'm really looking forward to the day when I can just keep my music on my phone, or stream it over the network via gprs, instead of having to keep my iPod on me at all times.
And yes, I do work for Microsoft. And I do work on Visual Studio, so take my words with whatever grain (or grains) of salt you feel necessary. That said, I really do feel like the products we have in the marketplace today in this space are really cool, and well-worth looking into, especially since Cingular decided to keep carrying the SMT 5600 after their ATT merger.
No, but I used to work for Microsoft.
That depends on your device. Some of them have an upgrade path (those that use flash for storing the OS have a possibility), some don't.
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Basically it will come down to; how well does the manufacturer of your device support your device? You can't take a standard Magneto download and install it on any device, it needs to be customized for your hardware. Since these are closed hardware platforms it falls to the manufacturer to do it unless you feel like doing some serious reverse engineering.
At the moment, the only phones that are almost certainly going to get a version of Magneto are the Motorola MPx200 and MPx220, mostly because these two phones have been used internally at Microsoft as test-mule hardware. Don't ask me how I know this
(The previous was fact, the rest is conjecture) Motorola is reportedly already planning to offer a new phone (the MPx230) which is the MPx220 with Magneto on it and a few new features (better antennae for Bluetooth for example). They're also planning to offer a soft and hard upgrade to Magneto for at least the MPx220. The soft upgrade will be low cost and will be literally a download/CD that you can install on your phone. The "hard" upgrade will be a trade-your-phone deal which will cost a little more but will allow you to get the advantage that the modified hardware platform provides.
YMMV... I have an MPx220 and actually like it a lot. I willl still upgrade though, Magneto seems to fix a lot of the problems I perceive with Smartphone 2003.