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Microsoft's SmartGlass For Android Reviewed
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has released their much anticipated SmartGlass application for Android, allowing the Linux-based mobile OS to act as an input device for their Xbox 360 game console. While the app has its share of annoying problems, it does offer a glimpse into a possible future where consumer electronics are no longer crippled by the artificial barriers of manufacturer or operating system."
the Wii U tablet-based controller?
Barriers are not "artificially created" between operating systems. Different operating systems have different APIs, different underlying assumptions, etc., so most barriers between them are very real and difficult to break down, often costing thousands of developer hours. And even then, nothing is guaranteed to work.
Smartglass is available for both WP7 and WinRT, but hey, don't let reality interfere with your fantasy world.
Not compatible with ASUS T-300 running Jelly Bean. :-(
I wrote parts of this stuff
I first assumed this app would connect directly to my XBox via Bluetooth, and act as an actual controller device. It doesn't. Instead it requires internet connectivity on both the XBox and phone, and goes through the XBox Live servers (you have to sign into your XBox account on your phone, and also be logged into that XBox account on the XBox itself, before it can connect). I don't feel like messing around watching network traffic today, but I'm curious if XBox Live hands my phone over directly to the XBox (they find one another on my local network), or if all communication has to go through the XBox Live servers. There is a bit of latency, so I bet all communication is going out over the internet even though the devices are only 5 feet apart and both on the same LAN.
I found the gestures a bit clunky. For example, you have to touch-hold while dragging to drag faster. However there isn't any method (that I could find) to go through a whole page at a time in the XBox menus. I had to go item by item. I think I would prefer a simple D-Pad type setup on my phone, with dedicated buttons to scroll entire pages / screens at a time.
Better known as 318230.
You've got to be kidding me.
Microsoft has been actively fighting for more than a decade by all means, both technically and legally, technologies such as Java in order to make multi-platform development as difficult as possible. The whole idea of .NET was to make it harder to port programs while making it easy to develop for one platform. Apple does the same by tying developers to their toolchain and making it hard to develop with anything else than Objective-C+Cocoa. (Not to speak of various lawsuits.)
Does the word "application barrier" not ring a bell at all? Of course it's intentional. Everybody knows that since the mid 90s. It is not hard at all to overcome low-level API inconsistencies, every cross-platform abstraction layer does that. The reason why all of these libraries are incomplete or create problems is economical not technological. If the big players had worked together rather than against each other, you could today write any application once and run it on every PC, every Mac, every smart phone, your browser and probably also your mom's toaster.
Seriously, why did Nintendo announce the Wii U so early?
It's called defensive publication. For any feature Nintendo announces, someone else can't get a patent.
Except they released it two days earlier for Windows Phone and it runs great. But.. whatever.
Bear with me why I provide a little background to the question in the subject:
I worked for IBM for better than a decade, from the late 90s to just a couple of years ago. During that time, the general sentiment inside of IBM was that trying to lock customers in was a bad idea, that in the long term what was good for business was open, cross-platform widely-compatible solutions. That's not to say that none of IBM's product divisions ever tried to lock customers in, but it was the exception, and a fairly rare exception, and most of the rest of the company thought they were being stupid.
Obviously, the IBM I worked for was radically different in that respect from the IBM of the 60s, 70s and early 80s, when interoperability was a dirty word and IBM was able to gouge customers for obscene profits by locking them into "pure Blue" solutions. The anti-trust lawsuit and resulting consent decree was the start of the transformation, but the bigger force, IMO, was the fact that customers started distrusting IBM. In the late 90s when I started working for IBM Global Services, it was fairly standard practice in the consulting arm to actively *avoid* recommending IBM products unless they were clearly and undeniably the best solution available. A few years later practice shifted to pushing "blue" solutions more... but by then all of the solutions themselves had become not only interoperability-enabled, but most of them were entirely about interoperability, as IBM made the shift to a middleware and services company.
The fact is that open architectures and interoperable solutions really are better business in the long run. In the short term, lock-in allows the extraction of monopoly rents, but you don't build strong customer relationships that way, and good relations with your customers is how you continue raking in the bucks year after year, decade after decade. This is especially true for companies like IBM whose primary clients are businesses, but it's also true for companies that straddle the business and consumer markets, like Microsoft.
A number of things that have happened over the last few years make me think that Microsoft, even though they didn't get slapped around by the government the way IBM did, and really haven't ever gone through the sort of bloodletting that IBM did, has begun to turn the corner, to lose its institutional arrogance and its startup mentality of total domination at all costs, and matured into a company that understands you don't have to win everything to be successful, and that cooperation is sometimes more effective than competition.
I'd have said they'd never make that change while Ballmer is in charge, but maybe I was too pessimistic.
I'll reserve judgment for a few more years and see where they go. But I'm beginning to have hope that a new, less-evil Microsoft is emerging. They may need another serious failure or three to get all the way there, though. A major Windows 8 flop would probably be good for therm (culturally).
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