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We're Not Walking Away From Continuum, Says HP (theregister.co.uk)

Posted by msmash on from the not-yet,-at-least dept.

An anonymous reader shares a report: While Windows roadmaps purportedly leaked to a blog last week appear to have a big hole in them where mobile should be, HP Inc tells us it has been assured by Redmond there are no plans to drop Continuum. HP is the sole major mobile vendor committed to the Windows Mobile Edition of Windows 10 and bet big on Continuum, the multimode "use-your-phone-as-a-PC" feature on which some of HP's ambitions rest. El Reg was impressed by HP's plans to build an ecosystem around the multi-mode capabilities of the HP Elite x3 phone, which doubles up as a PC replacement. (Or tries to.) Launching in over 50 markets, the ecosystem includes a streaming apps service HP Workplace to fill in the app gap, and even a "lap dock." HP pitched it at field workers and verticals. The only thing letting Inc-ers down was the quality of the software from Microsoft. Spring came and went without the expected improvements to Continuum. Unauthorised briefings last week suggest the Windows Mobile branch of Windows 10 is now an orphan.

44 comments

  1. Reminds me of Itanium by klingens · · Score: 1

    With Itanium, HP also was the last OEM committed to it.

    1. Re:Reminds me of Itanium by crankyspice · · Score: 1

      Came here to say, wow, HP sure has a thing for betting on abandoned tech ... http://www.computerworld.com/article/3031654/computer-hardware/hp-plans-to-continue-with-itanium-in-servers-for-hp-ux-customers.html

      --
      geek. lawyer.
    2. Re:Reminds me of Itanium by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Reminds me more of Microsofts previous "strategic" partner Nokia. Or was it Microsoft's previous "strategic" partner Sendo?

  2. Excellent! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They're bringing the TV series back!!!

    Wait wha?

    1. Re:Excellent! by Rei · · Score: 1

      My first thought was that they were talking about the Icelandic metal band Kontinuum. Next up: HP pledges also to not walk away from Skálmöld, Agent Fresco and Sólstafir!

      --
      Ever since, I've been suspicious of Jesus and very careful around chlorine.
  3. We Are Walking Away From HP, Says Continuum by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It really isn't HP's choice. That's what happens when you don't own the platform.

    I wonder if they still think abandoning WebOS was a good idea?

    1. Re:We Are Walking Away From HP, Says Continuum by Junta · · Score: 2

      They probably think even trying to do WebOS at all was a bad idea, and might have been right, it might have been too late (Android and iPhone pretty much had gotten entrenched and no one has been able to displace it.

      Basically that was Hurd's ambition not even getting a chance to try to be realized. He had a significant interest in revamping HP's consumer products, including having a complete mobile platform, but Apotheker didn't care about consumer, and especially not mobile, so it rotted on the vine.

      I'm skeptical that it would have worked out, but the timing with Apotheker meant there wasn't even a sincere attempt.

      My opinion, people don't care *that* much about their mobile platform to care so much about desktop usage or integration.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    2. Re:We Are Walking Away From HP, Says Continuum by myowntrueself · · Score: 2

      My opinion, people don't care *that* much about their mobile platform

      You don't know many Apple users do you

      --
      In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
    3. Re:We Are Walking Away From HP, Says Continuum by Junta · · Score: 1

      Well, guess I should be more specific, most mobile users don't care *that* much about being able to do sophisticated things with it, or fret much about how much data is the same/different on their handheld versus their desktop.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    4. Re:We Are Walking Away From HP, Says Continuum by Voyager529 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      WebOS's timing wasn't nearly as bad as its execution.

      WebOS came to light in 2009. Apple's App Store was only a year old, Android was still trying to find its footing, Microsoft was busy with their first revamp of WinMo, and Blackberry still owned the business market. Android being the second horse in the mobile race was far from determined at that point.

      WebOS's first problem was that it was Sprint-only. Carrier exclusivity is a relic of a bygone era *now*, but nobody was switching to Sprint for a Palm phone. It might have done better at Verizon, but Sprint was a bad move. Next up, their app ecosystem was incompatible. Now sure, webOS was such a radical departure from PalmOS that it's unsurprising there wasn't compatibility, and even though Palm's days were clearly numbered at the time, they made no attempt to leverage whatever ecosystem it did have. The market was ripe for a Blackberry competitor; BES was overpriced and overcomplicated, but it would be another year or two before Activesync was supported on either iOS or Android, and more comprehensive MDM features for either were still very immature.

      The place where the ball was really dropped, however, was the hardware. The Palm Pre couldn't stand up to *anything*. They had very high insurance claim rates, and very high return rates, because they couldn't handle real-world usage at all. They tried cramming a Blackberry-reminiscent keyboard into a thinner frame, and the screen was too small for a virtual keyboard to be a good idea. The mobile browser was okay, but wasn't Safari, and even if it were, mobile websites weren't much of a thing at that point.

      Once HP bought Palm, they promised "WebOS Everywhere", and it really would have been a great preinstallation environment for their laptops - anyone remember the 'Quickplay' idea that HP tried but took longer to boot than actual-Windows? WebOS was well ahead of its time in the context of competing with Chromebooks, and the idea of seamlessly moving between devices was the kind of thing HP could have executed better than anyone under those circumstances. However, I think you're spot on with the "CEO Revolving Door" being its undoing. Apotheker seemed to think that 'tablets == massive profits', and didn't leave the Touchpad on the shelf for even two months before scrapping it because it didn't sell like the iPad.

      Had WebOS launched alongside an MDM software stack (maybe even including five free CALs with a server purchase), run on phones that didn't bruise like a cantaloupe, mastered the seamless cross-device data sharing that was demonstrated at their keynote, and done so with some support from the top...it's entirely possible that we would have a three horse race right now.

    5. Re:We Are Walking Away From HP, Says Continuum by myowntrueself · · Score: 1

      Well, guess I should be more specific, most mobile users don't care *that* much about being able to do sophisticated things with it, or fret much about how much data is the same/different on their handheld versus their desktop.

      The difference between, eg iphone users and android users is that for the iphone users there already is a crossover to the desktop and quite a lot of encouragement for people with iphones to use macs for their desktop/laptop. For android users not so much, they are pretty agnostic with respect to their desktop environment and neither the desktop environments nor the mobile OS really pushes them one way or another.

      Ie: Once you start using Apple devices you get hooked into an ecosystem and mindset. Its not quite that strong for android devices.

      --
      In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
    6. Re:We Are Walking Away From HP, Says Continuum by Junta · · Score: 1

      I would say the vast majority of the iPhone users don't really think about any desktop at all. Sure there are people who swear by it, just as there are people who wouldn't even think about using Android without adb or similar, but the market is dominated by that...

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    7. Re:We Are Walking Away From HP, Says Continuum by peragrin · · Score: 1

      Yea with hand off using iPhone/ FaceTime iMessage is simple. I love iMessage which I have defaulting to only sending through text but every text I send or recieve gets copied to my laptop. So I don't need my phone nearby to get that one time text code the website sends me to login with.

      --
      i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
    8. Re:We Are Walking Away From HP, Says Continuum by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I looked at android a while back. It wasn't platform agnostic so much as non-Apple. Everyone I know who has an android device uses Windows and they don't have any issues. Not so much with OS X.

    9. Re:We Are Walking Away From HP, Says Continuum by Junta · · Score: 4, Interesting

      As an owner of the Pre (who actually did go begrudingly to Sprint), I'll agree, though WebOS at least was more robust UI and multitasking wise compared to Android and Apple, though frustratingly enough Palm was too invested in javascript+html only app, and only later added native app support (which was kind of neat in a way since it was SDL and very familiar to a Linux game developer, but only neat to Linux game developers really...)

      And yes, the concept when they announced WebOS promised seamless capability that wouldn't appear for years in reality, and if they had pulled that off, that would have been neat.

      I'm skeptical there was room for another monolithic vendor, though. Apple certainly is that, but I think that is the good fortune of being peerless when launch. If iPhone launched 2 years later, I suspect even Apple wouldn't have broken into the market.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    10. Re:We Are Walking Away From HP, Says Continuum by Voyager529 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      We're halfway there =).

      I can understand Palm's insistence on HTML/Javascript because the alternative at the time was writing to lower level APIs that would have limited their appeal. Additionally, that announcement was made at a time when Apple's like was "web apps are the future" and encouraged browser based functionality. It was a way of minimizing the effort to code for multiple platforms prior to IDEs handling the lion's share of the cross-compilation that would have otherwise been necessary. An inefficient use of resources for sure, but no one was going to bet the farm on Palm, either (well, except HP).

      I think there was room for another monolithic vendor for two reasons. First, there were three tribes prior to the iPhone - WinMo, Blackberry, and Palm. Each had their pros and cons, but there was a solid three-horse race to be had at the time. Post iPhone, and I'd argue even up until Android's Ice Cream Sandwich release, there was still a niche to be had by dethroning Blackberry. If there was polished hardware tied to a good MDM that did the cross-device syncing in a self-hosted manner at 1/3 the price of BES with availability on every carrier and Palm were to be content holding a 20% niche marketshare, I think they could have held the business market that no one seemed to want to target. It'd be a tall order to get to a mature level in a short period, but HP wasn't doing anything groundbreaking at the time anyway.

    11. Re:We Are Walking Away From HP, Says Continuum by JohnFen · · Score: 1

      My opinion, people don't care *that* much about their mobile platform to care so much about desktop usage or integration.

      Or, the people who do care (like myself) have already accomplished the amount of integration that they find useful though other means.

    12. Re:We Are Walking Away From HP, Says Continuum by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 1

      I've met very few iphone users that have a macintosh, so it wouldn't make any sense to me if they use both as one ecosystem as GP says.

      What I do know about continuum is that it claims to be a PC replacement, only it's really not, and I'm not even talking about hardware performance: It can only run UWP (aka Microsoft Store) apps and otherwise behaves the same as Windows RT devices did, including not being able to change the default browser, default search, run normal PE binaries, etc. Unless you're just a die-hard Microsoft fan (which is a small minority of people,) then this isn't for you, hence HP's (and Microsoft's) target audience is way too small for this to actually matter.

      Windows RT crashed and burned for this exact reason, and they should have learned from this mistake the first time.

  4. Plot twist: Continuum was called a Neo-Nazi by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Now what will you do HP? Hurry, the clock is ticking!!!

    1. Re:Plot twist: Continuum was called a Neo-Nazi by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Oh shit! Umm...destroy it, right now! And we're making a statement!

  5. there's an OS problem. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    multi-mode capabilities of the HP Elite x3 phone, which doubles up as a PC replacement

    Nevermind the UI problems from trying to make phone software work reasonably on a desktop with a 30 inch monitor and a mouse and keyboard. There's a non-starter here. The phone software ecosystem is a fucking nightmare.

    At least with my BSD box the software is not selling me out. With phone software, everything exists to harvest as much data about you as possible. Calculators scraping your contact lists, flashlists harvesting your call history, and now many apps even harvest audio clips. Facebook talking about harvesting periodic images from the phone's camera so they can figure out "your current mood, to better supply the content you want to see".

    The phone software ecosystem is not suitable for this use. Technically, it could have worked out. Culturally, it didn't. The phone culture was shaped by legion tech illiterates. There are still vestiges of cultures formed by tech literates in the Linux and BSD desktop worlds. Until the phone world cleans up its act, it is a non-starter for doubling as a "PC replacement".

    1. Re:there's an OS problem. by Aaden42 · · Score: 1

      Calculators scraping your contact lists, flashlists harvesting your call history, and now many apps even harvest audio clips. Facebook talking about harvesting periodic images from the phone's camera

      Have you looked at iOS permissions recently? None of the stuff you've described is permitted by iOS without explicit user authorization and in many cases an OS-rendered on-screen indication that it's occurring (location, audio capture, and camera activity).

      I agree that trying to kludge the same apps to be usable on a 4" screen with no keyboard and a 30+" screen with no touch capability is unlikely to yield good results on either form factor. Don't condemn every mobile app infrastructure just because Android and WinMob erred on the side of giving developers whatever they wanted without consideration for users' preferences. As an iOS developer, I'll admit it's a damned pain in the ass sometimes and annoying when the OS prevents you from doing something the hardware & technology could easily support. As an iOS user, I'm often grateful for it.

    2. Re:there's an OS problem. by crankyspice · · Score: 1

      > With phone software, everything exists to harvest as much data about you as possible.

      Maybe on Android. That's not Apple's business model (it is Google's), and Apple's permissions structure makes it much harder for apps to misbehave.

      --
      geek. lawyer.
  6. We're No Walking Away From Continuum, Says Q by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Fixed that for you

    1. Re:We're No Walking Away From Continuum, Says Q by Errol+backfiring · · Score: 3, Funny

      That can't be right. If James Bond's gadgets ran Windows, he would have died in the first movie.

      --
      Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
  7. Don't send flowers... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    RIP, you won't be missed! :-)

  8. Port Continuum to Android and iOS by DalM · · Score: 2

    Phone-as-PC is the future of personal computing, and Software-as-Service is the future for Microsoft. Microsoft shouldn't care if you are using Windows/Android/Mac/iOS/Linux/WhateverOS so long as you are using their subscription Office Software to reach their Exchange Servers. The longer they try to fight Android and iOS the more time they give competing systems the opportunity to entrench themselves.

    1. Re:Port Continuum to Android and iOS by EndlessNameless · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Continuum is an application. It includes power/performance/connectivity/mode variations in presenting its UI.

      It would need hooks, and functionally it closer to a custom skin than an app.

      Google isn't going to absorb MS code, so this is another platform war.

      At this point, I do want an alternative to Android because Google is going bad---but damn, could we please get someone besides Microsoft?

      --

      ---
      According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
  9. HP huh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They don't exactly sell a lot of phones, do they?
    Seems like they are really trying to break into a competitive market with something almost nobody is going to care about.

  10. Why? by nospam007 · · Score: 2

    "there are no plans to drop Continuum."

    Well I like Canadian TV series but Continuum's last season sucked.

    1. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Nonsense, that was the best season of TV in a decade.

  11. Continuum is great by WillAffleckUW · · Score: 1

    I really enjoyed that TV series.

    --
    -- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
  12. No need for a special mode for desktop by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You don't need continuum or any other separate "desktop" mode to use a phone as a computer. Just make it really easy to connect to an external monitor, keyboard and mouse (either USB or Bluetooth), and scale the OS UI to the DPI of the external monitor. As a bonus, add a system event that tells apps that the DPI has changed to allow them to update their interface for the new DPI.

    My old Nexus 4 could do almost all of it, except for the UI scaling, and also the SlimPort adapter did not feel very integrated. Nevertheless, it was usable as a desktop for browsing, email, youtube and even some spreadsheets and word processing. Even Alt+Tab works for switching between apps! The only announce was how huge everything was on the 27" monitor, and how Google does not see the opportunity to make inroad into the desktop space with just a few lines of code.

  13. Windows 10 Mobile - The Wow is Now Redux by dstyle5 · · Score: 1

    Microsoft really should resurrect this marketing for Windows 10 Mobile, except for the entire world, not just India.

    Windows Vista Launch - Wow is Now

  14. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 2

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  15. This is obviously the way things will be shortly.. by bravecanadian · · Score: 1

    but Continuum isn't it.

    They need the mobile device to be running actual Windows with the ability to tap into all the software that Windows can.. then you really can have one device to rule them all.

    That is the last play Microsoft has in the mobile market, it has to be coming soon, but Continuum is the half-baked version of it.

  16. Re:This is obviously the way things will be shortl by Bert64 · · Score: 3, Informative

    For microsoft to do that, you'd need x86 phones... Yet Intel is abandoning the mobile atom series.
    Linux/android could have done it years ago, it's already possible to install a desktop linux distro on a phone and has been for years, connect it to an hdmi screen and use bluetooth keyboard/mouse and you have a full linux desktop with 99% of the same software you'd have on an x86 desktop.
    The problem is it has never really been marketed or made available by default, its just a hack that you can apply yourself.

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  17. Re: This is obviously the way things will be short by Miamicanes · · Score: 2

    The fact that phones have no direct equivalent of a standard PC BIOS or ISA architecture complicates things quite a bit.

    Today's Linux & Windows might use the BIOS mainly as a stage 1 bootloader to launch their stage 2 bootloader (Grub, Windows' boot manager, etc), but devices like Android phones & tablets don't even have *that* benefit... in ARM-land, every platform is different & proprietary to the device vendor (or semi-proprietary to the device vendor, and totally proprietary to the SoC vendor).

    There is literally NO vendor-agnostic "right way" to lay out the boot code in flash... or even any vendor-agnostic standard way to WIRE UP that flash. Literally everything that made it possible for Linux, DOS, Windows, OS/2, FreeBSD, etc to be installed on a random "PC" doesn't EXIST in the mobile-device realm. And it probably WON'T ever exist. The fact that "PC" (as a generic, vendor-agnostic platform) even EXISTS is basically a lucky accident.

    At best, two Android devices built around the same Qualcomm SoC by different Chinese vendors cranking out variations of the same reference design MIGHT be about as mutually-compatible (at the "bare metal" level) as an IBM PC-AT and a Tandy 2000 were (ie, "sort of"). And most modern mobile devices actively try to prevent you from running other operating systems (usually, in the holy name of DRM-enforcement or one-sided enterprise security).

  18. Continuum was still a thing? by JohnFen · · Score: 1

    You learn something new every day.

  19. Re:This is obviously the way things will be shortl by MtHuurne · · Score: 1

    Ubuntu tried with what they called "convergence", but they recently gave up on that.

  20. Re:This is obviously the way things will be shortl by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Well Motorola Atrix G4 offered a dock and allowed for desktop usage, the again the Atrix is probably the worst cellphone I ever had.

  21. Re: This is obviously the way things will be short by joemck · · Score: 1

    All very true, but that isn't how "desktop Linux on Android" setups work. Your Android phone already has all the (proprietary, vendor specific, locked down) mechanisms in place to load the Linux kernel the phone came with. Fortunately that's pretty much the same kernel you need for desktop Linux. You just need a different userland.

    So we can let all of Android load, then start an app that chroots into a directory containing all the usual Debian ARM binaries, and runs everything through a customized X11 server that displays through Android's display server.

    With a rooted phone I suppose it might be possible to replace everything from init up with a desktop system. However at the very least you'd need a custom compiled X server to work with each SoC GPU. Not to mention making some acceptable setup for calls and texts, or still wanting to run Android apps now and then. So it makes more sense in most cases to have desktop mode load through an app on top of a full Android system.