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Wozniak Praises 'Beautiful' Windows Phone
judgecorp writes "Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has praised the user interface of Microsoft's Windows Phone, saying that aspects of its user interface are more 'beautiful' than comparable sides to the iPhone. The comments, in a New Domain, follow on from a comment by Forrester boss George Colony who blogged that Apple would decline in the post-Jobs era. Both pieces have kicked off the kind of online argument you would expect."
I played with a Lumia 900. It's well thought out but execution is lacking. The thing wouldn't get on the in store AT&T wifi. So I go to toggle it off and see what LTE is all about and the soft toggle for wifi on/off gets stuck in the middle. Err. What? It's a UI element! Really?
Windows phone 7 is full of interesting and good ideas with poor execution and little polish.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
OK, the hyper-coordination between articles praising the WinPhone and gushing first posts is getting annoying.... How about a 15 minute rule between article and first post? Or maybe restrict first post to accounts that have been around for more than 15 minutes?
Probably some Anti-Apple shill.
So what if Woz praised something a competitor produced? He's entitled to his own opinion, negative or positive, and it says nothing about the state of Apple. Is Apple going to decline without Jobs? Who know, but Woz having an opinion is hardly a sign one way or the other. The only thing it does is dispell any notion that he's an arrogant prat who couldn't possible even deign to glance at a competitor's product without vomiting.
Maybe this sort of thing gets to me too much, but I'm really fed up of this "you must be 100% for whichever brand-tribe you join!" guff. If he liked bits of another product then so what, that's competition for you.
Its not surprising that Wozniak stuck to tech rather than going into management. He gives his honest opinion, saying what he believes to be true. There is no place for this sort of thing in the boardroom.
I think your post misses one huge flaw with WP7
The developer API, it's too restrictive. No good way to get your apps to share data between each other. Only network connection allowed is HTTP. No single source of online storage (last I checked the SkyDrive API wasn't opened, so you can't use it, by the developer contract).
Yes, it has a clean and effective API, but in terms of functionality from 3rd party apps, it lacks, and would still lack, even if it had all the developers of iOS and Android combined.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
The UI may be great and the development environment good, but Microsoft, in a misguided attempt to lock developers to the platform (that only works when you have them to begin with), made it impossible to use c++ and OpenGL on them meaning every part of an Android or iOS game/app has to be rewritten to work on Windows Phone 7.
When you make it too hard, developers will stick with the platforms where the customers are; Android and iOS
Come on, that's not fair. The first poster, TechCar, has a long history of 8 posts dating all the way back to two days ago! :)
The one Windows Phone evangelist who claimed the current devices would be upgradable, quickly walked those statements back.
Source here .
If you buy one of these "beta test" phones, you will soon be stuck in a multi-year contract with a device that will not be upgradable to the current version of the OS. There is nothing beautiful about that. Do not buy before Win Phone 8 is released!
Wozniak is a nerd's nerd. He isn't the general public, and what woz thinks is awesome is not likely to be what Joe average wants to use. That is not meant to be an insult by the way, the man is a genius. But he's a technical genius and not a genius with regards to what people want (that was Jobs).
I'd say that getting a glowing review by wozniak is just as likely to be the kiss of death as it is to be the harbinger of iphone doom...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
George Colony who blogged that Apple would decline in the post-Jobs era.
Since day one of the Macintosh, or you might say day one of the IBM PC, people have been predicting the demise of Apple. With every new model and every new OS, legions of entrenched industry analysts stood up and said with certainty..."whoa, this may be the end of Apple".
I guess if they just keep saying that, one day it will be true and they can pat themselves on the back for being so prescient.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Look, just because his name is similar to other first-posting newly created account names accused of being MS shills (TechNY/TechLA), the account was created just yesterday and he only made pro-MS and anti-Google postings since then doesn't mean anything. Doesn't mean anything at all ...
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Just because Woz originally helped found Apple Computer in the 70's doesn't mean he's a shill for Apple 30 years later, long after having worked as one of their employees, and after the company changed names (simply "Apple" today -- with the "Computer" part purposely deleted).
I really do think the man speaks honestly about technology he uses, no matter which vendor it comes from. He often likes Apple's products, and when he does, he'll tell you so. But the media seems to assume he's "supposed to be saying that" and jumps to conclusions whenever he says something good about a competing product instead.
As a big fan of the iPhone myself, I'd agree with Woz about Windows Phone 7 too. It *does* have a refreshing and attractive-looking UI to it -- something I'm doubly impressed came out of Microsoft, after their LONG standing belief that everything they designed should have a START button in the corner. (Even their embedded systems for such things as vehicle navigation systems still required developers to purposely code the software to completely hide the OS's UI underneath, because nobody wanted a touchscreen in their car or truck to look like it was just another PC running a version of Windows, with icons to double-click.)
Well, to be more fair, he almost certainly has a shitload more posts than that going back for quite a bit longer, just spread between a few dozen accounts.
He's not an Apple fanboy. He just likes good technology regardless of who makes it.
--
The mill's closed. There's no more work. We're destitute. I've got no option but to sell you all for scientific experiments.
TechCar is the latest iteration of a large group of astroturfing accounts. There's a bunch of high UID accounts with similar style names (two random words smashed together) that shill pro-Microsoft and anti-Google positions. Unsurprisingly, he was born yesterday to post in Bonch's story claiming Google management knew about the wifi harvesting. He shows up to defend a well-established anti-Google (and pro-Apple) shill and has since posted a series of anti-Linux, anti-Google, and pro-Microsoft comments.
Assuming he follows the same pattern as the rest, mods will catch on in a week or two and his karma will plummet. The account will get put to sleep and a new one will be created.
Yes, because anecdotal evidence tends to be more true.
I've found that to be true in my personal experience.
HTTP is not a replacement for every other protocol. I am sick of the brain dead thinking it is. We have other protocols for a reason.
As a simple example, http sure is not enough for an ftp client, ssh client, etc, etc, etc. 7.5 of course will let you do all these things.
Your complaint is hardly specific to Windows Phone 7 tho - I've not used it (consider that a caveat) so I can't comment on WP7, but I've had my fair share of UI glitches and software slide buttons sticking on both Android (HTC Desire, 2.1 iirc) and iPhone.
I've even had situations where the iPhone wont let me answer a call thats ringing, because the screen isnt responding to the slide - the call goes to voice mail, the screen reverts back to the lock screen, and suddenly everything works again.
I've had situations where I couldn't hang up the call on both the iPhone and Android. Now thats not a great situation to be in!
My iPhone also won't connect to my local pubs wifi, even when Im sat a couple of meters away from the router - won't see it, and if I try and connect manually it won't join the network.
So execution is really lacking all round.
And you can't blame the phone OS if the store can't make their WiFi and phones work together
Umm.
Yes. You can. In almost all cases. If the store Wifi is working and everyone else can get on and that phone can not, What exactly is to blame?
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Apple's co-founder Steve Wozniak
Sadly, most Apple fans these days don't consider Steve Wozniak the co-founder of Apple. They think Steve Jobs said "Let there be light" and then created everything Apple by himself. And I wish I were joking.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
There's a reason, Woz has been an engineer and not a designer at Apple.
Yeah - he actually invented things instead of putting pretty packages and a neat UI on existing things and marketing the hell out of them. He had the audacity to put function over form.
"But this one goes to 11!"
And out of his eight posts, four are negative of Google, one is negative of Linux, and three are positive about Microsoft.
"Yeah, I played with it too, and it did feel like an early release product."
You mean it came early? Eeewww.
C|N>K
You are assuming it is working with all of the others.
Also, you are assuming the issue isn't with the driver or hardware (which would be the manufacturer of the phone, and not the OS).
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Windows did it.
We all know it.
If Windows is anywhere near the scene of the crime, "Windows Did It."
Have we learned nothing?
The last good OS from Microsoft Was DOS 6.22. If you replaced command.com with 4dos.com.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Don't allow posts from accounts less than a year old to appear as first post. Hold them in queue until a few dozen posts have been made. You could also slow them down a bit by requiring two mod-ups to raise their score one point.
AFAIK they already don't allow brand spankin' new accounts to moderate. The real challenge is dealing with established accounts that don't 'turf; but moderate up the turfers. It could be a political issue if you simply LART them.
I hypothesize that if a user's up-mods all go towards new accounts, that user is likely a shill. They certainly have a strange bias. There's not much reason to skew your mods towards new accounts. Yeah, sympathy for high ID numbers; wanting to make new users feel good; but that's not really productive. We can do without that.
There's still nothing to stop a determined bunch of 'turfers from gaining access. You should make them work for it though.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It's still a "windows" phone, advertised as such, so any failings in operation that appear to be software related will justly be seen as an MS failing.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Probably due to hidden SSID which the phones can't handle.
http://windowsphonesecrets.com/2010/08/04/windows-phone-missing-feature-of-the-week-connect-to-hidden-wireless-
networks/
If users are going to have to fight with drivers on their Windows phones, then Microsoft has already lost the race. Nobody wants to muck with drivers on their friggin' phone. What the hell does that even mean? It's not like someone swapped out the network adapter or anything -- so if they wifi doesn't work out of the box, the entire phone is suspect and isn't ready for consumers.
Well, then maybe the OS+phone combo, but people kind of expect wi-fi to be a well solved problem. Find the network, enter the password, and go. It's not like it's new or anything.
If I was testing out a phone, and I couldn't get it to use the wifi in the store, I'd simply move onto the next phone. That's some serious warning signals the phone is going to be problematic.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.