Actually, I didn't get the point of this announcement. To me, it looked more like a die shrink, or an extension of an existing CPU platform. Tossing in more cores, changing the packages or upping the frequencies doesn't exactly change things all that much. What would change it would be new instructions, but I doubt that Intel would wanna include new instructions that would force newer software to be recompiled, particularly when its primary competition has been its older CPUs that have really had a robust lifetime. Like this Pentium I bought 3 years ago still serves me well. If Intel were to include newer instructions, there would be little benefit, since software that runs on the older CPUs would run on the newer ones, but the newer ones would have more idle circuitry for the new instructions that would impact #die/wafer, thereby increasing costs on what's already a very expensive process, thanks to the more expensive newer fabs.
I think what happens in reality is that their QA/QC does the testing, and the chips that have one or more cores fail are binned lower, so that they can be sold at a lower price w/ the malfunctioning cores disabled, maybe by internal mode test vectors. Or they may find that some chips fail the spec'ed frequency, but are better at lower frequencies. Whatever the case, it's a good model to built a high end test platform CPU, sell as much of it as they get as the higher end, and then sell any fallout as lower end CPUs at discounted prices, as opposed to discarding them altogether.
Uh, I did a search in the Windows Store of my Lumia for Wells Fargo, and it listed the app. Nowhere near gone. If people haven't stopped using their phones, why would even banks delete them?
Yesterday, I was at a Microsoft store, and the only phone they currently seem to sell is the HP Elite. I believe it comes in a package w/ the HP Elite book
One of the issues Nokia had was too many models. This was something they did previously w/ their Symbian phones, and which they continued to do now. So if you shopped, there was no good reason to prefer a certain phone to another. Also, on some of the initial phones, the case colors were too gaudy, and looked like kids phones. The first smartphone I ever had was the Lumia 520, which was a great phone. I used HERE maps & directions, OneNote, and it was the first time I started to text regularly. Previously, texting was all but impossible on phones where you had just the numeric keypad to type, and to make things worse, Nokia would try to guess what the word was. At the time I bought that, typing was not only a breeze, but superior to that on both iOS and Android (although both have since caught up).
On the return issue, one of the phones I had was the Lumia Icon - Verizon's brand of the phone. 2 years ago, I had to return it a few months after buying it due to the battery going dead. Instead of replacing the battery, they wanted to replace the phone. Since at the time, I needed some of the apps that were not available on Windows Phone, I asked them to replace it w/ a Moto X instead. That's no longer an issue now, so once the contract expires, I plan to move that number to my Lumia 550.
Keep in mind, for all of Microsoft's bullshit about cross compatibility, there are plenty of windows phone apps that wont even show up in windows store on PC. When i look on Windows Store on my PC, Spotify doesnt exist, so for a long time i just assumed Spotify wasnt on Windows Store at all. Turns out there is an app, but you can only see it if you are on Windows Mobile. I couldnt believe MS wouldnt give me an option to look at the whole store.
It looks like MS is giving up on ARM altogether and doubling down on x86. They probably see Intel weakening and figure they can get cheap chips out of them.
As to your last point, the Netflix app absolutely sucks on my Surface 3, but netflix runs perfect in Chrome on the same system.
Your first statement - about phone apps that don't show up on the PC store - is correct, not just about Spotify, but others like Yelp & Fandango. But your second statement doesn't follow from that - that Microsoft is giving up on ARM and doubling down on x86. In fact, on the rumored Surface Phones, it was said that they'd be building it w/ the Snapdragon and then emulating x86 in order to run native x86 binaries. Which would suck as far as battery life goes.
The apps do have to be actually cross-compiled for both x86 and ARM. The only ones I know of are those from Microsoft.
I've been around a while and I recall quite clearly how the windows phone fanboys were crowing about how Nokia had an arrangement with MS where they could do exactly this to the Windows Phone OS and how they were going to crush Android and all the other OEMs. We see how that worked out.
The fact is that people just don't like what MS was offering. I had a Windows Phone with version 7 of the OS a few years ago just to play around with. You know what? It sucked.
I've never had a 7 phone, but from what I recall, it was based on CE and its screen looked like an XP desktop screen. Which was a horrible UI for a phone. The Windows Phone 8 was a completely different beast - being based on the same kernel as Windows 8. Incidentally, the same Metro UI, which sucked on laptops w/o a touch screen, was great on a Windows phone.
I've had 3 Windows phones overall - a Lumia 520, 929 (Icon) and now a 550. The first 2 were upgradable to Windows Phone 8.1, while the 550 is a native Windows phone. In fact, it just upgraded yesterday to the latest version of the Creator edition, or whatever Microsoft calls it. It looks a lot better than the first Windows 8 phones, which somehow were limited to only ~25 colors or so, and didn't allow you to set a wallpaper or anything.
I've never understood why people have gone away from it. It's the most effective way to track a ton of websites in entirety. I think of my RSS feed as my morning newspaper. I follow literally hundreds of websites, journals, and blogs using it, and I can churn through it all in maybe twenty minutes at my keyboard each day on inoreader.
Dunno why/. has to muck w/ the editor - they suffer from the same disease as Microsoft and GNOME
Anyway, when a page like this has an RSS feed, I just stage it from the bookmarks bar on Firefox, and read it that way. When I fire up the browser, I check the pull down menu to see what's up, and then select the one I'm interested in.
Never specifically bothered about RSS readers: don't see the point.
Too bad Microsoft didn't create a common NT development platform across the CPUs that it supported - Alpha and MIPS, in addition to x86. Had they done that, devs could have developed their stuff on Alphas and had awesome results
Yeah, like Billy said above, they'd have done well had they come out w/ that Metro UI for phones back in Windows Phone 6 or 7, and had they come out w/ the current Windows 10 interface in Windows 8. That would have covered both touchscreens and legacy PCs
WebOS is alive, as a smart TV OS. It was HP that killed it on phones - by buying Palm one day and dismantling it another. Like Microsoft did w/ Nokia's.
From what I understood about Continuum, it's changing b/w desktop and tablet modes when something like a Surface is attached to, or removed from, the keyboard.
I've not seen that come to phones, nor do I see it as essential. As it is, Lumias are ARM based, and so any software - like MS Office - has to be specifically there for both platforms. Where they are useful is that if one uses OneDrive to store documents but needs to access them w/o their laptop, like say at an airport, the Lumia comes in handy.
They'd do that if there's something new that they were introducing. Like forcing Windows 7 or 8 users to go to Windows 10. But it's not the case here, where they don't have a succession product. Which is why what Hairyfeet says makes sense: they can just leave it alone and let current Lumia owners continue to use the store to get whatever they want. Other vendors might pull dated stuff from the store, but Microsoft needn't.
As someone else who's travelled, it's nothing like the US. There, phone companies sell you a SIM, and as for the phone, it's up to you whether you wanna buy one from them, or provide your own. Also, the system of getting a 'free' phone w/ a 2 year contract doesn't exist: you simply buy the phone at cost upfront, and then put in the SIM of your choice. Of course, that's due to all of them being GSM standards: not sure what the practice is in Japan or Korea.
I never owned a Windows phone until Nokia adapted that platform w/ version 8. From what I heard, the CE based ones were crap. The first Windows phone I had was a Lumia 520 - their entry level - and it was a breeze, going from a flip phone Moto RAZR. Until then, I never used to text, but once I had this, texting was a breeze. As was HERE maps, OneNote and a host of other features.
In fact, at the time, Windows 8 had the best phone typing platform: Android and iOS have since caught up. But at the time, if you typed, you'd see suggested words on the top, which you could ignore. That was way better than the Symbian word-guessing that Nokia phones tried to do while one painstakingly used the numeric keypad to type out words. One had to know where to find the option of disabling the dictionary.
Also, as an aside, the touch sensitivity of the Lumias were unmatched by anything else I've had.
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Actually, I didn't get the point of this announcement. To me, it looked more like a die shrink, or an extension of an existing CPU platform. Tossing in more cores, changing the packages or upping the frequencies doesn't exactly change things all that much. What would change it would be new instructions, but I doubt that Intel would wanna include new instructions that would force newer software to be recompiled, particularly when its primary competition has been its older CPUs that have really had a robust lifetime. Like this Pentium I bought 3 years ago still serves me well. If Intel were to include newer instructions, there would be little benefit, since software that runs on the older CPUs would run on the newer ones, but the newer ones would have more idle circuitry for the new instructions that would impact #die/wafer, thereby increasing costs on what's already a very expensive process, thanks to the more expensive newer fabs.
I think what happens in reality is that their QA/QC does the testing, and the chips that have one or more cores fail are binned lower, so that they can be sold at a lower price w/ the malfunctioning cores disabled, maybe by internal mode test vectors. Or they may find that some chips fail the spec'ed frequency, but are better at lower frequencies. Whatever the case, it's a good model to built a high end test platform CPU, sell as much of it as they get as the higher end, and then sell any fallout as lower end CPUs at discounted prices, as opposed to discarding them altogether.
It's amazing how Butthead was the smarter of the 2, despite the name
How much adaption has SCP/SFTP seen? I haven't seen it anywhere.
Combine it w/ IPv6, and it should be ideal!
Uh, I did a search in the Windows Store of my Lumia for Wells Fargo, and it listed the app. Nowhere near gone. If people haven't stopped using their phones, why would even banks delete them?
Also, that phone had some business apps on it, like Salesforce, Sharepoint, et al
A Zune phone could be cool.
Yesterday, I was at a Microsoft store, and the only phone they currently seem to sell is the HP Elite. I believe it comes in a package w/ the HP Elite book
One of the issues Nokia had was too many models. This was something they did previously w/ their Symbian phones, and which they continued to do now. So if you shopped, there was no good reason to prefer a certain phone to another. Also, on some of the initial phones, the case colors were too gaudy, and looked like kids phones. The first smartphone I ever had was the Lumia 520, which was a great phone. I used HERE maps & directions, OneNote, and it was the first time I started to text regularly. Previously, texting was all but impossible on phones where you had just the numeric keypad to type, and to make things worse, Nokia would try to guess what the word was. At the time I bought that, typing was not only a breeze, but superior to that on both iOS and Android (although both have since caught up).
On the return issue, one of the phones I had was the Lumia Icon - Verizon's brand of the phone. 2 years ago, I had to return it a few months after buying it due to the battery going dead. Instead of replacing the battery, they wanted to replace the phone. Since at the time, I needed some of the apps that were not available on Windows Phone, I asked them to replace it w/ a Moto X instead. That's no longer an issue now, so once the contract expires, I plan to move that number to my Lumia 550.
Keep in mind, for all of Microsoft's bullshit about cross compatibility, there are plenty of windows phone apps that wont even show up in windows store on PC. When i look on Windows Store on my PC, Spotify doesnt exist, so for a long time i just assumed Spotify wasnt on Windows Store at all. Turns out there is an app, but you can only see it if you are on Windows Mobile. I couldnt believe MS wouldnt give me an option to look at the whole store. It looks like MS is giving up on ARM altogether and doubling down on x86. They probably see Intel weakening and figure they can get cheap chips out of them. As to your last point, the Netflix app absolutely sucks on my Surface 3, but netflix runs perfect in Chrome on the same system.
Your first statement - about phone apps that don't show up on the PC store - is correct, not just about Spotify, but others like Yelp & Fandango. But your second statement doesn't follow from that - that Microsoft is giving up on ARM and doubling down on x86. In fact, on the rumored Surface Phones, it was said that they'd be building it w/ the Snapdragon and then emulating x86 in order to run native x86 binaries. Which would suck as far as battery life goes.
The apps do have to be actually cross-compiled for both x86 and ARM. The only ones I know of are those from Microsoft.
I've been around a while and I recall quite clearly how the windows phone fanboys were crowing about how Nokia had an arrangement with MS where they could do exactly this to the Windows Phone OS and how they were going to crush Android and all the other OEMs. We see how that worked out.
The fact is that people just don't like what MS was offering. I had a Windows Phone with version 7 of the OS a few years ago just to play around with. You know what? It sucked.
I've never had a 7 phone, but from what I recall, it was based on CE and its screen looked like an XP desktop screen. Which was a horrible UI for a phone. The Windows Phone 8 was a completely different beast - being based on the same kernel as Windows 8. Incidentally, the same Metro UI, which sucked on laptops w/o a touch screen, was great on a Windows phone.
I've had 3 Windows phones overall - a Lumia 520, 929 (Icon) and now a 550. The first 2 were upgradable to Windows Phone 8.1, while the 550 is a native Windows phone. In fact, it just upgraded yesterday to the latest version of the Creator edition, or whatever Microsoft calls it. It looks a lot better than the first Windows 8 phones, which somehow were limited to only ~25 colors or so, and didn't allow you to set a wallpaper or anything.
That Nokia purchase reminds me of Apple's purchase of Power Computing, when they decided to pull the plug on the Mac clones
I've never understood why people have gone away from it. It's the most effective way to track a ton of websites in entirety. I think of my RSS feed as my morning newspaper. I follow literally hundreds of websites, journals, and blogs using it, and I can churn through it all in maybe twenty minutes at my keyboard each day on inoreader.
Dunno why /. has to muck w/ the editor - they suffer from the same disease as Microsoft and GNOME
Anyway, when a page like this has an RSS feed, I just stage it from the bookmarks bar on Firefox, and read it that way. When I fire up the browser, I check the pull down menu to see what's up, and then select the one I'm interested in.
Never specifically bothered about RSS readers: don't see the point.
It's still available on Amazon, even if the Microsoft store doesn't carry it.
Ironically, while I had these problems on my PC - when Windows 10 was first out - I never had it on any of my Lumias.
Too bad Microsoft didn't create a common NT development platform across the CPUs that it supported - Alpha and MIPS, in addition to x86. Had they done that, devs could have developed their stuff on Alphas and had awesome results
Meego is there as Jolla's Sailfish - why is that not catching fire if it's so great?
Yeah, like Billy said above, they'd have done well had they come out w/ that Metro UI for phones back in Windows Phone 6 or 7, and had they come out w/ the current Windows 10 interface in Windows 8. That would have covered both touchscreens and legacy PCs
WebOS is alive, as a smart TV OS. It was HP that killed it on phones - by buying Palm one day and dismantling it another. Like Microsoft did w/ Nokia's.
From what I understood about Continuum, it's changing b/w desktop and tablet modes when something like a Surface is attached to, or removed from, the keyboard.
I've not seen that come to phones, nor do I see it as essential. As it is, Lumias are ARM based, and so any software - like MS Office - has to be specifically there for both platforms. Where they are useful is that if one uses OneDrive to store documents but needs to access them w/o their laptop, like say at an airport, the Lumia comes in handy.
Not the same thing. The same thing would be using the old Nokia chocolate bars or Mot RAZRs instead of any smartphone
They'd do that if there's something new that they were introducing. Like forcing Windows 7 or 8 users to go to Windows 10. But it's not the case here, where they don't have a succession product. Which is why what Hairyfeet says makes sense: they can just leave it alone and let current Lumia owners continue to use the store to get whatever they want. Other vendors might pull dated stuff from the store, but Microsoft needn't.
Are you talking Edge for Windows 10 Mobile, or Internet Explorer for Windows Phone 8?
And if you want to stop making Tysons rich, start your own chicken farm
As someone else who's travelled, it's nothing like the US. There, phone companies sell you a SIM, and as for the phone, it's up to you whether you wanna buy one from them, or provide your own. Also, the system of getting a 'free' phone w/ a 2 year contract doesn't exist: you simply buy the phone at cost upfront, and then put in the SIM of your choice. Of course, that's due to all of them being GSM standards: not sure what the practice is in Japan or Korea.
I never owned a Windows phone until Nokia adapted that platform w/ version 8. From what I heard, the CE based ones were crap. The first Windows phone I had was a Lumia 520 - their entry level - and it was a breeze, going from a flip phone Moto RAZR. Until then, I never used to text, but once I had this, texting was a breeze. As was HERE maps, OneNote and a host of other features.
In fact, at the time, Windows 8 had the best phone typing platform: Android and iOS have since caught up. But at the time, if you typed, you'd see suggested words on the top, which you could ignore. That was way better than the Symbian word-guessing that Nokia phones tried to do while one painstakingly used the numeric keypad to type out words. One had to know where to find the option of disabling the dictionary.
Also, as an aside, the touch sensitivity of the Lumias were unmatched by anything else I've had.