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Intel Relying On Ice Cream Sandwich For Tablet Push
An anonymous reader writes "Intel thinks tablets live and die by their software, not their hardware. So as they get ready for a big push into the mobile device market, they're relying on Ice Cream Sandwich to provide competition with Apple's products. From the article: 'The company has largely watched from the sidelines as mobile device makers have used processors based on ARM's microarchitecture to power their products in recent years. This despite the fact that Intel actually predicted the rise of what it called "mobile Internet devices," or MIDs, several years ago, and built a chip, Atom, for such gadgets. For all that [Intel CEO Paul Otellini] touts the software over the hardware when it comes to tablets, Intel knows it's got a lot of ground to make up to wrest design wins away from ARM. The Medfield System-on-a-Chip (SoC) is a promising but still uncertain step in that direction.' Otellini thinks the tablet market will get much more competitive over the next year as ICS devices mature and Windows 8 devices arrive."
Microsoft didn't wait and see.... Windows CE was around on tablets (including ARM and MIPS-based ones) for a long time before Android ever existed. They were typically called Handheld PC or Palm-size PC devices. Windows CE 2.1 was actually pretty tolerable on the HP 320LX and Sharp Mobilon HC4100 I had. Never liked releases much past that.
Apple also had "tablets" long before Android, iOS, etc. The Newton MessagePad of which the 2100 was actually really nice and the eMate 300 bit slow but cool nonetheless. NewtonOS 2.1 certainly didn't suck.
Linux and NetBSD have also been capable of running on such devices for a long time as well. I owned a few WinCE devices over the years and a couple of Newtons.
There have also been x86 tablets since the early 90's. Dauphin DTR1 and there was a tablet Thinkpad as well.
Did they have goofy oversized widgets for sloppy finger-based simple computer usage by retards? No. They were pen based. You know..... for functional useful software in a professional environment instead of a web browser on steroids for morons that can't type or write legibly anyway.
Intel won't succeed with its first iteration but it will slow down ARM a bit in an overall growing market, Intel might even take the low to mid of the market and leave the high end to ARM for now as Medfield is only competitive with ARM processors from a year ago. Both ARM and Intel will gain marketshare and eventually the market might become split between them, I don't foresee a 3rd player, maybe MIPS in the form of the Chinese-derivative Loongson?
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Just like microsoft had a wait and see attitude with mobile phone OS then iOS and Android swept the market and then they released windows mobile 7 to a world that didn't care.
I don't think that's a fair comparison. Microsoft entered the mobile device business long before Apple and Linux, the problem was that they sucked. Really bad. Until Windows Mobile 7 I always told people "whatever phone you get, make sure it doesn't have Windows on it". Now nobody asks me anymore... the question is "should I buy an Apple or something with Android on it?". So you're right about the not caring bit.
What makes you think Windows 8 will be terrible?
Even if Windows 8 is terrible, personally, I think Android will end up losing the tablet war. The reason is that windows 8 will be able to leverage its existing base of "software capital", and bulldoze its way into the tablet market. Android simply does not have certain critical software (e.g. - MS Word) running on it.
Think of it this way. The mass market desktop pc will die. For the vast majority of users, a simple tablet like device, with word processing capabilities, and media/internet capabilities, is all that's needed. Bulky laptops will disappear too, turning into tablets with Asus "transformer" like capabilities. Eventually, a multitude of device will be consolidated into one single tablet device - a single personal computer. People will want to do everything they did with their desktops, on their tablets. This will include word processing.
What answer does Android have to this?
If they don't fix this, and have their software base ready to rival MS-Word etc. I believe the ending will be very unfortunate, and MS can continue unhindered with their nasty monopoly.
The one consolation might be that Android will continue to thrive in the mobile phone segment, since a tablet form factor is too bulky to replace a phone, unless tiny phones become powerful enough to run Windows 8. Then, it might be curtain's for Android's there too. Why bother with several devices, when one single "personal computer" will do?
And this is exactly the attitude that landed MS on last place on the mobile market. Calling its potential users morons and retards for wanting a sloppy dumbed-down UI, when in reality they were just average users who wanted a simple interface.
It doesn't matter when WinCE was around when it didn't deliver what people wanted.
What?
Did they have goofy oversized widgets for sloppy finger-based simple computer usage by retards? No. They were pen based. You know..... for functional useful software in a professional environment instead of a web browser on steroids for morons that can't type or write legibly anyway.
And the sales figures for all of these were shit. I think you agree with Intel: it's all about the software.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Windows CE 2.1 was actually pretty tolerable on the HP 320LX
DOS on the HP 200LX was much better than the 320 LX. A working RS-232 port, something so few put in, great for a roaming terminal, and people got them working with bar scanners and such for mobile inventory years before there was an App for that.
Learn to love Alaska
People are buying the Galaxy Tab?
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Otellini thinks the tablet market will get much more competitive over the next year as ICS devices mature and Windows 8 devices arrive.
Intel should know that from last year, there's not been a tallet market save for an Ipad market. I do not think matters will change until Google and its partners tame the chaos within the Android ecosystem.
You ask your self: Why has a hugely successful company like Samsung released a [very compelling] Galaxy Note tablet based on already outdated software? Promising an update does not cut it either. It only showcases the chaos within the ecosystem, giving trolls fodder to feed on. Sad.
Bad move, Intel. I used to rely on an ice cream sandwich. Then Häagen-Dazs stopped making 'em and everything else in my life went to complete shit for about three months. Take it from someone who's been down that road: if you're going to rely on ice cream sandwich, do not commit unless you have control of the supply chain.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
Just like microsoft had a wait and see attitude with mobile phone OS then iOS and Android swept the market and then they released windows mobile 7 to a world that didn't care.
I don't think that's a fair comparison. Microsoft entered the mobile device business long before Apple and Linux, the problem was that they sucked.
I dunno. Someone upthread remarked on the Apple Newtons, which were released a couple of years before the first release of Windows CE. No idea when Windows Pen first came out. Certainly none of these early attempts were that much earlier than the others.
But your basic point seems mostly correct: Microsoft did have some initial offerings that considerably predate Android and iOS. Perhaps OP is referring to Windows Mobile 7 & 8?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
But what am I talking here... tablets have no point, other than being an e-penis, anyway. Same as SUVs. They are expensive, impractical, slow, and basically all the bad things in one, and the best in none. ^^
In the long run, they will be replaced by mobile phones. Or from my p.o.v., they never found a place that a real computer or a proper smart phone (one at least offering what S60 offered 10 years ago, like a file manager, communications tools, media playback, Internet surfing, install whatever you like, 3d and video acceleration, big display, full-featured hardware) hadn't already taken.
You're entitled to your opinion, but I think trying to read in bed with my mobile or my laptop is kinda sucky, and I think a tablet might work much better for this. I don't see it replacing either of them anytime soon, but that doesn't mean it's not a good form factor for some use cases.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
having looked at windows 8, i would have to say that it is what makes me think it is (not "will be") terrible. granted it was the developers preview but even that was enough to make me run screaming in the other direction i have been unable to sleep due to the nightmares its memory has brought me ever since.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
What makes you think Windows 8 will be terrible?
I'm using the Developer's Preview right now and I can tell you it's annoying as Hell, and it's not gonna change. Why? Because the things that make it annoying are things Microsoft wants to push.
There's no real Start menu. All programs have to be launched either from the Metro interface, an Explorer window of the program folder, or having the app docked on the taskbar. The Metro-enhanced apps look great on the Metro launcher, but regular apps just get their Start menu files added as tiles.I have several tiles labeled "Uninstaller" but I have no idea what program they uninstall because they aren't grouped at all with their parent programs like they were in folders on the old Start menu. Same with those apps "Read Me" files. But if Microsoft put a regular start menu in people would likely jump right into the Desktop and not even bother with Microsoft's Metro at all, continuing to use their PC like they did in Vista/7. That would threaten Microsoft's plan to steer everyone into using their Metro app store and taking a 30% cut, like Apple does on their App Store. There's also a lack of regular menus in Explorer. It's been replaced with the Ribbon interface. Microsoft sees Ribbons as the future: usability or customer preference be damned.
Why is everyone so down in Intel? More competition is good for us, the consumer! Although software is very important so in hardware, no one wants a tablet that needs to be recharged every 2 hours.
People are buying the Galaxy Tab?
Now that there is a CA$100 price drop someone might.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
so, I should shell out between $500 and $830 to read in bed?
It's going to need to replace more than a paper back book to separate me from a whole paycheck.
I mean, my phone doesn't do that either but I think you need to come better than "reading in bed"
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I'm a big fan, and would consider the Intel Android tablet - but not a Windows one. But it has to have the right mix of features and be a good value and be competitive with the field on the date of purchase. The WiDi tech looks really sweet, and a HDMI WiDi dongle to use in my TV, monitor, or conference room bigscreen might put it over for me.
Can't wait to give this a try if they can get someone to make it. But that's going to be their biggest problem. PC vendors aren't going to touch Android on Intel. That leaves the current batch of Android on ARM vendors - and they're quite happy with what they've got already to work with.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Thanks for that clear answer. Sounds pretty bad to me although I think non-technical users might not care, but what interested me most was the bit about the 30% cut with the Metro App Store. All of this serves to highlight why Microsoft shouldn't dominate the tablet space. But my fears that they will, are I I believe, legitimate. Android very badly needs to think of itself as a proper OS, not just a mobile OS running toy applications. It needs to rethink of itself as being able to run serious software - everything from a full fledged word processor, to Photoshop to Crysis.
You missed the mark... What made the iPhone break thorough was the fine integration work. I had a WinCE PDA a decade ago, too, and it was an absolute nightmare to use for anything... Little things like the power button putting the device into standby (instead of just shutting off the screen) made it useless as an MP3/Ogg player.
The apps were all massively crippled. Pocket Office was inferior to Wordpad. Browsers were all crap, crippled compared to desktop versions, and nobody had figured out how to render full sized web pages on a 240x320 screen. They were still massively dependent on desktops. And worst of all, WinCE was just unresponsive crap. It was laggy as hell on 300MHz+ CPUs when Palm and others were snappy on 30MHz CPUs. The start menu model was never a good idea. And I despised having to go download a REGISTRY EDITOR for my PDA first thing to fix insanely stupid default settings...
Now if you actually wanted to get stuff done, Psions were awesome. Slide-out keyboard. Office suite that allowed composing pretty full-featured documents, even embedding charts and drawings into documents, and printing them out directly to the nearest IRDA enabled laser printer. There, some of the limitations were avoided just because the portrait display eliminated side-to-side scrolling with web browsing and whatnot. Even had a PDF reader, but you'd have to squint to read the tiny fonts, or deal with side-side scrolling every line... the software that makes smartphones tolerable today just wasn't even a dream back then.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I find it useful to read stuff, watch videos during my commute. And no one here is trying to sell you anything. If you dont think you would find a tablet useful, good for you!
Intel lost a lot of time with high end processors for desktop and servers thinking it was the most profitable market. It seems more profitable market, or at least markets that be considered as part of core strategu, are in mobile devices where computational efficiency is a must ( energy consumption per computation) Computational efficiency is not only relevant in mobile devices but also in server farms where hundreds if not thousands of CPU are running in parallel.
They were also all based on resistive screens, as capacitive screens weren't around then (I think - at least I never saw one). Resistive screens are rather uncomfortable to use due to the need to apply considerable pressure, but they do have the advantage of allowing for greater precision with a pen than a cap screen and a squishy finger.
how about that on a basic level, you don't try to have a consistent interface between portable devices and desktops/laptops. That's just a no, and a bad idea.
Granted you can turn off metro, but even approaching this idea in 2011-2012 when it clearly has been demonstrated by the market to be an unconditionally horrible idea and to go ahead with it anyway? Is this really a hard thing to figure out?
Even for "android on laptops" via chromebooks, you don't have them setting it up as the exact same interface all around. That and nobody fn cares about windows 8. They can use android dollars to continually revise the project but if the starting point is the metro UI then they've already got one foot in the grave.
"People will want to do everything they did with their desktops, on their tablets. This will include word processing. "
I have an Android phone and even with the tilt full-screen keyboard interface, I find typing a chore even with a stylus pen. Using a keyboard is so much easier. Considering the tablet has a different input interface from a desktop, is a tablet really capable of replacing a desktop? The only way I can see it doing that is when connected with a docking station which makes it a desktop.
Dreamcast definitely delivered with WinCE. Though, it was a highly optimized, very specific version of it.
As a victim of Intel's legal belligerence, I hope that each and all the employees in their legal department as well as their external legal counsels pick an inefficient x86 chip, stick it into an ice cream sandwich, shove the whole thing up their left cubicle mate's ass, give it to eat to their right cubicle mate, and they all die a long and painful death from self poisoning.
I hope I am not being too explicit.
"Did they have goofy oversized widgets for sloppy finger-based simple computer usage by retards? No. They were pen based. You know..... for functional useful software in a professional environment instead of a web browser on steroids for morons that can't type or write legibly anyway."
I love you.
*hugs Thinkpad tablet* (no, not the slow-ass Android version - a REAL Thinkpad tablet!).
Aaaah, Psion... I used to have (I still have it somewhere, I think) a Psion Revo+. I had Opera on it for webbrowsing and coupled with my Siemens S35i (which had an IRDA interface) I could surf and check my email everywhere. Sure, it wasn't speedy over GPRS, nor cheap... but it worked. I also remember the built-in email client fondly. That was just a Revo+, they had much better gear. Also keep in mind this was around 10 years ago!
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Yeah, it's a good chip. In performance-per-watt, it'll outdo any other Intel chip with ease. By x86 standards it sips power, even if you include the northbridge. But that is by x86 standards... by ARM, it just can't compete. If Intel really want to succeed in mobile, they'll need to take a big risk: Abandon the thirty-year heritage and backwards compatibility of x86/64.
It didn't deliver what 14-year-olds wanted. It delivered what business users and field techs wanted quite nicely.
The 320LX had an RS232 port. Just slap a null-modem adapter on the sync cable. PCMCIA RS232 and ethernet cards could be used as well. There was plenty of inventory software for WinCE.
Not a desktop.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Shit relative to computer sales at the time or tablet sales of today.
Why the haterade for people who use computers in a different way and for different reasons than you do? "Poke-and-drool"? "Computer illiterate"? Is it necessary to tear down others to make you feel better? Do you simply not know how to communicate your thoughts and ideas in a more positive manor? Let go of the negativity, man. Your blood pressure will thank you.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I never got a chance to play with the Psion.
I'll concede that WinCE had crap browsers but most browsers sucked back then, especially mobile.
My 75MHz MIPS-based Mobilon 4100 wasn't all that slow. It choked on things once in a while. It was far from perfect but didn't exactly suck.
I was more more of a NewtonOS fan myself. The MP2100 was quite nice. Never got a chance to play with Psion.
Good point. Much better than the froth and venom spewing from GP.
Wonder how an Android/iOS interface would differ if it was limited to resistive screens? (And I don't mean how would some nasty Chinese toilet tablet work. How would things be different from the ground up with resistive screens more firmly in mind.)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
The mantra for the future should be "It's not the hardware or the OS, it is the content stupid". If you can create a device that enables the end user to easily access content of their choosing then you are on a winner. The issue has always been ticking all the boxes, apple was the first to do so and android soon followed. So yes Intel is dead on the money, the hardware is a minor player but at the same time important as it is one of the many tick boxes that must be implemented correctly.
No I'm just tired of having to pay double for a machine useful as a tool instead of a locked-down funnel for paid entertainment content.
I tried to use several types of PDAs etc for a decade in business environment. It was always more trouble than it was worth. Until iphone came along in 2007.
Did they have goofy oversized widgets for sloppy finger-based simple computer usage by retards? No. They were pen based. You know..... for functional useful software in a professional environment instead of a web browser on steroids for morons that can't type or write legibly anyway.
I wish every tech blog writer would write as honestly as you do. You're like a Hunter S. Thompson of nerd rage.
I don't know about that. WinCE was way, way ahead of competitors for some time in many ways, right up until they abandoned Windows CE in preference for "Windows Phone". Things like:
* Mobile access to commonly emailed documents
* A good integrated mail client
* Thorough integrated contact management
* Excellent 3rd party mapping/GPS software
* Streaming and local video support
These are things Apple still lacks, and which Android devices are just now coming around to doing well. WinCE's biggest shortcomings were that:
* From a technical perspective, it had horrible support (for multitasking). Loading things was slow. This was probably due to its flash memory support and multiprocessing model, I suppose.
* Vendors fucked up the installs. Third party ROMs were usually much, much better - stable, fast - than what shipped on them. Think of the slowest, most hideously unstable Android device you've seen so far: that was a good day for a WinCE phone, and it was almost invariably the fault of the carrier.
* It was physically ugly compared to wiz-bang products like a Blackberry
* Microsoft didn't know what to do with it or how to control their IP (as with pretty much every 'mobile' venture they've made before or since).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
There were resistive-capacitive screens around at the time, as well. Many of the resistive screens weren't all that bad, either - I had an NEC MobilePro 780 and its screen did not require that much pressure to activate at all (arguably being more accurate than most capacitive screens I've seen since, even while using just a finger). It all depended on the display in use, I suppose.
On the contrary, it took me weeks to get accustomed to the capacitive-only screen on my first smartphone. Talk about irritating...
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
ice cream sandwich is yummy for tablets and i would prefer ICS tablets than iPad :D
interest only home mortgage loans
Actually, the best platform for Intel's Tablet push would be Microsoft's Windows 8 - it could do some minimal salvage of both Intel & Microsoft in the tablet market by offering a key advantage not there in iOS or Android - Windows compatibility. Windows 8 for ARM ain't gonna run those gazillion Windows apps out there, but Windows 8 on an Medfield may, and that would be the main selling point of Wintel tablets.
Otherwise, concede that the tablet market is an ARM monopoly (unless anyone comes out w/ MIPS based Androids) and an Apple/Google duopoly.
People don't give a shit what powers it as long as it works. Anyways, Intel's problem actually isn't ARM, it's that they're also being joined by MIPS, and MIPS is a cheaper architecture and has better power credentials. Price and functionality matter, and whoever can deliver that at a sweetspot will be successful.
so, I should shell out between $500 and $830 to read in bed? It's going to need to replace more than a paper back book to separate me from a whole paycheck. I mean, my phone doesn't do that either but I think you need to come better than "reading in bed"
You can get kindle fire for about USD200. And yes, for book reading on your bed, it's overkill. So, aside for reading sci-fi novel in bed, I use my Archos 70IT to browse, read books, newspaper, comics, mangas, watching videos, ssh-ing to my NAS box at home, etc etc on my 4 hours daily commute
The above claim - of Windows 8 being able to run legacy Wintel software - will only be true about Windows 8 tablets based on x86, not ARM. Windows 8 on ARM will not run legacy Wintel software any more than Windows NT on Alpha or MIPS ever ran legacy Wintel software, which given the lack of native support, ended up being their undoing. Windows 8 has not been attracting ISVs the way Apple or Google have, and so that platform will depend mainly, if not solely, on support for legacy apps. If Medfield can trump ARM implementations like Apple A5/A6, Qualcomm, nVidia, Freescale, et al in terms of power consumption, Windows 8 may have a chance against Android.
In fact, even if Windows 8 can run legacy Wintel software, I'd think they'd at least need some sort of a rewrite to enable those applications to recognize touchscreen inputs, as opposed to keyboard/mouse inputs that they've been used to until now. There will also be the question of how to do it. Assume that a Windows 8 tablet has 256GB of flash memory, it could be possible to install it from a PC using a USB cable while treating the tablet as another hard drive. But the question of how the application will behave in a new environment is still open - unless the tablet can have USB keyboard & mouse inputs, in which case, why prefer it to a netbook?
MS Word or Office ain't gonna make or break Android - I believe LibreOffice can be installed on it. Moreover, versions of Office since Office 2007 have had those new file formats and ribbons, and are very different to use from previous versions. I worked w/ Excel 2003 very smoothly, doing pivot tables, vlookups and so on, but in subsequent versions, I'm totally lost, even though some of the previous keyboard shortcuts work. Besides, Apple, which depended on MS Office for its desktop offerings, came out w/ their own native tablet apps like Numbers (for spreadsheets), so it's not difficult for Google to do the same, even if they chose not to use LibreOffice as is.
The apps that matter - be it things like home budgeting, games, etc are there on iPad and I think Android as well. The only advantage a Windows 8 would have is if it could run native PC apps, which the other 2 can't. Let's see whether they can or not. But it won't happen if Microsoft insists on going w/ ARM, or Intel tries to run against ARM w/ Android.
Sounds pretty bad to me although I think non-technical users might not care.
The less technical the users are the more they will care. To the people who just don't get computers not having a start button or desktop means they now know just a little more than before they started using windows.
They will hate it because it they will have to figure out the crazy methods (see xkcd comic, cant find it) to do stuff all over again.
Are you talking about Windows 8 on desktops, or Windows 8 on tablets? On desktops, I agree that the Metro UX would be a disaster if they finally went through w/ it, but for tablets, the UX would be fine. Main issue will be whether such a tablet can run their legacy PC software, since developers ain't preferring Windows 8 to Apple or Android. And if MS insists on promoting tablets w/ ARM, their foray into the tablet market will be a disaster.
KDE did the right thing by having completely different designs for desktops vs netbooks (I believe what they call netbooks is basically their interface for tablets). The requirements of the 2 are different, since it's a lot more trivial to land one's finger anywhere on a screen than move a mouse pointer all over it. As a result, they have 2 good interfaces for either platform.
Indeed, the decision to force Metro - which would be fine as a tablet interface - on to the desktop defies any logic, the usability studies notwithstanding. Similarly, the decision to focus Gnome3 & Unity on tablet paradigms when they were both being targeted towards desktops made no sense either.
...I think Android will end up losing the tablet war. The reason is that windows 8 will be able to leverage its existing base of "software capital", and bulldoze its way into the tablet market. Android simply does not have certain critical software (e.g. - MS Word) running on it.
What's to stop anyone from using all the existing FOSS? Is there something I missed about it being especially difficult to port (e.g.) OpenOffice from Linux to Android? And this is something of a strawman in any case. See below.
Think of it this way. The mass market desktop pc will die. For the vast majority of users, a simple tablet like device, with word processing capabilities, and media/internet capabilities, is all that's needed. Bulky laptops will disappear too, turning into tablets with Asus "transformer" like capabilities. Eventually, a multitude of device will be consolidated into one single tablet device - a single personal computer. People will want to do everything they did with their desktops, on their tablets. This will include word processing.
Hello there. I'm a writer. Writing is what I do. I do it 8-10 hours a day. I am going to do it with a separate, horizontal, *physical* keyboard and a vertical monitor. I am NOT going to do it using a virtual keyboard on the same 10" touchscreen I'm trying to read my work on. Ain't gonna happen.
Sure, you can modularise it--I can see having a tablet that one could drop into a dock/stand/whatever with a keyboard (and possibly a larger monitor and other peripherals)--but at the end of the day, see above: for any serious work involving manual entry of complex, nonrepeating alphanumeric data, you're still looking at a laptop/desktop configuration of some sort.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Now THAT's an annoying website! Neat product though.
Good info
Strawman much?
It's exactly as OP said. Previous technology was engineered towards the goal of giving tools to businesses and professionals. Current devices are engineered as "entertainment devices". Microsoft never implied its potential users were retards at all. They just never considered the retard market being so large. They thought they would sell to businesses first and it would trickle outward. Like every other thing they have ever done.
Every other company gave up when they realized tablets were bad interfaces for productivity tasks. Only one company thought to turn it into an interactive idiot box, err.... television set.
It won't... Tablets are too damn heavy and that starts weighing on you very quickly. Plus, there's no way to hold them one-handed... through pure chance, phones are just the right size where wrapping your hand around them makes a great "handle". Tablets need some new technology that'll allow an easy one-hand grip. Maybe that'll be straps, or finger holes, or some gel backing material, but right now tablets have horrible ergonomics, and your smartphone is indeed the best possible method for reading in bed right now.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Thanks for that clear answer. Sounds pretty bad to me although I think non-technical users might not care,
The Metro interface itself needs more work to show it can cut it as a launcher interface, too. In its current incarnation, it's scrolls left and right. You can move it with the scroll wheel on your mouse or drag a scroll bar that appears on the bottom, but it feels like a kludge way to navigate through all your apps. It's like someone up in Redmond suddenly realized "oh yeah, you have to have a touch-screen to swipe! That might be a problem for people who don't (like almost all desktop users)". Besides the "extra files" getting tossed into the interface in separate tiles I mentioned, there's the problem or navigating large collections of apps. On a tablet this isn't so much of an issue because of the more limited storage space on tablets, but on a desktop machines you could find yourself getting a bit weary scrolling through all those tiles to reach something at the other end. A full install of the Adobe CS4 Master Collection adds 25 new tiles to the Metro grid. There needs to be a way of dividing the "Full" Metro launcher view into sub-screens, like you can on iOS when you pull up specific "genres" of apps (or like you had programs and their support files segregated into folders named for the publisher on the old Start menu). Non-tech users will feel this as well once they have a healthy collection of free games from the Metro store or traditional apps from other places installed.
The Metro UI (and the included apps that come with it) are also obviously written under the assumption your screen is 13" or smaller. The Metro apps all run full-screen (and can't be changed to windowed) and their controls are all oversize for a desktop environment (I have a 1920x1200 display -- waste. of. space. ). I hate it when I hit certain links in the Desktop zone (usually in control panels) and for some reason instead of Firefox launching IE is coded to launch instead. And not the Desktop (normal) IE, but the Metro full screen version that whooshes everything else I'm working on out of view. I've also been unable to find a way to actually Exit any of these Metro apps, either. I can click out of them and back to the Launcher, but I cannot stop the process without actually End Tasking them from the Process Manager. They eventually go into a "hibernation"-like state instead if you don't use them. Also amusing: the Process Manager keeps track of network utilization and data usage on a per-app basis (obviously written with tablets and metered 3G data plans in mind).
but what interested me most was the bit about the 30% cut with the Metro App Store.
Correction: It's 20% for above $25,000 in sales. But it is exactly what it appears, Microsoft finding a way to take a cut from application sales revenue on programs they ha nothing to do with writing, just like Apple's store.
You make some interesting points. However, the Win32 API will probably remain the same. As such, it will be a simple matter of recompiling legacy apps for ARM. I don't see the big problem here? Furthermore, enabling touch support for an existing code base is a matter of tweaking the UI layer. You could argue that those apps will not be very user friendly if not designed from the ground up to be touch friendly, but being able to leverage existing code means you're already halfway there.
As for your question of - why prefer it to a netbook? Because a tablet which has a detachable mouse and keyboard makes more sense than a netbook. Would you rather spend money on and lug around 3 or 4 devices, and maintain software on all of them, or have one device which does it all? I'm saying that things will eventually head that way. That's the only way Microsoft can break the tablet market. And in the process of doing so, they will kill the desktop PC/laptop market. Stuff like the Asus Transformer and the Motorola Atrix are a portent of things to come.
As for Word, MS word is the defacto word processing standard, whether we like it or not. 94% of the market is with Office. MS word, or extremely good compatibility with it, will be critical to most users. Libre Office compatibility with MS word is very poor. I have tried it, and have experienced it first hand. A piece of software that 94% of people use has every chance to make or break Android.
What I'm saying in summary is, if a user had a chance to buy a Windows 8 Tablet, and run Word on it (and connect mouse/keyboard to it), they'd probably buy that, instead of spending another $500 on an Android tablet on which they can do less.
This developer's preview is on a desktop (Core i7 920, 6 GB RAM). I am under the impression there is only going to be ONE "Windows 8", and everyone will run it. I have seen nothing to suggest there are separate versions (except for 32 and 64 bit) or that the one I am using is meant for a tablet device. The Desktop mode is full of "normal" sized UI elements just like Windows 7 that would be hard to control on a small screen. I suppose Microsoft could opt to do their "Home", "Professional", "Ultimate" feature sets again though.
The system requirements for it are surprisingly low:
- 1 GB of RAM for 32-bit or 2 GB for 64-bit.
- 16 GB hard disk space for 32-bit, 20 for 64-bit
- DX9 graphics hardware with a WDDM 1.0 or higher compatible driver
- Touch-screen required for touch input.
Legacy software isn't going to run on ARM. Only the Metro-complaint apps.
There will be no "Classic" or "Rosetta" for Win8 like there was for OSX's transitions.
Not only PC vendors, but even most Android manufacturers ain't gonna prefer Intel to ARM, unless Intel can demonstrate lower power consumption AND greater performance @ the same time. And they'll have no reason to - all the apps already there for Android are Android on ARM. Plus you have a rich ecosystem of ARM manufacturers - Qualcomm, Freescale, TI, et al.
If you're not going to consider a Wintel tablet, there is really no reason to look @ Intel. The only thing Intel brings to the table is w/ Windows 8, where there is at least the theoretical possibility of running legacy software on it.
Yes, Psion 5MXs were astonishingly good. The keyboards were twice as good as anything since.
This N900 I'm writing on is the only usable PDA since.
Which almost nobody used...
Funny that. Best Buy and Newegg also want a cut for that software they had nothing to do with writing. Complain that Apple offers no other source (for iOS apps), if you like, but complaining about the cut just belies ignorance and/or hate.
See my reply to the previous poster. In summary: 94% of word processor use is MS Office. And nowhere have I said that a keyboard/mouse is not needed. But what's to prevent you from hooking your future tablet to a 30" monitor and a keyboard?
Never noticed that on my Psion 5mx. Perhaps I have superhuman strength or something.
True, you could only use it for simple things (the same as an ordinary mouse) - select, drag etc. No gestures and stuff. But the UI was so well designed - no frills, clean, logical - it was really easy to use.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Best Buy and NewEgg have warehouses and (in BB's case) brick and mortar stores to pay for. How does their markup compare to Microsoft's, btw?
The only way to publish Metro apps is going to be through Microsoft's App Store. Developers wont be able to sidestep them and sell direct to consumers (like they can sidestep NE/BB). They can still make regular Desktop Apps, but with making Metro the default UI that could be seen as making your software a "second-class citizen".
Maybe I would have less issue with their terms if they weren't holding an artificial monopoly on distribution, eh?
You make some interesting points. However, the Win32 API will probably remain the same. As such, it will be a simple matter of recompiling legacy apps for ARM. I don't see the big problem here?
"Simply recompile" was the argument used to show how portable UNIX was across platforms. However, the end user isn't going to recompile (and the vendor isn't going to hand out the source code to let the end user recompile), so the legacy app just won't work.
(Unless they adopt a true hardware abstraction layer like IBM's AS/400, where the app code was recompiled on the fly for the new architecture on first use. But since x86 apps weren't distributed that way, then it won't happen)
"She's furniture with a pulse"
WinCE delivered professional grade suckiness - frequent crashes with data loss, and no upgrades to fix bugs at all. It looked like a scam to me. Professional non-tech people who used it against the advice of IT people (because it was "windows") were horrified at how crap it was, and could not wait to ditch it.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Google has a reputation of backstabbing vendors left and right (ask Dell or Juniper) and is better not to do business with them at all. I don't understand why Intel doesn't dedicate resources to Meego/Tizen and frees themselves from Andy "hypocrite" Rubin and the other Google assholes.
--
Jordyn Buchanan, clueless shithead of the day.
'Simply recompile' was also a valid argument w/ NT on RISC, but as we all know, vendors never bothered recompiling their apps for those platforms, and neither was most of the source code available. However, MS VC++ did exist for RISC platforms, but no one came. Since developers haven't been flocking to Windows 8, I don't see vendors of existing apps recompile their applications for tablets, and see them go for $1.99. What they might agree to is enable touch support for their generic apps, so that if they are installed on a tablet as opposed to a PC, they'll function at least somewhat as a tablet app.
I think an abstraction layer is out of the question here - it only made sense w/ CPUs that had the firepower, such as FX!32 on the Alpha, but even that didn't save the platform. No, native apps are going to have to be there for the platforms to be successful
On engun's point that MS Office has 94% of marketshare, that's true about desktops, not tablets, where MS Office does not exist - neither on iOS, nor on Android. Yet, that hasn't stopped the acceptance of these platforms, probably b'cos people so far haven't been using tablets to type up documents or spreadsheets or presentations. But Apple is already somewhere there - w/ Numbers and the other 2 apps, so it's a question of Google finding good apps for Android. It doesn't have to be MS Office compatible - it just needs to do what the user needs, work w/ most printers, and it'll be fine. The only thing this lack of compatibility might do is delay the adaption of tablets in the office, as opposed to @ home.
You gotta be kidding.
This statement was probably taken out of its original context and I would bet it was "Intel will rely on ICS for Android tablets".
In fact, this whole thing is so bold, it does not really deserve commenting on it. ICS, really. Pitty.
Don't be so sensitive, you pussy. "Poke-and-drool" is some funny shit. Describes iRetards perfectly.
Let go of the humorlessness, man. You need to move into a more positive manor. ROFL
The apps were all massively crippled. Pocket Office was inferior to Wordpad. Browsers were all crap, crippled compared to desktop versions, and nobody had figured out how to render full sized web pages on a 240x320 screen.
I go into detail about that here:
http://dotancohen.com/eng/dell_axim.php
I must note that every complaint that I had about that Windows Mobile device is about three times more valid for todays tablets. One step forward, four steps back.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
I think there's a fundamental difference in the NT/RISC case with the Win8/ARM case. Which is that ARM devices are actually popular! Therefore, vendors definitely will have incentives to retarget their applications for ARM, assuming that Windows 8 becomes popular on ARM. BeerCat's contention that users need to do this recompilation makes no sense. When did the typical windows user ever compile from source? The vendors will publish x86 and ARM binaries on their websites. I think it's reasonable to conjecture that Microsoft Office will be available for ARM. Others will follow.
So the key question is, will Win 8 become popular on tablets? If the trend of miniaturization continues (and why wouldn't it?), with laptops becoming ultrabooks, and ultrabooks becoming transformers (basically, tablet + dock), then it stands to reason that Windows 8 will be the OS by default, as it is already the defacto PC operating system. As an additional bonus, hardware manufacturers can choose either ARM or x86 for their hardware, which means it'll be Intel that's in trouble, not Microsoft.
I don't know whether Google offering a "good enough" word processor will be enough, as you've suggested. Perhaps it will be, but we should keep in mind that a vast majority of users are heavily invested in Word/Excel documents, and are pretty much locked in. They may also be locked in because of other Apps, like Photoshop, or whatever. If apps don't matter, how can we explain Microsoft's strangle-hold on the OS market? What is Google's strategy for breaking that lock-in?
No, Office delivers what business users want and Ms mints money with that product. Non finger friendly operating systems on touch screen devices deliver nothing but lost profits for any company stupid enough to try to sell one. You and the clueless idiots that modded you up are ignoring reality. But I'm sure you're much "better" than the iPad users you insufferable jackass.
How weard is it for somebody to claim that the hardware it not important, the important thing is the software, and go on talking on how they'll create a product with the same software everybody else uses.
Yeah, the hardware is not important... I'll belive it when you stop using Android.
Rethinking email
so, I should shell out between $500 and $830 to read in bed? It's going to need to replace more than a paper back book to separate me from a whole paycheck. I mean, my phone doesn't do that either but I think you need to come better than "reading in bed"
You can get kindle fire for about USD200. And yes, for book reading on your bed, it's overkill. So, aside for reading sci-fi novel in bed, I use my Archos 70IT to browse, read books, newspaper, comics, mangas, watching videos, ssh-ing to my NAS box at home, etc etc on my 4 hours daily commute
Also he presented it as a use case, not a target function for the device. I like to use a tablet in the Kitchen for recipes, and to watch the news.
You have a uid in the low 700k and you should know better. Why bring the discussion down to such a low level? Obviously many people find capacitive screen tablets useful and they are used by many serious businesses in a functional capacity. I wrote the catalog app framework my company uses for salespeople in the field. Our sales have probably doubled since putting it into production last year. We have a fleet of Acer A500 Android tablets btw. What should we do? Stop using the tablets and not worry about making money because of some anti-capacitive screen fan boy crusade? That is flat ludicrous. Not everybody is like you and is willing to torture themselves using a mouse centric os on a touch screen. The fact that you think so just makes you look like an ignorant pompous child. Seriously, the kind of low brow flaming you're laying down here is what I would expect from a 15 year old.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
It's not "ARM devices are actually popular", it's "iOS and Android are actually popular". Whole world of difference.
And no, just recompilation to ARM won't magically give you a GUI usable on a finger-based touchscreen.
I mean, did you try to use older desktop Windows based tablets? They were damn awful to use, which is why they flopped in major way.
The reason is that windows 8 will be able to leverage its existing base of "software capital", and bulldoze its way into the tablet market. Android simply does not have certain critical software (e.g. - MS Word) running on it.
What base? No one can use their existing software running on Windows on x86 today and expect it to run on Win8 on ARM. At best it will be a simple recompile. At worst it will be a full port. Also you assume that even MS has solved the major problem with using full MS Office on a touchscreen: UI. Apple sidestepped the problem by saying the iPad is mostly for content consumption with a little bit of creation. Office and most Windows programs are built for keyboard and mouse not touch. MS will have to rewrite Office for touch and I see them having enough issues with rewriting Office for ARM much alone touch.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I had an N770 and it was nice. I have to ask though, what is it that you n900 can do that my rooted Droid2 with Ubuntu in a chroot can't that makes your Nokia more of a "usable PDA"? I'm not trying to argue here I'm seriously asking because I find my Droid much more functional than my n770 ever was and can't think of a single thing it could do that the Droid can't. Just to add a little more, I have the scripting layer for android installed so I can write and run python, perl, etc. scripts for any small gaps. I wrote a great barcode app that hooks into amazons aws API for when I'm yardsaling. I use lots of cli apps like rtorrent vim, screen, ipython, you name it. I can't for the life of me think of anything the n770 did better. Please enlighten me.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Best Buy and NewEgg have warehouses and (in BB's case) brick and mortar stores to pay for. How does their markup compare to Microsoft's, btw?
Yes and Apple has no expenses whatsoever. It's not like Apple has to build data centers and maintain an infrastructure where there 200 million users can start downloading one of 100,000 apps within seconds of purchasing one. I guess people think that just because someone doesn't have physical store but an online store, they have no capital expenditures at all.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Having "Word" hasn't done anything for windows phone sales. What makes you think its a compelling differentiator for windows tablets? If office sold tablets, we wouldn't evenbe talking about ice cream sandwich and I pads because they wouldn't exist. You need to check your presumptions.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
your smartphone is indeed the best possible method for reading in bed right now.
Kindle works better - weight is fine, size is fine, readability is great. Not good for web browsing etc though. If you want web browsing or general computer tasks in bed then a netbook or light laptop is ideal - you don't have to hold it because it can sit on your chest, with the screen angled for reading. One hand still needed to turn pages/click links etc.
If Office were that critical to touch screen devices, windows phone wouldn't be languishing at sub 2 percent market share. Furthermore, there are windows tablets on the market right now and there have been windows tablets on the market every day for the last decade available to general consumers. They all run office. The "real" office. Yet they collect dust while I pads fly off the shelves. Office outside of work, e.g., the desktop is not as important as you think it is.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
I just orient my Xoom in portrait mode and rest it on my chest. When I get tired of laying on my back, I go to the side and the Xoom just rests on the bed sideways. Works fantastically and I appreciate the added screen real estate over my Nexus S.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Proper way to be lazy - netbook/laptop plopped on your chest with small wireless mouse connected, so you can control it with your arms resting down your sides.
Decent optical mice work alright on bedsheets/sofa covers - at least my old Logitech does.
I don't get it.
Sure, Intel may port android to atom platform.
But what about apps?
The average dev builds ARM binaries, and that it not about to change.
Even if they build for other architectures, it is hard to test without actual hardware test devices.
Bram Stolk http://stolk.org/tlctc/
Yea totally agreed.
It wasn't called WinCE for nothing. And you guys think that Open Source folks can't name products....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Previous technology was engineered towards the goal of giving tools to businesses and professionals. Current devices are engineered as "entertainment devices". Microsoft never implied its potential users were retards at all. They just never considered the retard market being so large. They thought they would sell to businesses first and it would trickle outward. Like every other thing they have ever done.
Every other company gave up when they realized tablets were bad interfaces for productivity tasks. Only one company thought to turn it into an interactive idiot box, err.... television set.
"No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public"
H.L. Mencken as channeled by Steve Jobs
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I don't know: MS seems to putting out more editions of Windows than fewer with each release. There will be at least an ARM version for tablet I suspect. And the minimum system requirements has always been low, sometimes unrealistic. Yes you can run Windows on the minimum, but you really can't expect it to run very well.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
There's a Psion 3A Emulator that you can probably find online, which runs nicely in DOSBox. I actually still use the spreadsheet occasionally. It's pretty impressive to see what they did on an 8086 clocked at under 8MHz with 512KB of RAM (shared between application memory and RAM disk). I had a 3 (3.84MHz CPU, 256KB of RAM), and it could happily have a few instances of the word processor (no spell check - that was only in the 3A), the address book, the spreadsheet, and a few other applications all open at once and instantly switch between them. It even came with a little development environment (OPL - a structured BASIC-like language, which could compile into stand-alone binaries).
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The Newton sucked initially too. The software was great, but it needed a processor at least twice as powerful as they could build. The later models were much better, but by then the image of the Newton had stuck. The Palm Pilot was the PDA to buy because it was far less ambitious and so actually managed to deliver what it attempted.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The ARM version will only support the Metro part, not the full system. Unless they've changed their mind again...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I prefer crushing them up and having them with some sugar.
Ice cream does sound a bit more delicious though.
Competition is good, yes, and that's part of the reason why everyone is so down on Intel: they have a history of anticompetitive behaviour. In contrast, the ARM ecosystem is actively fostering competition. In the ARMv7 world, most companies license core designs from ARM and then just add things like GPUs and DSPs for differentiation. In the ARMv8 world, this is going to change: at least two companies (including nVidia) are planning on bringing their own independent implementations of the ISA to market before ARM has an IP core available to license. ARM guarantees that they are compatible, and any userspace software for one will work on any other (operating systems may need a bit of porting as things like interrupt controllers may be different even between SoCs based on the same ARM core).
In x86 world, there is Intel, and a token amount of AMD to satisfy antitrust concerns. Companies like IDT and Cyrix gave up, and VIA is just clinging on to the sidelines. In the ARM world, there are about a dozen companies actively competing and no clear winner among them (although Qualcomm is doing pretty well at the moment).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
But your basic point seems mostly correct: Microsoft did have some initial offerings that considerably predate Android and iOS.
As did blackberry, nokia, palm and probably others.
Apple reinvented the smartphone by bringing together the multitouch capacitive touch screen with a proper browser engine to make a phone that people actually felt comfortable using the web on. About a year later they introduced a heavily hyped app store and were able to bring together far more apps than other phone vendors had managed in the past.
Google turned android (which aiui was already in development as a blackberry clone) into an iphone clone complete with an app store clone and was able to soak up those who wanted a multitouch smartphone with a decent web browser but either couldn't get an iphone (the iphone was intially limited to one network in each region unless you wanted to crack the network lock), weren't prepared to pay the price of an iphone or disagreed with apple's walled garden approach. Initially the iphone had the advantage in available apps but the android market has since overtaken it in app count and there are whole categories of app banned from the appstore.
Afaict most of the other smartphone OS vendors were caught off-guard by apple/google bringing the multitouch/decent browser/appstore revoloution to smartphones and have been flailing around ever since. MS decided to throw away all support for existing application software and develop an android/OS clone. Worse their new OS forced users to do all their development with .net tools (no native code allowed) making it very difficult to share code between WP7 and iOS/android. Nokia dicked arround with various linux variants before finally signing a deal with MS. Palm also dicked arround with it's own linux variants before getting bought up by HP and essentially killed.
Blackberry still seem to be around filling the corportate niche with their tie-ins to exchange etc (yeah it's crazy that it's blackberry who gets to capitalise on the exchange users not MS).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Does calling your operating system "Ice Cream Sandwich" sound really gay and unnecessary to anyone else? Like, say hypothetically. "Yeah man, I'm multi booting Linux, Ice Cream Sandwich, and Windows."
Is this what it has boiled down to? ChaCha? Twitter? Blogosphere? Web 2.0?
Couldn't we name use apt names for stuff, not drool spattered about by the UGA advertising major type?
Just call it "ICE" and then chill out.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Hey Microsoft--I may be only one user but I have to say these things:
* I won't be upgrading to Windows 8 because what works on a phone is also as a UI on my desktop PC--get a clue my desktop PC is not a smartphone and does not operate like a smartphone, stop breaking what works for the desktop computer.
* I won't be buying future versions of Office because of that ribbon--no matter who did your usability studies, menus are much faster than finding first the Microsoft nomenclature for the task to be done and then have to search and scan to find the right ribbon icon to use.
* I don't even use MS Paint except for screen captures because it too got an annoying Ribbon--so clicking the Save icon for a new file brings up the Save As dialog box but clicking it again only saves so then I it appears that Save As that is not easily accessed for an existing if I want to save the same file as a new format--stop making GUI puzzles and go back to menus so users can get things done faster once again.
* Any other application that gets a ribbon--such as Explorer and Wordpad, then I won't be using those either, meaning yet another reason to pass up Windows 8.
* The annoying ribbon even influenced some other software, such as the new versions of WinZip--I don't like that other software may also be influenced to start using ribbons either.
Except for work--Microsoft you have lost a user and a customer for the new versions of software to be run on the desktop computers. Fix your design issues--namely the Windows Phone style tiles for the desktop and the ribbons in your applications--only then I'll reconsider new Microsoft software. For now, I'll keep my Vista SP2 system for quite a while, thank you very much.
AND STOP POPPING UP THAT WINDOWS CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE ICON IN MY SYSTEM TRAY! I SAID NO ONCE, I SHOULD NOT HAVE TO CLICK IT AGAIN SEVRAL MONTHS LATER TO CONFIRM THE RADIO BUTTON IS STILL SET TO NO--WHAT, YOU THINK I'M GOING TO CHANGE MY MIND AND SAY YES???
Let's talk about the other two typical problems with WinCE devices.
Until 2003, portable Windows CE devices nearly always had volatile storage. It was nearly part of the spec.
Windows CE's interface made no concession to small devices whatsoever, meaning they had to be operated with a stylus. Who cares about ugly, let's talk about usability.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Capacitive screens have been around for ages, but they used a tethered pen... GRiDPads used them. Later GRiDPads moved to using resistive touch, though, to eliminate the tether.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
> all the apps already there for Android are Android on ARM
Aren't most apps inherently portable, as they're written in Java for the Dalvik VM? The exception is apps that use the native development kit, but my guess is that those are few.
What answer does Android have to this?
The answer is that most people don't need Word, they just need something to let them write letters 'n shit, yo. Most people who need to spend a lot of time in application software really need a keyboard anyway. And Windows is much, much heavier than Android, so it's going to cost a whole lot more for the hardware. Microsoft is especially proud of their operating system, too, so the licensing fees are actually significant, especially on the "Fancy" versions of the OS that have spiffy visual styles and so on. Microsoft has no cheap answer. Android solutions will compete on cost and in an economy continuing to tank, they will win on that basis.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"oh yeah, you have to have a touch-screen to swipe! That might be a problem for people who don't (like almost all desktop users)".
Now here is a use for Kinect...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What fucked WinCE was MSFT trying to make it act like Windows, full stop. Look at WinCE 5.0 and what instantly comes to mind...its a fricking hybrid of Win2K and WinXP, which is precisely the WRONG message you want to give on a device that don't run x86. A local retailer over the holiday thought he was gonna make some extra scratch selling "Windows tablets" with WinCE, hell the way the box was laid out it looked enough like XP if I didn't know what WinCE was i wouldn't have known. The customers didn't know either as they didn't know WTF WinCE was and i'm sure looked at the picture and thought it was just another version of XP. Well the guy ended up having to cover the Windows part and sell them at a loss as generic tablets thanks to all the returns he got.
What Apple and Google got right that MSFT STILL hasn't got right is you can't run the desktop on something you poke with a finger, it just don't work. You'd have thought WinCE would have goten that through their heads but instead we're getting the desktop fucked so Ballmer can try to hoodwink enough developers to get some apps for WinTab. if any developers fall for this let me be the first to give you a Nelson HA HA because that shit is gonna cause confusion just like the WinCE WinTab and its gonna bomb. you need to keep mobile and desktop separate, not jam all that shit together.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
This is true. The vast majority of apps don't use native code, and should work fine on Intel Android. Unfortunately the native apps are the best apps. I imagine Intel would encourage game makers to make native apps for their gear as well.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
But, but, isn't Google gay? Just look at the colors in their logo...
>But, but, isn't Google gay?
Nope, that would be Microsoft.
You are implying that businessmen and "professionals" are all adept at electronics. And conversely that if you are not an expert in IT, then you must be living in a trailer park, collecting unemployment.
And yes, a tablet has some severe restrictions. But the things it can do, it does with a lot more ease.
What?
Dalvik is nothing but a bit translator that turns Java bit code into something else in an attempt to fake the fact that Android runs Java (ie: Google does not want to pay for licensing tech others created).
Without a Sun/Oracle Java compiler, Dalvik doesn't work.
Does calling your operating system "Ice Cream Sandwich" sound really gay and unnecessary to anyone else? Like, say hypothetically. "Yeah man, I'm multi booting Linux, Ice Cream Sandwich, and Windows."
Is this what it has boiled down to? ChaCha? Twitter? Blogosphere? Web 2.0?
Couldn't we name use apt names for stuff, not drool spattered about by the UGA advertising major type?
Just call it "ICE" and then chill out.
Or Android (4.0).
"To prevent this day from getting any worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD THING" 1GJU8xLuDKDxEs4KLf8fAGyptoDsqvEsBT
Gee, so Compaq made iPaqs for a decade and never sold one. And HP never sold any Jornadas either. Never mind Linux also ran on the same hardware for years using either the GPE or OPIE environments or even sometimes plain X11.
Complex apps are near impossible to write for touch-based devices with small screens and the Android API and standard widget libraries suck. I would MUCH rather use OPIE on small screens. They could have done touch UI's back then but people who work for a living (the target market for $500-$800 expensive toys like these in the late 90's-early 2000's) wanted pointing precision and the ability to write/draw directly on the screen. Fingers are useless for precision pointing or complex usage of a system. For iFart apps they work great.
Palm Treos also sold well but I'll freely admit PalmOS is even more of a joke than WinCE. I never said WinCE was great but it certainly wasn't LATE. I was more of a NewtonOS fan personally.
My original point was MS was NOT late to the game. They were an early player alongside Apple and Palm.
Not saying mobile linux sucks but in reality, Android is just a mutant slow JVM running on top of Linux.
Most people want a lame portable web browser with text messaging and an MP3 player. Android does that ok I guess. Me, I want a highly portable computer with a cell phone bolted on. Different target market. For a portable COMPUTER, touch is not necessarily the right way to go. Win8 is going to be a joke because of this as well. For a portable content-consuming ENTERTAINMENT DEVICE (aka a toy), touch works quite well.
Recent mobile OS's are also a giant step backward when it comes to user freedom even though Android is "open".
No, never said you should burn your work. You've already invested in it. I wouldn't have gone that direction but if you're happy so be it.
What I'm saying is pen-based touch interfaces that are quite useful shouldn't disappear because poke-and-drool sells to the general public better.
There's a fine line between elegant simplicity and gutted uselessness. What works for the masses usually gets in the way of people who are capable, efficient, technical users and because a device for the latter class of users won't sell 400,000,000 units, people think we don't deserve what we want. Sales numbers are meaningless, the general public will buy whatever is shiny and lets them play angry birds, take embarrassing pictures at parties and play dumb flash games.
Without "power-users" and nerds, these sorts of devices would have never made it out of a lab. Hell the home computer would never have been reality. I think it's kinda silly to push us to the side. We made this industry what it is.
Calling Android slabs "tablets" is kinda funny. I can picture Sumerian guys trying to write with their fingers in clay. They used a stylus for a reason.
Why the haterade? Because I can't do half of what I did before on older slower mobile devices and what I can do is cumbersome, a pain in the ass or I have to hack the device. Except web browsing. Webkit is cool. That's really the only thing modern mobile OS's have going for them. Oh and shiny 3D effects.
I think the OP is confused about what should be called 'retarded'. There is no virtue in having a bad interface. WinCE had a bad interface. The stylus wasn't a better tool in most cases. It was what we used because the interface failed. WinCE also failed at offering "business" use. Android, and even iOS have far more and better business tools than WinCE did.
Another big failing with WinCE was that it's compatibility with itself was horrendous. If you bought an application that said it was WinCE compatible, there was a very good chance you couldn't run it on your device. Apple solved this by having stricter APIs and a very limited set of hardware. Android solved this by visualizing the processor. When WinCE was released, the Apple path of limited hardware was really the only path MS could have taken for compatibility, as the hardware wasn't up to snuff yet for emulation. I suspect the didn't do that because it was in direct opposition to how they made their fortune.
Now there is a thought - people bye a table not as a brick or a decorative object, but to get something done with the software on it. Very advanced thinking!
Why do they then go on to promote Android? As much as I love Android, it is just good enough, and not an example of really excellent software.
Unfortunately tablet manufacturer either ship Android pretty much unmodified, or even worse make some dubious "improvements" that makes everything even more inconsistent. How about some decent software and interface design for once? It has been done before, so why is it so difficult? I mean just look at the settings menu, it is about as uninspiring and as easy to navigate as a 1980's text adventure.
You are like the guy that insults people who go to an 10-Minute Oil Change instead of changing their oil themselves. There is no virtue in spending hours changing your oil when in 15-20 minutes you can have it changed by someone else faster, cleaner, cheaper, and easier. It doesn't make someone retarded because they chose the easier path. It isn't though a lack of knowledge or skill that I make the decision to have my oil changed by someone else. It is because I do have knowledge.
Like wise, most people's distaste for WinCE is not because of a lack of education or skill. It is because they HAVE knowledge, and use it that they shun WinCE. Using WinCE is like changing your own oil. Sure, you can do most stuff. It will be messy, take a bunch of time, you have to make sure that your getting the right products to put into it. Or, you can get iOS or Android devices where you end up with the same end product in less time and less mess.
Heck, today if I want a Windows style interface, I will just install Splashtop Streamer on my desktop, the Splashtop client on my Android phone, and use Windows. Heck, from the same Android device, I can use OSX too. It works just as well on the iPhone. If I need Linux, I go the VNC route.
Cellular coverage is good enough now, and WiFi access prevalent enough that anything that doesn't work great with a simplified finger oriented interface, is easier and more functionally used via a remote desktop solution.
Most Android apps are pure java and run on the JVM.
That is, those would run on intel just as well as on ARM without any single change.
It' only an issue for apps using the NDK but there aren't many.
I thought the Palm Pilot III was excellent aside from the inconvenience of using a dial-up modem for a live connection.
That was a huge problem with Windows Mobile too. Having a windows desktop on a tiny screen was utterly retarded. They should have paid someone to come up with interface that was sensible for those devices rather than recycling the same old design.
The Apple Newton came about in 1987. WinCE came about in 1996. How did Microsoft beat Apple to the handheld PC market?
Arm windows devices won't have existing app support. I'm sure Microsoft will develop some applications for it (or they may push their cloud based Office solution) but I won't get my games or anything else from third parties unless they specifically make an Arm version. So on Arm Android has the software library advantage.
I would say that disallowing native code is a correct move by MS. We are in a post native code world. Most people just haven't realized it yet. Processors are fast enough today that the emulation layer is just not that big of a hit. Banging hardware was necessary in the 80's. It made sense sometimes in the 90's for tight loops. Today, native code should be reserved for a few niche uses.
You are like the guy that insults people who go to an 10-Minute Oil Change instead of changing their oil themselves. There is no virtue in spending hours changing your oil when in 15-20 minutes you can have it changed by someone else faster, cleaner, cheaper, and easier.
I don't insult people for that. Generally, changing oil doesn't take hours either unless you're blind and can't find the drain plug. Or you have a car where the filter is rough to get to. Takes me about 10-15 minutes. Only reason I change my own lately is my vehicle has a lot of mileage and I like to use nicer filters and better oil that breaks down less quickly than typically provided at Jiffy Lube.
For most people, the 10 minute oil change is great. For me it isn't. And yes, I'd be really pissed off if they quit selling oil by the quart and the only way to get an oil change WAS the 10-minute $30 oil change.
Like wise, most people's distaste for WinCE is not because of a lack of education or skill. It is because they HAVE knowledge, and use it that they shun WinCE. Using WinCE is like changing your own oil. Sure, you can do most stuff. It will be messy, take a bunch of time, you have to make sure that your getting the right products to put into it. Or, you can get iOS or Android devices where you end up with the same end product in less time and less mess.
One, I never said WinCE was great. Just more useful than the current crop of iOS and Android devices to technically competent users.
Heck, today if I want a Windows style interface, I will just install Splashtop Streamer on my desktop, the Splashtop client on my Android phone, and use Windows. Heck, from the same Android device, I can use OSX too. It works just as well on the iPhone. If I need Linux, I go the VNC route.
Don't you think that Splashtop or VNC would be a lot easier to use with some cursor precision? And that might work for you but I live in a rural area where cell converage is spotty and public WiFi is near non-existent.
Cellular coverage is good enough now, and WiFi access prevalent enough that anything that doesn't work great with a simplified finger oriented interface, is easier and more functionally used via a remote desktop solution.
Yeah, remote desktop with a finger.....have you ever actually tried using it for anything serious but showing people you can do it? Much less on a device with a smaller screen? It's just about useless and flaky as hell.
Sorry, Intel only 'predicted the rise of what it called "mobile Internet devices," or MIDs' AFTER Nokia had the 770 and even its successor N800 out. (And this is not to say Nokia was first, either, just one that was popular at the time.)
Intel's MID racket was basically the same future everyone in mobile tech saw, with the one exception that they saw it as a way to sell Intel CPUs, even though their CPUs sucked mightily for the application. To rectify that, they developed the Atom processor family, which would suck less than existing x86es, and were still way behind everyone else. They've finally closed the gap to a couple years behind, but everyone else producing ARM SoCs is still moving forward, and there's no reason to suspect Atom will ever get ahead, and it's not clear they'll even catch up. So why are we paying attention to them again? Oh, that's right, because journalists go to press conferences, then regurgitate whatever is told them there.
Best Buy and NewEgg have warehouses and (in BB's case) brick and mortar stores to pay for. How does their markup compare to Microsoft's, btw?
Yes and Apple has no expenses whatsoever. It's not like Apple has to build data centers and maintain an infrastructure where there 200 million users can start downloading one of 100,000 apps within seconds of purchasing one. I guess people think that just because someone doesn't have physical store but an online store, they have no capital expenditures at all.
Leasing square feet of retail or warehouse space and staffing it is a fair penny more than than server costs. Bandwidth is cheap. It's not an Apples-to-Apples comparison. And like I said, it's different when developers can ignore those channels and do it themselves through online sales direct to consumers (digital download or boxed copy mailing).
I'm not in support of any of the app stores getting cuts as large as they do when they position themselves as gatekeepers to the platform. Microsoft or Apple. People pick the platform for the apps, they already give the parent OS-makers additional revenue in people choosing them and not the other device/OS instead.
I agree that Office is not critical for the table market - right now. That's because tablets are mostly toy devices right now. So users don't want to run office on it, as you've pointed out. But why will that not change in future? I'm saying that the miniaturization trend will culminate in laptops becoming ultrabooks, and ultrabooks becoming tablets with detachable mouse/keyboard/monitor. In other words, tablets will become the single main personal computer for most people. It's at that point that Office will be critical, unless Google has a viable alternative. Hope I've clarified my views better over the course of this thread.
Yes... that's what I just said at the bottom of my post. Regular Windows software (which would include the "classic" Windows desktop -- it is obviously not a Metro app) will not run on ARM. Only Metro-compliant apps.
Unless you were trying to reply to the person above me.
"oh yeah, you have to have a touch-screen to swipe! That might be a problem for people who don't (like almost all desktop users)".
Now here is a use for Kinect...
This is one step away from either looking foolish at the office, or the Minority Report UX. I can't tell which.
That's the best counter-argument I've received so far - the cost factor. Thanks! But we have to factor in the half a billion people that use MS office. As I've outlined over the course of this thread, for that sizeable population, the cost factor will be offset by the fact that you can own one single portable device, instead of two. I think the argument can be settled by analyzing how many people use a "tablet" currently as their one single personal computer. I'm guessing most people have two devices right now - one running windows. In future, when tablets are as powerful as current PCs, the situation will be even more skewed in favour of Windows. Why spend money on a toy tablet running Android?
That's why I believe Google's word processing strategy is critical, among other things. I want Google to make sure MS's monopoly is finally broken. They need to cover all their bases - and half a billion word users need to be given serious consideration.
And wrt to the keyboard. I agree the keyboard is mandatory, but what's to prevent one from being plugged in at whim? (e.g. Asus Transformer)
Well IMHO the smart move would have been to spin off the mobile group so they could innovate without trying to force "synergy" between it and the desktop. this is the core problem at MSFT, they have too many overlapping groups and they end up fucking one trying to tie it into the others. look at how Valve has taken the lead when it comes to Windows gaming simply because of the X360 stealing away developers that should have been working on Windows gaming. if they would have spun them off and simply had some basic rules on APIs and handles so windows and the X360 could work together without overlapping depts they could have snapped up the lion's share but instead they came out with a half ass GFWL trying to tie it to X360 and create "Synergy" between the two were frankly there wasn't any and fucked it all up.
Mark my words you are about to get a big lesson in this problem with Win 8, which if you've tried the dev preview (which you really should, its a fucking trainwreck!) you know its a touchscreen cell phone OS right up there with iOS being forced into a non touchscreen desktop just so ballmer can try to get developers for WinTab. its gonna bomb, folks don't have touchscreen desktops and frankly don't WANT to poke their monitors all day, but because Ballmer can't give away Windows mobile instead of getting a clue that the desktop and mobile need to be two separate companies he's gonna fuck the desktop with a cell phone GUI just like he's been fucking the mobile with a desktop GUI. if you haven't tried it i urge you to download the dev preview and fire up a VM, its a serious "WTF are they thinking?" moment that shows just how badly run that company is ATM. i'm just glad Win 7 is supported until 2020 because i'm telling my customers to get their desktops and laptops now because they won't want Win 8 and if its like Vista it'll be 6 or 7 months before the OEMs see the nosediving sales and demand downgrades rights.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
In future, when tablets are as powerful as current PCs, the situation will be even more skewed in favour of Windows. Why spend money on a toy tablet running Android?
That's right, that's why Android has to take charge now while it has the advantage, and it can gain momentum.
And wrt to the keyboard. I agree the keyboard is mandatory, but what's to prevent one from being plugged in at whim? (e.g. Asus Transformer)
if you're going to use it all the time, that's just another point of failure.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It specifically calls for a the Sun/Oracle JDK to use Dalvik.
The only person not making any sense is you and not the previous poster. You must have very poor reading comprehension.
Core 2 Duo 291m transistors
Nvidia Tegra2 (Arm) 260m transistors
The latter is loosely broken into 2 general purpose ARM processors and 6 audio/video processors that can be switched off independently when their function is not required.
Intel have no hope of bringing x86 to the smartphone market unless they start from scratch with an 80386 (275k transistors) modify the hell out of it for power consumption and work forwards from there.
I'd actually be interested to see a genuine 386 processor running at smartphone speeds.
The easy one would be: MPlayer.
Another is NX Client... you can run it in your chrooted Ubuntu, but then you have to go through a VNC client, which is extremely clumsy and has problems with input.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Leasing square feet of retail or warehouse space and staffing it is a fair penny more than than server costs. Bandwidth is cheap. It's not an Apples-to-Apples comparison.
The last time I checked Apple spent a $1B to build their last data center. Google spends about $500M on each of theirs. The money spent isn't on space or staff; it's on equipment and construction costs. There is more to a data center than cheap bandwidth. Many here on slashdot seem to forget servers cost money; routers (the industrial kind not the one you get at Best Buy) cost money.
And like I said, it's different when developers can ignore those channels and do it themselves through online sales direct to consumers (digital download or boxed copy mailing).
Yes and all of that costs money and time. Do you think that copies mail themselves or that it costs a developer no time/money to create their website, host it, and operate it? Do you think that it costs them nothing to use a turnkey e-commerce solution? Do you think that credit card companies don't charge independent developers fees for online sales?
I'm not in support of any of the app stores getting cuts as large as they do when they position themselves as gatekeepers to the platform. Microsoft or Apple.
30% is very low compared to what it used to be. 45% was more common and you still had to pay fees on top. 30% is also what Android charges.
People pick the platform for the apps, they already give the parent OS-makers additional revenue in people choosing them and not the other device/OS instead.
So you are saying that everyone should take money to recuperate their operating expenses out of altruism? I think at 30% all the sites makes some profit. They don't make a lot of profit though.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Intel should be relying on an unlocked bootloader so people can decide what they want instead of having Win8/ICS/Other rammed down their throats! They just might find that people having a choice might result in increased hardware sales.
Yah, the win8 dev previews are pushing me to buy the first mac I've owned since the early '90s. The vista/win7 abomination (7 only seems good if you had to use vista, the UI is a clusterfsk *). The whole thing is probably on purpose, they will come out with win9, and reverse a couple decisions and everyone will praise it for being great. I think business is really pushing back right now, even against 7. My wife started a new job a few months back, and her brand new PC was running XP, the IBM CE shows up at work, and he is running XP, everywhere I look outside of the local coffee shop full of college kids I see XP.
Then there are the "cord cutters". I see them at the trendy places, and at my friends houses. They don't even use there PC's anymore. The ipads have replaced them.
*, I pointed this out to a co-worker by starting 6 or 8 different apps that come with it and pointing out it looks like a history of computing, some of the UI is win3, some of it is 98, some of it is XP, some of it is vista, some of it is office 07. If your going to convert the UI to a ribbon, _EVERYTHING_ needs to be a ribbon...
Its a visual representation of the complete lack of management at MS.
Recompiling isn't the easy solution that you think it is. Consider the n900. Despite being based on Debian, recompiling applications really didn't work that well. Part of it was the small screen, but mostly I found, the issue was with trying to use a program developed for the desktop on a touch interface. Scroll bars and buttons don't lend themselves well on devices that rely on gestures and accelerometer input. I don't know that anyone outside of Microsoft will be willing rewrite their products for a niche product--Win8 on ARM.
Actually have mplayer on my Droid. Yes, that mplayer. Found it on xda-developers a long time ago. As far as nx, yes, the situation could be better.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Personally, I think the worst thing it not that it was worse than other systems 10 years ago, but they were still trying to sell it 2 years ago. I hated that keyboard that even with a stylus was too small.
WTF?
Mobile access to commonly email documents ... you mean like a ZIP file? (which I couldn't open on WinCE 6.1)
A good integrated mail client... Well, sorta... it worked with Exchange, perhaps, otherwise it was bleh...
Thorough integrated contact management... it had a calendar app that was roughly on par with a $15 time management piece. It worked with Exchange, see previous post.
Excellent 3rd party mapping/GPS software... what are you smoking, exactly?
Thorough integrated contact management ... I have no idea where this comment comes from. Wha?
The audacity of claiming that iOS or Android lack streaming and local video support, or mapping/GPS software options is stupid silly.
WinMo / WinCE is perhaps the single greatest spectacular failure in the history of tech - a commanding, multi-billion dollar, 10-year lead resulted in Windows Mobile 6.x, which couldn't even begin to compare to a copy (Android) of a well executed idea (iOS) implemented in short order using relatively standard technology. (*nix)
How do you blow your decade in the sun any harder?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
The audacity of claiming that iOS or Android lack streaming and local video support, or mapping/GPS software options is stupid silly.
There were multiple programs available for WinCE which did "Google Maps" type stuff in a more usable, featureful fashion than what Google's Navigation does.
Apple's mapping software? It's a joke. It's frequently wrong, and you've got to enter the address precisely, starting from state/zip and working backwards.
Android is better than that by a lot, but it's also horribly unstable on most of the Android devices I've used, with different ROMs. (At least there's ndrive.)
Hell, until recently, even VZ Navigator was better than most of what's available on Android and iPhone.
I have no disagreement about WinCE blowing it's load prematurely and ineffectively. The core technology sucked, but for many things, if you wanted to do it on your mobile device, your only option was WinCE until fairly recently (about 2 years ago).
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Windows 8 includes both the Metro side of the coin as well as the standard Desktop. Your traditional apps will execute normally on the legacy Desktop. No change to the User. Metro applications are Touch oriented so of course they have different controls. They are SVG based so they will run on screens that are 7" to 70". Not sure why you feel they are "obviously written under the assumption your screen is 13" or smaller." Your comments about IE seem to indicate you don't understand how to use Peek. Meaning, you can touch the left side of the screen and Peek at apps in Memory. IE 10 on the Desktop will support Plugins, like Flash. IE for Metro will not support Plugins. Which leads me to the next point. Apps don't "exit", they are suspended. Have you not looked at the Task Manager to learn this? And really, Plugins like Flash are nagware anymore anyway.HTML5 is native in Windows 8. And to respond to your incorrect opening statement, Windows 8 is a Touch first OS that is always operable with a Mouse and Keyboard. Assuming the User is capable of operating them. Why would you wants apps that "can't be Windowed" while running in Metro? You want to switch between them? Why not use Peek or SnapView or Charms like Search or Share? I am going to go out on a limb here and guess that you haven't really experienced Windows 8 Developer Preview on a Touch Device. Another observation, Adobe CS4 adding 25 tiles to the Metro Desktop isn't an indictment of Windows 8 rather an editorial on the bloatware of said software suite.
Windows 8 supports both; it supports the standard Desktop as well as Metro apps. What evidence do you have to support your prognostication that "their foray into the tablet market will be a disaster?" Just in case you have no idea what you think you know. There are 450M+ Windows 7 PCs on the planet and 1.5B Windows PCs. Just in case you don't know, there were 32M iPads shipped in 2011. I don't know what you think you know but I'll bet on that Windows tablet "thingy" making a couple of bucks.
Windows 8 will execute legacy Windows apps perfectly on the Desktop. Windows 8 will be touch first so legacy apps will be touch enabled but not optimized like Metro apps.Windows 8 Desktop apps (like legacy apps) will operate as they always have with a keyboard and mouse. No change. ISVs probably love Windows 8 because they have many, many choices. Much easier to port from a lagacy mouse/keyboard desktop to a first class touch enviroment like Metro. ARM is simply a different platform that ISVs may want to target.
Why would the legacy Dektop be "hard to control on a small screen" with a mouse and keyboard?
Metro. Even the name is gay.
Not sure why you feel they are "obviously written under the assumption your screen is 13" or smaller."
Because the UI elements are larger than needed on a desktop-sized screen and waste space? Which I said in the very next sentence after the one you're referencing. When I'm viewing the weather app I don't need the temperature displayed in 200 pt type or whatever ungodly size it really it. Interfaces that use elements this size relative to the display size are commonly called 10-foot UIs in other words, they aren't appropriately sized for desktop PC use, because you sit much closer to a PC screen than that. It's the same thing here, I call it "tablet PC sized" because the elements are made to be easier to use on a touch screen. Buttons and text are bigger because the screen size may be small and harder to read. Precise pointing is more difficult when you're using a finger instead of a stylus or mouse, and controls are spaced further apart to avoid accidentally activating the wrong item for the same reason.
Your comments about IE seem to indicate you don't understand how to use Peek. Meaning, you can touch the left side of the screen and Peek at apps in Memory.
The point is I can't view more than one app simultaneously by arranging windows because every Metro App wants to have all my attention by hiding everything else. Some of us like to multitask.
Apps don't "exit", they are suspended. Have you not looked at the Task Manager to learn this?
Have you actually read my post before replying to it?
"I've also been unable to find a way to actually Exit any of these Metro apps, either. I can click out of them and back to the Launcher, but I cannot stop the process without actually End Tasking them from the Process Manager. They eventually go into a "hibernation"-like state instead if you don't use them."
And really, Plugins like Flash are nagware anymore anyway.HTML5 is native in Windows 8.
Never expressed an opinion on plugins or flash.
Why would you wants apps that "can't be Windowed" while running in Metro? You want to switch between them? Why not use Peek or SnapView or Charms like Search or Share?
Does not Peek require me to hover the mouse in the lower right corner or use an activation keybinding? I kinda need to be able to use my keyboard and mouse while I am working and looking at both windows at once. That's why it's called "peek". It's only for a quick glance.
I am going to go out on a limb here and guess that you haven't really experienced Windows 8 Developer Preview on a Touch Device.
No, I haven't. Because I'm examining Windows 8's ability to be a desktop computer OS, which is one of it's intended uses by Microsoft. If you think I'm using Windows 8 "wrong" by experiencing it on a desktop PC and not a touch device, well then you're only agreeing with me that Windows 8 (or to be more precise Metro) is a bad interface for traditional computers and Microsoft should be making separate desktop and tablet OS offerings, instead of doing this.
Another observation, Adobe CS4 adding 25 tiles to the Metro Desktop isn't an indictment of Windows 8 rather an editorial on the bloatware of said software suite.
Half those tiles are the major applications themselves, most others are the minor ones. There are not many uninstaller/readme/support files in the group. You obviously haven't researched what's actually included in the Master Collection (hint: everything).
And I'm afraid it is an indictment of Windows 8 when all these files aren't an issue in Windows 7 and before. The launcher design itself is the problem, because it doesn't hide things until needed. I don't see (and have to scroll through) 25 menu items of CS4 to reach an item after them on
I meant on a touch screen, not with a keyboard/mouse.
I was replying to unixisc's idea there are separate Windows 8 versions for tablets and desktops. While I suppose you could have an Intel-powered touch tablet (like the BUILD hardware) run the legacy Desktop, I was saying the small screen size would make it hard to control because fine pointing is harder with your fingers than a mouse, and the Desktop interface has small elements like the triangles you flip to burrow into nested folders sometimes.
From some of these replies I'm getting here I think some people (not referring to you) have the wrong idea Windows 8 is a "Tablet OS" and therefore I'm being unfair by judging it with a desktop-size display and keyboard/mouse for input instead of a touchscreen I can make gestures on. Windows 8 is simply the next version of Windows. It will be used on all computing devices tablet, laptop, and desktop. If I think it stinks as a non-touchscreen interface, that is a valid issue for Microsoft since they expect me to use it whether I have a touchscreen or not.
You know you can just turn it off and use normal desktop right? Why are you complaining about a touchscreen interface if you are trying to use it with mouse?
Not only that - while NT 3.51 had been multi-platform and somewhat portable, it's become less & less portable w/ every successive release - 4.0, 2000, XP... Reason being that a lot of userland features had been moved into the kernel for better responsiveness, but the fatter one makes the kernel, the more difficult it is to port. Yeah, Windows Phone has its ARM ports, but fact remains that MS will, in addition to the above problems of rewriting Office for ARM and for touch, have a completely different resource availability in which to fit in Office. In fact, it's even questionable whether Wintel apps of today will work unchanged on a Windows 8/Medfield tablet w/o any alterations to allow touch, as well as a rearrangement of the ribbons, etc.
Question: What is wrong with the Win 7 UI? Because after killing Aero and making my own pure black theme it seems quite nice and low resource to me. the breadcrumbs and jumplists alone make it worth upgrading IMHO, and its memory management seems much better than XP or Vista. I've been running it since Oct 09 and even though I've changed out every single piece on this machine its not given me a bit of trouble whereas the XP that I had for dual boot is had to be hacked to use a RAM disk simply because it won't save a page file, the motherboard swap was one thing too much for it.
As for the ribbon? don't use it. I'm running the positively ancient Office 2k, it runs just fine on Win 7 X64 and with the converter pack opens office 2k10 files just fine. I do have office 07 on my netbook but i just set it to minimize the ribbon and made my own custom mini bar that has the functions i use so its actually a little faster than my office 2K when it comes to quick edits but what can i say, i'm a creature of habit.
but if you want Win 7 to act like XP friend, it really ain't hard. Just go get Aston and you can frankly make Windows be like anything you want. they got Win98, XP, hell even KDE and gnome if that melts your butter. i use it on my XP to give me a more modern UI, runs great and is low resource. Its got a free 30 day trial so it isn't like it costs anything to give it a spin. But if you think you don't like Win 8 you REALLY ain't gonna like what they seem to be getting ready for at Apple, think iOS on the desktop, with everything app store. That is why I'd suggest getting Win 7 set up your way and then batten down the hatches, because Win 8 is gonna suck and Apple is gonna end up iOS. Thank goodness Win 7 is supported until 2020, i can skip 8 on my main system like i did vista.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Ah, sorry, I missed the part at the end. I was replying to the 'I am under the impression there is only going to be ONE "Windows 8", and everyone will run it.' - the ARM version, as you say, will be a different version, aimed at tablets / phones.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
No no, not explicit at all. You should really tell us how much you love Intel...
Since Apple's mapping is based on Google Maps, and I've used both android and ios for navigation, my experience does not match yours. It's not as good as it could be, but certainly far better than what you described.
Then use your older slower mobile device. Nobody's stopping you.
You can moan and gripe against horseless carriages all you want, but if you really want a horse driven carriage, you can still trade for one from the Amish.
Windows 8 Metro is Touch first. You CAN view apps simultaneously in Metro with a Snap View. The Desktop works very well, like previous versions,/ with a keyboard and mouse.
Windows 8 has a Desktop for Mouse and Keyboard and Metro for Touch. All legacy apps will run on Windows 8 x86. And this quote "developers ain't preferring Windows 8 to Apple or Android" is funny!
Good point
They do understand that if Apple wanted to, Apple could run iOS on Intel chips, right?
It sounds like Apple has told them they won't do that, and Intel is trying to change their minds by mounting a seemingly concerted competitive effort.
At the least, Intel's new chips, which have surprised even ARM's CEO with their speed and economy, are going to make Intel rich yet again.
The question is whether Apple wants to be in full-frontal competition with them, or do what it did with the PowerPC/x86 decision and go with the one that has taken the technological lead.
As a recent post just highlighted, Windows still sells more licenses than OSX, iPhone, and Android combined... Intel's real push will be with Windows 8 tablets. Having ICS in the wings is just icing on the proverbial cake.
Question: What is wrong with the Win 7 UI?
I thought I had answered in the original posting.
One simple word: "Inconsistent"
Its all over the place, and looks/acts like someone bolted random paradigms all over it, depending on which subsystem you happen to be using. This primary seems to be a function of multiple groups responsible for different portions of the UI. The guys doing explorer were on one page, the guys doing paint where on another, the guys doing the administrative panels were on a third (or rather didn't see any reason to update their UI from xp). The UI ranges from things like notepad which are using the windows 3.0 (menu only, no button bars) all the way to paint which was updated to match the office paradigm and doesn't even have menu bars by default.
There is obviously no one at MS who is in charge of the look and feel of the product, because they would never have allowed paint to be updated without calculating the time to update the remainder of the OS (at a minimum explorer) and making sure the changes were complete.
you can run ubuntu in a chroot, sure, but on android it''s via vnc which is dog slow. on the n900 you can run debian apps natively, so for instance i can (and do) watch hardware accelerated movies on totem player. good luck doing that via vnc.
basically all the ubuntu apps you know and love can appear as little icons on the desktop and be run as if they were native apps. and run individually. you have to open up vnc in all-or-nothing fashion and it really is DOG slow and offputting to do it that way. it's nothing more than a bit of geek cred, not something you would LIKE to use ad-hoc.
what else can the n900 do? crack wep and wps wifi passwords(no injection drivers for android..)
consumer IR, so use it as a tv remote
built in fm transmitter!
built in fm receiver.
control phone and tablet functions via command line (e.g. send sms via command line)
oh..., and also, i can (and do) boot into ANDROID. as it's a multiboot phone. the version of android for the n900 is called 'nitdroid'. and it's updated unlike your phone which will never get ICE.
So a better question is what can your phone do that the n900 can't.
Today, native code should be reserved for a few niche uses.
Unfortunately every platform seems to be pushing their own languages. Google is pushing a basterdised version of java. Apple is pushing objective C. MS is pushing .net*. Symbian uses a somewhat stripped down (no exception support) variant of C++. Afaict winCe/WM was traditionally programmed in C++ and VB though it seems later in it's life the platform got .net support too. The common ground between all these platforms is to write the core logic of your app in the well-supported subset of C++ (that is don't rely on exceptions) and then write the platform specific UI code in the platform's language of choice.
MS is basically telling all developers who want to port to WP7 from other mobile platforms that they will have to rewrite more-or-less from scratch. That seems like a suicidal move when you only have a tiny marketshare.
If MS offered a compiler that could take standard C++ and turn it into .net bytecode suitable for running on all their platforms (rather than only on platforms where running "unsafe" code is allowed) then the inability to run native code wouldn't be an issue but afaict they don't do that.
*yes I know .net is not technically a language but the main languages for .net are different from the main languages for other bytecode platforms.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
*I understand your point at take it as you made it.
Language compatibility, and VM/Native are really two different issues. They are heavily correlated, but one does not cause the other.
By forgoing language compatibility, software is prevented from being cross OS compatible at the development stage. "Native" code on the other hand locks the OS into a particular piece of hardware. It frequently seems like a good idea when products are first released, but after a few years, any speed improvement that was gained is lost do to the platform being held back to legacy hardware.
Well, on your droid you may use Python for simple scripting with SL4A (Scripting Layer For Android).
But on the N900 you can use Python for writing applications using PySide. You have all the posssibilities and libraries you would expect on a Linux platform.