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Microsoft To Kill The Lumia Brand In Favor of a New Surface Phone, Says Report (thenextweb.com)
It's no secret the Lumia brand is struggling to gain any significant market share these days. Earlier this year, it was reported that Microsoft's Windows Phone OS dropped below 1 percent mark share, all but confirming the death of Windows Phone. A new report suggests that, despite the irrelevance of Windows Phone, Microsoft will not be giving up on its mobile OS. Instead, the company plans to drop the Lumia brand by the end of the year and replace it with a brand new Surface Phone in an effort to breathe new life into its flagging smartphone business. The Next Web reports: There is some credibility to the claims. Microsoft's Lumia lineup has shrunk to just four models, and there's nothing to indicate it's working on a successor. In the U.S., where Microsoft has struggled to shift Lumia phones, it has removed the link to buy them from its website. On the retail side, stores have started removing units from display, and are trying to shift remaining stock by offering steep discounts. Further evidence comes from two since-deleted tweets from Laura Butler, engineering director at Microsoft, who posted "Surface iPhone ;-)" on September 6, and "Surface Phone not NOT confirmed. :-)" on September 7, in reply to questions posed by other Twitter users. Microsoft is expected to hold an event in October, where it's believed it will announce a new Surface all-in-one. As Ars Technica pointed out, this could be when Microsoft announces its new Surface Phone, just in time for Christmas.
I think the only way Microsoft could gain any traction with Windows phones is if they manage to keep compatibility with real Windows apps.
It means a x86 CPU, and there is probably a lot of work to be done to make a usable UI but it might be worth it, at least for now.
Look at Surface tablets. Windows RT was a failure but real Windows tablets are usually considered pretty good, except for the price.
Intel even stated a few years ago that a given CPU can have 2 of 3 things:
- Speed
- Energy efficiency
- Low power consumption
It cannot however have all three of those in the same chip, i.e. a very fast chip cannot scale down based on the demand to meet the needs of mobile devices. The whole x86 architecture is pretty much entirely engineered for speed, and a few months ago Intel finally conceded that they just can't make Atom chips compete with ARM. If there is a "surface phone", then it's not going to run x86 apps locally, unless it's either slow as shit or has shitty battery life.