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First Impressions of Windows 8 Powered Nokia Lumia 920 and 820
Nerval's Lobster writes "Nokia CEO Stephen Elop first took to the stage at Center548 on New York City's West Side, where Microsoft had first unveiled Windows Phone 7 in late 2010, to claim that Nokia was becoming a 'more nimble competitor' thanks to several strategic decisions under his tenure, including the choice of Windows Phone as the company's primary smartphone platform. ... In terms of [the 920's hardware]: the battery is 2000 mAh; the processor is a dual-core Snapdragon S4, which was apparently selected for its energy efficiency; and the aforementioned wireless charging, based on the 'Qi' wireless charging standard. ... Despite the enthusiasm displayed onstage for Windows Phone 8, the new smartphone platform poses something of a conundrum for Nokia. The company invested heavily in Windows Phone 7, all but abandoning its homegrown operating systems — including Symbian, once a dominant player in the mobile arena — in favor of Microsoft’s platform. But those Windows Phone 7 smartphones won't upgrade to Windows Phone 8 software, and nor will they run Windows Phone 8 apps."
And I thought you'd be getting a free one, what with working for Nokia ; ).
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Apple's does the same thing after most announcements. Investors are a fickle bunch.
If you're an Android power user, and you want to see reasonable OS updates, then you know to buy a Nexus device, that's the point of them. Google can't force the various carriers and handset makers push out updates, and it's not in their interests to do so since they want you to buy a new handset every year, so you should understand what's going to happen there. OTOH my Nexus S had ICS and Jelly Bean almost from day one, no hacks, and running perfectly, and that's a pretty old phone now.
Oh no... it's the future.
Fact is, developing for a smart phone is a completely different thing from developing for a desktop or game console; the difference in screen size, input methods, memory size, processing power and battery restrictions make them utterly different. Windows 8 apps may be theoretically runnable on Windows Phone 8 (And I'm not convinced people will be writing them anyways--as has been pointed out elsewhere, people will be writing Windows XP apps for a while yet for maximum audience), but they won't be *usable* on Windows Phone 8. I'm not surprised that Microsoft doesn't understand this; the entire attempt to shoehorn Metro into Windows 8 shows that they don't understand that you can't run a cellphone interface on a desktop, and vice-versa.
So as long as just about everything you need is in the Microsoft ecosystem, then you won't really need to sync. Great!
Speak for yourself. I transfer files to my Android phone over Wifi all the time. And I'm not alone - my mom just got a phone and she wanted to be able to pull pictures from relatives' phones without requiring both phones to have the same obscure transfer app. I told her she could do this natively on Android over Bluetooth, but it may only work with other Android phones since Apple likes to lock down Bluetooth (probably to make the record labels happy). So even non-techies are looking to do things that are not possible with these locked-down platforms.