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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."
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?
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.
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
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.
maybe MIPS in the form of the Chinese-derivative Loongson?
That's already happening, and they're selling like hotcakes. http://www.mobilemag.com/2012/01/12/79-ainol-novo-7-paladin-tablet-does-ice-cream-sandwich/
The problem for Intel is the price of these SoCs:
http://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner_a10/
They may not be as capable as the Atom, but they're good enough to make very usable tablets at 1/10th the price.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Problem for both Intel & Microsoft is that software for PCs are still pretty pricey, while software for tablets is really cheap, thanks to the repository stores. People who would mull over whether to spend $30 on a game would have no hesitation spending $1.99 or even $4.99 on it. Since the tablets have such inexpensive software, people can get a whole bunch of them, and Wintel can't have as many to offer there. So their trump card would be to offer Windows 8 tablets based on Medfield, and hope that it sticks. That's the only thing I can imagine bailing out Windows 8 from a fiasco in the tablet marketplace.
Tablets ain't gonna replace office laptops or servers, so there, both Intel & Microsoft are safe. But as far as home usage goes, tablets - particularly once they go head to head w/ PCs in price - will be seen as more and more attractive. As it is, the elimination of VGA and DVI from monitors is going to make a lot of monitors outdated, even though they are functioning just fine, while there will be so many affordable software titles available that at least on the home front, it has a good chance of heavily eroding the home PC business.
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
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.'"
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.
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.