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Microsoft To Add Yet Another Smartphone OS This Year
GMGruman writes "Someone at Microsoft either really loves mobile operating systems or can't make up his mind as to which to use, because Microsoft Thursday announced yet another mobile OS, its fifth. The new Windows Embedded Handheld OS will succeed Windows Mobile 6.5 and run on at least some existing Windows Mobile smartphones. It is not the same mobile OS, known as Windows Phone 7, that Microsoft earlier this year said would replace Windows Mobile and break with it in terms of compatibility so Microsoft could better compete with the iPhone and Google Android OS."
So, they'll have Windows Mobile, Windows Phone 7, Windows Embedded Compact 7, Windows Embedded Handheld ...
"Me too" attitude (what? let Android be the only one with fragmented market?) ... Nothing new from Microsoft, including the "shoot yourself in the foot... no that foot... the other one. Atta boy!"
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Seriously. Steve Ballmer laughed at google on stage at D:8 for having both android and chrome OS and now microsoft has 3 current, all slightly different mobile operating systems. I mean come on.
Heres an Ars Technica link as I can't find the exact video on the all things d site.
How many computers are too many?
You're making the false assumption that it's the market that decides what operating systems are available on smart phones. Hate to break it to you, but all cell phones are a terribly proprietary business with a huge barrier to entry, and if all of the present players decide that shit is the best thing to run on smart phones then that is what will run on smart phones, even if there exist holy open alternatives that will save babies from being eaten.
"The OS will feature a richer and immersive user experience..."
This can only mean that it's gonna have a 3D display with Kinect-like controls. I can't wait to fly through the keypad snatching at buttons as they rush by!
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Yeah, maybe in your fantasy world no one would use it. If the OS is good enough, one of the phone device manufacturers will leverage that advantage to make a larger profit over the others.
Unfortunately it isn't.
The Market does decide, why do you think Android and iOS are leading the pack when it comes to growth? Why do you think all the other phone manufacturers are scrambling to keep up?
Besides, Android is fairly open and the iOS is standards compliant.
Try a Nokia n900.
It's pretty much straight up Linux with the command line and apt-get ready to go right out of the box.
Android is 100% open source. Don't like the Market? Replace it. Don't like the keyboard? Replace it. Don't like Google integrations? Remove them.
If you think all of this is somehow difficult or discouraged, I think you should take a closer look at the forums at xda-developers.com, or even at developer.android.com, where you can check out the entire OS source code with git and re-build it from scratch and re-flash your phone, if you want.
All this talk about Jailbreaking Android phones is for people who want root access but *DO NOT* want to re-flash their phone. There is no such problem for people that are comfortable replacing the software. And in fact this is what you have to do with most open source projects running on specialized hardware.
...in smartphones and hand held devices in general.
iPhone -- iOS Unix
Android -- Linux
Palm -- Linux
RIM -- Moving to QNX
That leaves Symbian and Windows Mobile as the two non-'nix holdouts.
There are very few changes to the various versions of Android, so you can ignore fragmentation and target 1.5 and pretty much everyone will be able to run it. The addition of wifi tethering, apps to sd etc in 2.2 makes no difference at all to users of 2.1,1.6,1.5 etc.
Reading these stories about MS lately is making me all nostalgic for when what they did mattered. I can't quite put my finger on it... but at some point they lost their big and scary status.. and have just become more of a joke.. to me at least. There was a time when their whims could shift the whole market.. these days I wonder if the masses even notice their flailing attempts to 'compete'.
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. -HLM
So would this be a fair assessment for someone familiar with the current product lineup?
1. WEC7 is a rebranding/retread of Windows CE 6. There will be industrial PDAs using it like the MC55, Psion Ikon, DAPtech etc
2. WEH is basically the Windows Mobile shell on top of WEC7, just as WM6 was the shell on top of CE5. In theory it should be possible to recompile/port existing C++ codebases and will be a useful upgrade path for large corporations who currently run their bespoke stocktaking/delivery/survey applications on top of WM6.
3. Windows Phone 7 is a completely new offering built on the WEC7 kernel. It has a locked-down userland aimed at being flashy for the consumer market which cannot run native code (and is useless if you have 8 years of C++ codebase you want to run on it).
If this Microsoft operating system is going to be incompatible with the other Microsoft operating systems, why not just switch to something else now and be done with it? Compatibility is the only advantage Microsoft software has, and that is being thrown out with the bathwater.
MEH OS is exactly how I feel about this new offering and its chances of impressing anybody in this age and time. At least they didn't get it as bad as the CrAPI one.
"We're starting to see that philosophy play out today with the introduction of Windows Embedded Handheld, which is essentially a warmed-over version of WinMo 6.5.3 with some key UI and enterprise-focused enhancements. Microsoft is specifically calling out an "extended support life-cycle" for the platform, a sign that these phones aren't for the gotta-have-it crowd -- instead, the company intends to push these things through corporate fleets where Windows Mobile has traditionally dominated, places where Windows Phone's flashy stylings and locked-down underpinnings won't have the same draw."
Mostly seems this *is* Windows Mobile 6.5 in all but name.
As an N900 owner: do NOT try an N900. Nokia are even worse than Microsoft in terms of supporting their products. N900's Maemo OS is already outdated, and the N900 along with it. They must have been planning to do that even before releasing the N900, given the timelines, which is why you get people posting friendly advice to Nokia on how it can avoid death.
Nokia seem to think of their phones and OS's like Casio thinks of watches: a simple, closed-loop device that's done as soon as it hits the shelves. For all their hype of maemo's Ovi store and all, when it comes right down to doing the work and putting their money where their mouth is, it just doesn't happen. Now they're planning new products: N9/Meego, which will suck equally badly.
The only thing Nokia has going for it is Qt, which they bought in from Trolltech (along with TT itself), and they'll probably find a way to kill.
If they're such pieces of shit, where are the open standard wondrous operating systems?
Perhaps here? Or maybe even here?
The only thing Nokia has going for it is Qt, which they bought in from Trolltech (along with TT itself), and they'll probably find a way to kill.
Qt is now their standard development kit for Symbian and Maemo, so to suggest they only bought it to kill it is false. And as a new learner on Symbian, I have to say I'm very impressed. Qt looks to be a very good API. It's also cross-platform, not only meaning the same code will compile for Symbian and Maemo, but also making it easy to develop for Windows, Mac and Linux (so you can pretty much compile for 100% of the desktop market, and 50% of the mobile market). And it means you can use standard C++, where as the old development kit for Symbian apparently used an awkward cut down version.
And as for "only thing Nokia has going for it", there's more to Nokia than Maemo. Like the small matter of their other OS with 50% market share, or the hundreds of millions of phones they sell every year. Never used an N900, but I love my 5800.
In fact your entire post seems to be extrapolating from the single point of "Maemo is discontinued". By all means warn the OP, but your claims about how they therefore kill all their phones, OSs, and SDKs, is just plain ludicrous. Symbian has been around for many years. You might as well claim that because Apple have ditched their Mac OS before (not to mention 68K, PPC), that therefore they're about to ditch OS X or IphoneOS at any moment!
No, you got bugfixes that essentially brought it out of beta status months after it was released. On the same day, you saw the first release of Meego, their new system, which Nokia have clearly said that they will NOT properly support on the N900. The work to fix major bugs was essentially just a woefully inadequate fairwell gesture. A full, supported meego release with potential for another 2 years of app compatibility for the N900 might have been a less stupid gesture.
So would this be a fair assessment for someone familiar with the current product lineup?
1. WEC7 is a rebranding/retread of Windows CE 6. There will be industrial PDAs using it like the MC55, Psion Ikon, DAPtech etc
2. WEH is basically the Windows Mobile shell on top of WEC7, just as WM6 was the shell on top of CE5. In theory it should be possible to recompile/port existing C++ codebases and will be a useful upgrade path for large corporations who currently run their bespoke stocktaking/delivery/survey applications on top of WM6.
3. Windows Phone 7 is a completely new offering built on the WEC7 kernel. It has a locked-down userland aimed at being flashy for the consumer market which cannot run native code (and is useless if you have 8 years of C++ codebase you want to run on it).
That list also gives one a glimpse of what is wrong with Windows Mobile in general. It is clunky, unintuitive and fragmented. It seems I can't pick up two phones purportedly running the same version of the same Windows Mobile OS and use the same procedure to configure half the things I want to. Some time ago I configured a HTC S620 smartphone to work over a a VPN connection. It took quite a while to figure out the clunky UI and the badly documented process needed to accomplish this (Mostly HTC's fault for writing a crappy manual) but it worked fine in the end. Recently the thing broke down and I was provided with another type of HTC smartphone of the same vintage running the same OS version but the configuration process was totally different. Although it usually ends up working OK if you have the patience to do battle with the UI and read the (often) crappy user manual, I passionately hate setting up and configuring Windows Mobile.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow