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Windows Phone 8 Officially Unveiled
BogenDorpher writes with news that Microsoft has officially introduced Windows Phone 8. The new version of their mobile operating system will bring support for processors with up to 64 cores, as well as resolutions higher than 800x480 — up to 1280x768. It will also include better support for NFC and microSD cards. One important thing to note is that Windows Phone 8 won't be coming to current Windows Phone devices.
Now I can buy a Windows Phone to warm my hands on in the winter.
Why would you limit the max res like that?
Why not design it to scale from the very beginning so you don't have to hack it on later?
Why they could not support smp from the beginning had me wondering as well.
QUOTE: "Microsoft tirelessly pushed the idea that its saving grace, the Nokia Lumia 900, was the next big thing in smartphones. However, the fact that the Lumia 900..... won't be able to update will undoubtedly leave some owners of these devices feeling hung out..... Without the software update, potential customers will basically have no reason to snag a Lumia 900, a Titan II, or any other Windows Phone device for that matter, until Windows Phone 8 is available."
This move reminds me of when Apple stopped supporting PPC devices. The article says WinPh8 won't support single-core devices. I wonder why? That would be equivalent to them releasing Windows 7 and saying, "Won't support Pentium 4 or other single-cores."
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
It seems they consistantly miss the mark in what consumers want to buy. OK great, 64-cores? who cares? What features does it offer the consumers who are supposed to purchase these to make their day to day lives more productive? Easier? More connected with friends / family?
None of my friends could tell you what WVGA or WXGA is, nor do they probably care.
I live in Boston and see hundreds of of people daily using a variety of phones. I have NEVER seen a Windows phone. not once. Why? Because it makes NO sense to buy one over Android/Iphone.
Microsoft needs to figure out quickly how to incorporate features, functions and uses that NO OTHER company has thought of. Until then, they will remain completely irrelevant and if I were a stock holder in their company, leave me questioning whether all that R&D money is being spent wisely.
S.t.e.v.e.
FTA:
And FTS plus the other article there:
So windows phone 7 is not selling... solution! Reveal windows phone 8 due in a few months which won't run on any phone bought now.... so better not buy now!
I'm sure this is *really* going to help them sell those phones and gain some marketshare to improve on the nonexistant one they have now... but good news though! The hundreds of thousands of excellent windows phone 7.5 apps will work on windows phone 8 ....
The most interesting point by far is arguably native code support, something that was sorely missing from WP7, and made porting apps from iOS and Android incredibly difficult (since you couldn't just share model code in C/C++ between the platforms). Not to mention the perf issues it created for games.
Diversity, you know. Choice. Something that's been missing from the market since Microsoft killed off virtually all of their competitors and established their monopoly.
Well, that's what HTML5 is for, supposedly. Doesn't mean you're going to get any performance out of it though, which limits its use case. Theoretically that's the problem Java was supposed to solve, but it doesn't really seem to have panned out.
They've always been good at FUD, but never at hype. This is as much of a yawn as always. I wish it were real competition to give apple and google something to actually care or even have to compare to, but it's not.
It will run 7.8, an update that has most (if not all) of the non-hardware-specific features. The summary is incorrect.
64 cores should be enough for anyone!
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I'm wondering what the advantage of so many different - and incompatible - OSs on Phones is. iOS, Android, Blackberry, now Windows Phone, et cetera. Each with different APP stores, different SDKs and Apps... What's the point of it all? What does it matter where a Smart Phone with hardware specs XX runs Android, iOS or Windows Phone. ---------- The whole things seems like a waste of software developers' finite resources to me...
Hey! I think you're right, and you've just given me a great idea.
As a society, we can have some sort of planning organization that decides what the specs will be, then to avoid duplication of effort in manufacturing, the planning board can arrange for the production too. With advanced scientific, statistical analysis, it shouldn't be any problem to figure out exactly how many devices need to be produced, so that we don't waste raw materials by making too many.
In fact, it seems to me like we could take this sort of centralized planning approach with pretty much any industrial product. It's really just a matter of applying scientific principles to industry for the good of society. It would eliminate waste and duplication of effort and make sure that all necessary industrial products are designed and manufactured with optimal efficiency.
yay i love non upgradeable phones from dying companies too! im sooo excited. i hope to get paid this week from the troll fund.
Is it going to be like the days of Windows Mobile? the only way to get updates is to buy a new phone?
This is where Apple is winning, all phones get OS updates for several years. Google falls down on this as they let phone makers screw the users.
Microsoft had better offer a instant free upgrade to WP8 for all owners of the Nokia WP7 phones, or they might as well pack it in. Their "Screw the user, unless they have a credit card" attitude back with the Windows Mobile phones are what drove me to Apple in the first place.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Really? You know this for a fact?
The average computer user never had the option of using the other choices. Microsoft made sure they were dead and gone from the desktop before Windows ME hit.
No, they leveraged the "Secure" part of "Secure Digital" cards and had issues with some cards that weren't fully compliant since no one else really implemented the secure half. They need it for DRM, after all, and have probably come up with a workaround for it.
It's upgradeable to Windows Phone 7.8, AC. Plus, a Windows Phone on Virgin Mobile would be a lot better than the cheap, often laggy Android devices they have.
Which is fine, except for the marketing.
Apple, on the other hand, says "Oh of course the 3GS runs iOS 6. Some features may not work though...". The version number is meaningless...
What this does is to cannibalize WP7 sales in favour of a not-yet-even-remotely-released WP8!
Well it is true that I work 16 hours days for approximately $.50 per hour from my company's astroturfing center in Shenzhen.
But actually I am very grateful for my job, because it is better than slinging mud on my father's rice paddy, and my manager even lets me have 2 bathroom breaks per shift so I hardly ever have an accident anymore.
If I hadn't spent 8 years learning English I would be in the factory building glorious iPads, or maybe back at home standing knee deep in leech infested water.
Plus, a Windows Phone on Virgin Mobile would be a lot better than the cheap, often laggy Android devices they have.
I've read several of your comments and finally the bias comes out. I have the HTC Evo 4G on Virgin Mobile and it is not even remotely laggy. As far as WP7.8, it's fucking bullshit as WP8 apps will not be backward compatible.
It will run 7.8, an update that has most (if not all) of the non-hardware-specific features. The summary is incorrect.
But the phones with 7.8 will not run windows phone 8 apps and that's what really matters. Please be intellectually honest when fanboying in the future.
The difference between this and the WP8 situation is mostly marketing. WP7 devices will get WP7.8, which includes many WP8 features, but not some that MS considers dependent on the hardware specs that differ betwen WP8 and WP7 (either because the older hardware doesn't support the feature at all or because using it on the older hardware would produce an unacceptable -- in MS's eyes -- user experience.)
While older iPhones nominally get the current iOS versions, the versions they get are lacking features that Apple feels are dependent on the newer device hardware (either because the older hardware doesn't support the feature at all or because using it on the older hardware would produce an unacceptable -- in Apple's eyes -- user experience.)
iOS 5 on the iPhone 3GS doesn't support the same features as iOS 5 on the iPhone 4, which doesn't support the same features as iOS 5 on the iPhone 4S. With iOS 6, that'll all still be true (and is increasingly true as more iOS devices are supported by the same nominal OS version.)
Can someone explain to me why Microsoft isn't capitalizing on the phone market in the same way they have the PC market? Why design a phone operating system that can only be run on a small niche of devices, and can't even upgrade phones that came with WP7? Why not instead go after the entire market and design an OS that can be installed on any mobile phone of adequate specifications.
While there may be some serious difficulties to overcome in the short term, this to me seems like a very possible end-state for the industry. Just look at what happened in the (non-Apple) PC market: competing hardware+OS standards evolved into a common hardware standard and a separate OS market that Microsoft dominated.
Disclaimer: this is not necessarily an end-state that I would like to see happen, just some ponderings that I've had.
Osborne Effect round 2, here we go, kicking Nokia in the nuts when its down. Elop will tell us all to just wait a bit longer for his master plan to work and profits to start happening.
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
"I hear you're having a life threating event. Do you need an app for that?"
iOS does indeed use a fully fledged OSX kernel, just like Android uses a fully fledged Linux kernel.
CLI based apps can run just fine with little more than a recompile, anything gui based obviously needs code changes not because the mobiles are not "fully fledged" but because a desktop ui would be really unusable on a mobile phone... That said, there is an implementation of X11 for android and even for iOS, not that you'd want to use it for anything.
Apple don't provide the same proprietary gui libs for phones as desktops because they would be unsuitable and result in unusable interfaces.
Existing windows apps will not work, at the very least you would need to recompile them (which for the majority of windows apps you cannot do due to not having sourcecode) or hope they were written atop a hardware neutral runtime...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
What does "better support for microSD cards" mean? Were they having problems with reliable reads/writes?
Not quite - they were having problems using them in a way that's sensible:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2450831
In short, once you put an SD card into a WP7 phone you can't take it out (or the phone won't boot) and you can't read it on any other devices. Each card model also needed to be "certified" before use.
I don't know if you're using "core" to mean "kernel" or "basic OS layout", but either way you'd be wrong. iOS is derived from OSX and shares the Darwin/XNU kernel, BSD subsystem and even the BSD userspace stuff with OSX. Most of the frameworks (Cocoa, etc) are also essentially the same or very similar.
Well he could be mostly right, actually.
Yes, the kernel and BSD userland are very, very similar, but once you move up the stack towards Cocoa there are actually quite a lot of differences. It's not as simple as s/NS/UI/ on the class names, case in point: JWZ's efforts to port Dali Clock.
The real litigious bastards...
Wait, what?
I love my phone on Virgin Mobile. It isn't the latest, greatest hardware, but its fantastic for the price. The problem with the Android phones I have had is that they are terrible stock, but can be great phones once rooted and have a decent mod on them.
Microsoft announced the successor to its popular Windows Phone 7 platform.
Perhaps I'm out of touch, and this isn't meant to be snarky, but that's an interesting definition of "popular". Honestly I've never seen a Windows 7 phone.
Is probably just the switch to the NT kernel from a stripped (legacy removed) CE kernel. I hope the speed and stability carries through! It's so weird saying that about a Microsoft product but as anybody who has actually used WP7 knows, it's generally rock solid.
Switching to the NT kernel is what has enabled the multicore support and it probably also enables the use of any future x86 hardware platforms too. Obviously moving to NT also helps Microsoft unify their infrastructure because it means they only have 1 kernel to worry about (and mostly just the Metro framework).
Normally I'd be the first one to bash Microsoft about the whole WP8 not being on older devices thing, but since WP8 runs a completely different kernel it'd be foolish to expect them to support older devices which probably don't even have device drivers written for the NT kernel.
The company I work for just had a bid led by our MS developers to start issuing Windows phones to employees. They ordered some demo units and gave them out and the next day when people started coming to IT and asking "how do I download skype?", "how can I get pandora?" the fact that apps make or break a phone platform finally sunk in.