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Windows Phone 7 To Get Multi-Tasking, IE9, Xbox Integration
geek4 writes "Microsoft is planning to introduce multi-tasking and full integration with Internet Explorer 9 in future updates to its Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system later this year. IE9 on Windows Phone 7 will use the same core browsing engine as on PCs. Microsoft also talked about the importance of multi-tasking, and claims it can now offer fast task switching without causing serious detriment to the battery life. In particular, Microsoft said, this will improve the experience of using third party applications. In a demo, a Microsoft engineer showed how a music application called 'Slacker' could keep music playing in the background while the user moved between different applications. By holding down the 'back' button, users can also see all their recently accessed applications, allowing them to switch easily between them."
Microsoft also demonstrated how they're integrating WP7 with Xbox 360 consoles, showing a video of players using their phones as an auxiliary touchscreen controller to interact with a Kinect game.
it would be extremely trivial for such a compromised phone to broadcast and infect all XBox 360's within range
A browser exploit can cause a phone to spontaneously sprout limbs, open your 360, connect itself to the JTAG header, and perform the NAND dumping and flashing nonsense currently required to run unsigned code? That's one hell of a phone!
Roles are switched: MS is re-implementing experience that users are already accustomed to on Linux (Android). And expecting 3rd party developers to switch or at least "also support" their platform for 1% of users.
839*929
Come on, be fair. It took Apple waaay longer than that to figure it out.
"The same thing we do every day, Pinky. Try to take over the world."
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Am I the only one that's really surprised that multitasking wasn't already a feature? I thought it was weird when they announced it for the iPhone 4 like it was some huge breakthrough. Symbian might be a piece of crap as a smartphone OS, but, damn, they've had multitasking for 10 years now. It's not a hardware issue. How did this get ignored for so long in iOS and Windows phone?
This sentence no verb.
Halo is no better than the thousands of other Bloody simulators. I'd sooner play fun games like Metroid, Zelda, Mario, Final Fantasy, Dance Revolution, and so on.
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
Am I reading this right? Windows phones will now be able to do things android and iphones have been doing for years?
I find being offended by me offensive.
This is good.
Before you reach out for the pitchforks and torches, let me finish the sentence: this is good for competition. Now that Nokia will ship WP7, Apple and Google will find themselves with a worthy competitor in the smartphone market. At least when it comes to user experience.
Windows Phone 7 was lacking a lot of functionality the earlier Windows Mobile had. It's just a new not-yet-complete OS.
This makes me wonder if they're using a more agile-style approach and releasing what functionality they have completely tested instead of releasing the complete functionality regardless of what they've had time to test? It does make sense in a phone OS.
Exactly. It's just awful, how slowly things are evolving in these locked down mobile systems.
Metro is such a clean, fast interface, lets me see just what I want to see exactly when I want to see it. There's very little hunting/searching for something, as if I use it more than once per day I just pin it to the front page. It just fits extremely well how I want to use a phone.
Although I do have to say, if I couldn't have test-driven it on an HD2 I probably wouldn't have taken the leap to full fledged WP7 hardware. Kudos to MS for not legalbomb XDA from orbit when DFT released the ROM into the wild. If they continue to be smart, they'll let the mod community flourish they way they did with WM6 - that's the only thing that made the platform stay as relevant as it did, for as long as it did.
"I'd make a wooshing sound, but the post was so far over your head it was inaudible..."
No. Xenix was introduced earlier in the '80s, and MP/M before that, on various (non-Commodore) personal computer architectures.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Multitasking on mobile devices is a different problem than multitasking on desktops. With a desktop, the challenges are primarily allocating memory and CPU. With mobile devices, network and battery are the resources that need to be optimized. So with a desktop app, you can shove it int he background, give it limited cpu cycles and memory without any architectural changes. With mobile devices, it is a lot harder to limit because you don't want the CPU running all the time and even if nothing else is using the network connection, letting some background app use it constantly will result in draining the user's battery and potentially costing them data usage fees.
A good example is push based notifications. If applications ping a server regularly to see if they have updates or if there is a message, that uses a lot more of both resources than if it subscribes to a network service that notifies the device when the same event occurs. The problem is, the former is easier to code and the way developers are used to doing things on desktops where they don't have to worry about battery and data nearly as much.
So when Microsoft says they are adding in support for multitasking, does that mean:
In short, multitasking for mobile devices is a difficult problem, with different challenges from traditional multitasking on desktops. Google engineers have repeatedly stated that they consider multitasking and battery life problems to be one of their greatest challenges and current failings. Microsoft announcing that they're coming out with something is, then interesting, although it may be a poor clone of one of the other vendors' implementations.
Your entire post seems to suggest that all Android phones are powerful phones. In reality, they fall along the entire gamut of the market. A smart phone does not necessarily have to cost a lot, nor does it have to be a good phone, and Android definitely covers that ground.
Palm is even about to cover that ground with their new credit card sized, WebOS 3.0 phone. The fact that Windows Phone 7 already included a smaller screen size in its specs immediately suggests to me that you not only ignored them because you assume anything pro-MS is done by an MS fanboy (I currently own an iPhone 4 on AT&T, but I am tired of iOS), and that you lack the ability to see beyond what is happening the market right now.
I never once suggested to anyone that Windows Mobile 6.5 would beat Android because it was a hack on top of a dated OS. Windows Phone 7 will scale down nicely, especially given their strong development tools rooted with WPF, which places a strong emphasis on vectors. Contrast that to Android, and you don't even know if an app will run on your phone (whether by performance or other reasons), and I'd take the smaller WP7 experience that any day of the week.
The problem with IE9 is many people can't upgrade. You'd be surprised how many people still use XP on older machines or netbooks at home, and how many corporate environments will be locked to XP (and in some cases IE6 with it) until near when SP3 drops out of extended support in 2014.
I run XP at home, as I refuse to pay for Windows 7 until there is compelling reason to do spend the cash and spend the time reinstalling the machine. Lack of security updates in 2014 might make me shift in 2013 if nothing has done before then, so I'm not moving last minute, but until then the only thing I'd particularly notice is DX10+ and that isn't worth the cost to me (I have a relatively beefy gfx card and occasionally play hight end games, but if any game dares *require* DX10 then to me it jumps from being a £30 game to being a £130+ages-reinstalling-my-desktop-environment so just won't get bought (I have far more valuable things to do with my spare time). Many people will be in the same position, but unlike me a fair number will be resolutely using IE8 (or below) rather than one of the more capable options which means as developers we have the choice: support the retarded IE8 and its senile descendants or lose a chunk of the market (though to be frank, I'm getting towards a mindset where that chunk of the market can go screw itself).
Some of our banking clients are moving to IE8 soon as some software providers are starting to refuse to support IE6 (Google dropping support for IE6 last year started that ball properly rolling: thanks G!), but they are not moving off XP any time soon so there will be no IE9 for them yet. IE8 is here to stay in those environments for at least then next two years, maybe three, and IE6 to a certain extent too.
Perhaps you should stop thinking what you learned in your CS class applies to the real world and actually join the real world long enough to notice the fact that phones that blindly multitask fucking suck. Example: Windows Mobile 7 ... Full on multitasking ... and no battery life unless you had perfectly written apps ... which is rather rare. Don't stop that shitty app thats eating CPU, welp it doesn't care, its be happy to run in the background while your battery drains because as you said, it can manage the memory and CPU while it happily drains the better because the user forgot its running in the background.
Versus something like multitasking on the iPhone which is really task switching with the capability to run a few very low resource background threads as needed.
You can take any phone that lets apps run away with like a desktop OS and shove it up your ass as it'll probably be more useful there.
Why are you talking about kernel locks? $50 says you don't even know what BKL means (and no, going to google it now doesn't count douchebag) You clearly don't know what you're talking about so you'd probably do well to just STFU before someone schools you, won't be me, I'm just too lazy tonight. Just because you read someones blog doesn't mean you actually have a clue, and those of us with a clue can see through better than the windshield on my car. So linux and NT had shitty kernels in the past, whats your point? They had global locks that killed performance in an SMP environment so it didn't scale for shit, again, whats your point, has nothing to do with Mobile phones and nothing to do with multitask, its related to SMP. 1995 called, they want their clue back. If you think the BKL that is so common to OSes is a piss poor design than you've never worked as a professional where the right technical decision could be the completely wrong practical decision for countless number of reasons. When pretty much everything ran on a single cpu, and you need to tack on SMP support in a hurry, its far more cost effective and efficient to throw some big locks into the kernel and move on ... adding proper SMP support to an existing OS takes a lot of time, effort and debugging to get all the things that were never intended to work that way into a state thats safe to do so ... which is why Linux for example has taken so long to clean up. For the first 15 years or so of Linux's existence there was no to very little reason you'd bother with SMP, and so coding SMP support would actually be inefficient.
Those kernel locks cause no performance degradation to speak of in a uniprocessor system and are irrelevant to any discussion about phones for that very reason. Maybe later this year or next when we start seeing dual core phones then it might matter, until then it makes no difference.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager