Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Asks: Does the World Need a Third Mobile OS?
Now that it is evident that Microsoft doesn't see any future with Windows Phone (or Windows 10 Mobile), it has become clear that there is no real, or potential competitor left to fight Android and iOS for a slice of the mobile operating system market. Mozilla tried Firefox OS, but that didn't work out either. BlackBerry's BBOS also couldn't find enough taker. Ideally, the market is more consumer friendly when there are more than one or two dominant forces. Do you think some company, or individual, should attempt to create their own mobile operating system?
As of this writing the librem 5 by Purism is $75,000 from being fully funded. It will complete funding later today/early tomorrow and then there will be a fully open source debian based phone. https://puri.sm/shop/librem-5/
Read more here, wikipedia here, the Toolkits here, and the Sony handsets here. And if you are enough of a hardware hacker, there are numerous other handsets to try it on.
Is it 100% complete? Almost, just missing a few sensors and bluetooth, but its sure better than starting from scratch.
There are a few of you around that are anti-Sony or got burned on the Jolla tablet and won't consider this. So have fun with your spy gizmo from Apple or Google.
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
The Windows Phone worst enemy was Microsoft itself. It wasn't a bad UI, what feels stupid on a desktop computer works well on a phone.
Speak for yourself on that one; the only people I've met that at actually like the metro interface on phones are all big fans of Microsoft. People who are indifferent towards Microsoft have never liked it in my experience.
Think about it:
- The tiles just flip around at set intervals, and when they do, you may well not have a hint as to what application that tile was for unless it happened to be fresh on your mind, because there aren't really any good hints to that end.
- Some tiles don't offer any hints at all, at any time. Think about the tile in WP8 that just showed a zero-depth picture of a trophy...how is the user supposed to know what the hell it is for? Xbox achievements when you don't own an xbox?
- Unless you continue to stare at a given tile, you could very well be missing something important, like an important email for example, because the tile is probably flipped to something uninteresting, like Amazon telling you about cameras they sell.
(Microsoft told Windows Phone users for a long time that there's no need to rip off Android's notification system, until they realized exactly how terrible the tile system was for notifications.)
This was NOT a user friendly OS. The tile system was a really horrible idea to begin with. Windows Phone fans love to chat up a storm about how lame static icons are...well, at least static icons give users a good idea about what they're for, at all times. There's a very good reason that static icons have been a thing since Xerox invented them 44 years ago. If they really wanted to do away with static icons, they should have adopted Android's widget system where they can be interactive, real-time, have text that makes sense of what you're looking at, and have unlimited dimensions.