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PC Plus Packs Windows and Android Into Same Machine
jones_supa writes "At the mammoth Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas in early January, it is expected that multiple computer makers will unveil systems that simultaneously run two different operating systems, both Windows and Android, two different analysts said recently. The new devices will introduce a new marketing buzzword called PC Plus, explained Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies. 'A PC Plus machine will run Windows 8.1 but will also run Android apps as well', Bajarin wrote recently for Time. 'They are doing this through software emulation. I'm not sure what kind of performance you can expect, but this is their way to try and bring more touch-based apps to the Windows ecosystem.' Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, suggests that PC Plus could get millions of consumers more comfortable with Android on PCs. 'Just imagine for a second what happens when Android gets an improved large-screen experience. This should scare the heck out of Microsoft.'"
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/12/27/2027222/pc-makers-plan-rebellion-against-microsoft-at-ces?sbsrc=md
1366x768 just doesn't cut it, no matter how many OSes you stick on it.
'They are doing this through software emulation. I'm not sure what kind of performance you can expect, but this is their way to try and bring more touch-based apps to the Windows ecosystem.'
..
More likely a pretext to extend the Microsoft Tax
One of the biggest causes of malware are attacks on the Web browser and its add-ons. Android is a lot more secure in this regard, so having the ability to browse the Web with the code executing well away from the Windows side will be a very useful security gain.
It won't stop Trojans, but it will help address one major vector for infections.
I'd buy one of these "PC Pluses" just because I do know that the Android side will almost always be usable. I won't be able to do the advanced workflow or run the usual applications and games as I do on Windows, but for a number of tasks, the Android side will be good enough. Plus, with root, it can serve as a way to offload some UNIX functions such as a caching DNS, squid cache, etc.
Bridgeboard on my Amiga, 20 years ago.
Mostly random stuff.
So you run Android in a VM inside Windows. So what? This isn't a new trick, and it's not newsworthy either. It smacks of shameless shilling. Seriously, nothing to see here, move along..
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Has anyone else taken a skeptical view of the word "experience"? I don't want to "experience" a computer. I just want a functional computer that works.
'Just imagine for a second what happens when Android gets an improved large-screen experience.'
I don't need to imagine much. When you use any system for something its not designed for the only thing that it will experience is its own demise.
This wont really work. It tries oh so very hard to have the PC do what the market wants tablets and phones to do. This is not the direction the PC market needs to chase.
The role of the PC is changing; It has competition in the market, because tablets and phones are reasonably powerful, and ultraportable.
For casual data consumption and small-scale gameplay (casual games and such) the PC has basically lost out. It needs to remember what it actually is: a consumer version of big iron. (Like it or not, the differences between a small server and a desktop PC are academic for the most part.) You dont carry big iron in your pocket. Big iron is for storing large quantities of data on, Big iron is for doing grunt processing that smaller, more dedicated devices are not suited to. Big iron is intended to provide services to a small fleet of lesser connected devices.
What do people use their home PC for these days, exactly (ordinary people, mind)--? They use them to download and store large archives of digital music and movies. They use them to preserve their digital photo collections when their phones get too full. They use them to manipulate data and files that arent well suited to processing on a mobile device. (writing wordprocessing documents, managing spreadsheets, etc.)
What do people do on tablets and phones? Basically anything else.
With that in mind, what kind of crack are these people smoking, to think that they can make a device that requires 120vAC constant power, and weighs 10lbs, needs a seperate discrete viewing hardware appliance, and bulky keyboard and mouse inputs-- be in any way comparable or desirable for software that is intended to be used on devices that weigh less than a pound, run on a 300mAh battery for hours, and have everything all together conveniently, and portably?
PC makers should understand that there are now 2 very different markets. The tablet/phone space, and the home server market, where PCs still sell.
If the home server marketplace isnt lucrative enough, then instead of wasting precious resources on boondoggles like this, they should be encouraging app store gatekeepers like Apple and Google to allow apps that are basically a front end for a network service running on a home server in the user's home, over the public IP network. (Oh, but that would make the ISPs so very sad, wouldnt it?) That would allow the raw torque of a home PC to be better utilized, a home internet connection to be better utilized, bring functionality not realistically possible to the tablet/phone space, and keep everyone mostly happy.
Instead, you have gatekeepers like Apple and Google wanting to cement their exclusivity as gatekeepers by preventing competing server services from being run exclusively for and by the end user, since that would cut into services like google's cloud storage platform, Chrome OS paradigm, and pals. This is because if they remain the gatekeepers, they get to hoover up all the delicious user profile information and use pattern data about that user, and sell it to advertisers and market analysts. (If the end users ran their own instances of a service on their own platforms and hardware, it would make doing that basically impossible to guarantee.)
But, because this is just another attempt by a market segment who's business model has shriveled up in the winds of change at resisting that change, I fully expect it to fail like the boondoggle that it is.
PCs will always have their uses; Fancy touch interfaces and pretending to be a big bulky tablet simply isnt the use that the market has chosen for them. Given the availability of superior offerings in the ACTUAL tablet space, this is NOT going to win anyone over except perhaps corporate idiots who respond only to buzzwords.
One word: Bluestacks. Not open source but is freely available and already does what TFA is claiming major manufactures are going to do. I have owned my PCplus for about a year already. No touch screen though but the mouse works pretty good. If you have a touch screen laptop then you already own a PCplus.
According to the more informative Time article, it's entirely software-based, and the whole shebang has Intel's backing.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
This should scare the heck out of Microsoft.
Microsoft will just release patches that break the Android emulator.
And if accused of doing it just to break the Android emulator, they would just say it was coincidence and it wasn't their intention.
Think otherwise? Prove it.
You're probably thinking of Netscape vs. Microsoft. In that case, and I expect in this case, Microsoft will need no help to break the application, it will run like crap from the get-go. Netscape was crap, and ran like crap on all platforms. At the time MSIE actually was a better browser. It wasn't until ~2003 or so when Firefox raised from the Netscape ashes with a good alternative to MSIE.
it is expected that multiple computer makers will unveil systems that simultaneously run two different operating systems, both Windows and Android, two different analysts said recently
they are doing it through emulation so they are running ONE operating system
Two articles in two days say two analysts say two computer makers will unveil systems that simultaneously run two different operating systems.
Most Andriod apps are not native ARM apps, but Java / bytecode which run in a virtual machine called davlik. Port that to Windows / x64, and suddenly all the Android apps run in Windows. The Android environment itself could be emulated in Windows or tied to replacement functions like the Windows desktop in the new platform (instead of a phone/tablet interface).
Windows is POSIX compliant and supports Unix if they chose the route of emulating unix functions, or they could build their own environment like cygwin/etc. It doesn't need this, but some apps might need something like it if it exposed the underlying unix features. It depends on how they wanted to implment it, cause it could also just wrap over to the Windows environment..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalvik_(software)
Not going to be enough. They'd have to axe all of the touch centric solutions like the sliding bars, hot corners and so on. Desktop functions well as a mouse driven interface, and mouse and touch interfaces are mutually exclusive in many of their requirements.
The main reason for 8's catastrophic failure is the fact that it pushed for touch centric desktop, leaving everyone using mouse/keyboard or mouse only with a crippled interface that simply didn't work properly. Start menu is just one of the most obvious examples of this design paradigm, but there are many others.
For casual data consumption and small-scale gameplay (casual games and such) the PC has basically lost out [to tablets].
Both my Dell Inspiron mini 1012 laptop (running Xubuntu) and my first-generation Nexus 7 tablet (running Android) have 1 GB of RAM. The Firefox web browser on the laptop keeps a dozen tabs in memory at once without dipping into swap, partly thanks to my use of the Flashblock extension. I can load all of a day's Cracked articles in tabs, board the bus, and read them on the commute to and from work. Both Chrome and Firefox web browsers on the tablet, on the other hand, will forget a tab when I switch away from it and have to reload. Because I'm not willing to pay another $500-$600 per device per year for mobile broadband on top of what I already pay for Internet at home, the tablet will end up displaying an error message "You are offline" when I switch back to a tab.
And as for gameplay, point-and-click games work well, but other genres don't. I've tried to play platform games (similar to Super Mario Bros. and Mega Man) on a tablet's touch screen, and it's painful.
[Ordinary people] use [a home PC] to manipulate data and files that arent well suited to processing on a mobile device. (writing wordprocessing documents, managing spreadsheets, etc.)
Where "etc." could include running a compiler for a high school or college student's "introduction to computer science" homework. This is something that tablets have traditionally been lacking, even when docked to a Bluetooth keyboard.
[PC makers] should be encouraging app store gatekeepers like Apple and Google to allow apps that are basically a front end for a network service running on a home server in the user's home
There are already plenty of remote desktop viewer applications for mobile devices. SSH, X11, RDP, VNC, take your pick. One problem is that using them requires paying $500-$600 per device per year for mobile broadband on top of what the user already pays for Internet at home. The other is that for any service running on a home server, once you've added a Bluetooth keyboard and a stand to hold the tablet, you might as well be using a small laptop.
Sure they need their win32 craplets but in a few years of more declines they will wonder if it is wiser investment to go to a cloud and host them with Citrix via tablets instead as this is what everyone else is doing etc.
Until they see the $500-$600 per year price tag for the mobile broadband plan needed to use an application while on the road. Running applications on a leased server can replace a desktop a lot more easily than a laptop.
Maybe we just need a Android app that lets you run Windows applications. You know, for those times you need to run some ancient CRM app from the corporate network on your tablet. That's probably more useful than the other way round.
Any OS can get malware that is installed by the user.
This is true of platforms where the user can install applications without needing to buy a developer license, such as Android, GNU/Linux, OS X, and Windows. On a platform where only the operating system publisher can install applications, such as Windows RT, Windows Phone, iOS, and the major game consoles, there's somewhat less risk of a novice user accidentally contracting a trojan.
TFA itself links to a better FA at: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9244953/Microsoft_to_face_computer_makers_rebellion_at_CES
This original source article includes a discussion of the architecture involved - and the person they interviewed admits he hasn't seen it in action, and has no idea how it works. He suggests it could be one of three approaches - dual boot, an Android API within Windows (somewhat akin to Bluestacks), or a VM running within Windows. I would add a fourth - a hypervisor, permitting both OSes to run concurrently as VMs - though that seems unlikely, as it would require the OEMs to license Windows differently, as I understand it.
Interesting times. I agree with the commenters who say MS should be afraid of this - Google has taken its sweet time maturing Android into a desktop-supporting experience, but it's close, and "Android PCs" are already in the pipeline to take advantage of it. Any familiarization for the "unwashed masses" with what it feels like to simply run Android as your laptop/desktop OS has to be viewed by MS as, well, "crossing the streams" bad.
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
That is so disingenuous. Windows 8 was also all maximized all the time, until they realized that users by and large considered this a bad model for a laptop and switched to the current maximum of two windows, which is still a broken paradigm for a laptop and unnecessary on a tablet. In trying to be all things to all people Windows 8 does nothing well.
I understand, really. This Android API is trying to make up for the lack of a rich enough native app ecosystem for Windows 8. Trying to market it as "manufacturers revolting against Microsoft" tries to appeal to geeks. Shameless marketing erroneously repeating blatant falsehoods like "packs Android and Windows in the same box!!!" tries to appeal to people who are thinking "hm, I was interested in that Samsung Galaxy notepad, but maybe with this I can have the best of both worlds!" When all the get is Windows 8, a fundamentally broken paradigm, that just happens to also run some Android apps. If people fall for this, they deserve all the frustration their new purchase is going to give them.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
You mean after choosing to download a malicious application, choosing to install it, and choosing the grant it permission, Windows allows me to use software that DOES things to my computer that I may consider detrimental?
Yeah but for some sites you really need to have Adobe Flash installed.