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Bill Gates switches to Android phone

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Bill Gates switches to Android phone

#41

Post by miguelrochefort »

Touche wrote: post #28
jasonmaydie wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every major version was a new os. Their phone strategy was terrible and lacked commitment. It didn't help that it was started by one CEO and abandoned midway through by the next CEO.

I don't think that was at all part of why it failed. Palm stuck to their OS but theirs failed too. I think all that ultimately mattered was that Android became the Windows of mobile phones; an operating system that each manufacturer/carrier could customize to sell the idea of value-add (with no actual value-add, I know).

Palm did not kill webOS. HP killed webOS.

Re: Bill Gates switches to Android phone

#42

Post by Divver »

Before I joined Apple I was at Microsoft and I did use a Windows Phone. It was a Lumia 1520.

And honestly the OS was rock solid and worked great (unlike my experience with the Lenovo Windows work laptop I was given which would keep blue-screening after going into hibernate for more than 5 minutes. I ended up switching to a SurfaceBook once that was available and it worked perfectly. Amazing laptop. Like a MacBook Pro. Except without Bash which sucked so you had to learn PowerShell to script things (well until recently now I think there’s Bash on Windows using some kind of emulation trick I guess))

Windows Phone was a solid system with a decent easy to use UI it is kind of a pity it didn’t take off.

But because the app ecoosysem was so poor after about 6 months I switched to a Samsung Android phone (there was no Google Pixel at the time), which had worse battery life but it performed fine.

I use an iPhone now and the biggest thing I miss is the lack of certain categories of apps that I could find on Android or Windows that I couldn’t find in the iOS App Store.

And the feature set of iOS usually lags behind Android but after using it for over a year now it’s really not that bad and I really like the cross-OS integration features with macOS, tvOS, and watchOS.

Universal copy paste is a killer feature imo.

To be honest I’m happy with both Android and iOS. They both have the same set of popular third party US apps in their App Stores.

Re: Bill Gates switches to Android phone

#45

Post by notfromhere »

miguelrochefort wrote: post #41
Touche wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that was at all part of why it failed. Palm stuck to their OS but theirs failed too. I think all that ultimately mattered was that Android became the Windows of mobile phones; an operating system that each manufacturer/carrier could customize to sell the idea of value-add (with no actual value-add, I know).

Palm did not kill webOS. HP killed webOS.

webOS wasn't going to survive regardless

Re: Bill Gates switches to Android phone

#46

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

Jedd wrote: post #11

There's a mild delight in noting that Microsoft failed to break into someone else's platform stranglehold. Personally I wasn't sad to see it fail to obtain a place in the market. Disclaimer -- I've never used a Microsoft phone. Indeed, I only know one person that had one - and even then it was an employer decision. Nor have I ever heard anyone wish out loud that their phone was more like their Microsoft Windows compu…

> There's a mild delight in noting that Microsoft failed to break into someone else's platform stranglehold.

You're forgetting that Microsoft _was_ the smartphone leader around the time of Windows Mobile 5 and 6, after defeating Palm. At one time, there were over 100 models of of Windows Mobile phones on the market. (Android's fragmentation problem was entirely foreseeable because it happened to WM first.)

They lost the market to Apple and Android through a mixture of complacency and stupidity, which is something of a shame. WM was just as open as the Windows desktop; no walled garden, no app store eating a third of your revenue, no vendor lock-in shenanigans, just load whatever software you want and run it.

Re: Bill Gates switches to Android phone

#49

Post by Yetanfou »

notzorbo3 wrote: post #21
Jedd wrote: post #11

There's a mild delight in noting that Microsoft failed to break into someone else's platform stranglehold. Personally I wasn't sad to see it fail to obtain a place in the market. Disclaimer -- I've never used a Microsoft phone. Indeed, I only know one person that had one - and even then it was an employer decision. Nor have I ever heard anyone wish out loud that their phone was more like their Microsoft Windows compu…

> Nor have I ever heard anyone wish out loud that their phone was more like their Microsoft Windows computer The one place I want microsoft to succeed is smartphones. Android spies on basically everything you do. Both android and iOS are vendor lock-in in a way we've never seen before. Compared to the current smartphone OS offerings, Windows was (and is) an incredibly open platform.

Android itself does not "[spy] on basically everything you do", that role is given to the Google-specific services and applications you can - but do not have to - run on the thing. Neither is Android "vendor lock-in in a way we've never seen before", the source to the basic OS is available after all. The exception to this is formed by the device drivers which generally come in the form of "blobs" which are tailored to a specific build of the OS. This makes it unnecessarily difficult to make use of source builds, a situation which might be rectified by "project Treble" [1] but the jury is still out on this.

With the source to Android available and decoupled from the device-specific code it should be easier to create alternative Android distributions. This should also make it possible to upgrade Android on devices which have been abandoned by the vendor and those which never got any updates to begin with.

This is not just theory by the way, I'm using a number of Google-free Android devices myself. They run just fine without those Google bits, they don't spy more than any other device. This does not mean it does not spy at all but that problem is present in all mobile devices from all manufacturers and under all operating systems: the radio interface layer is a black box closed source blob in all commercially available devices that I've come across.

[1] https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/05/here-comes...

Re: Bill Gates switches to Android phone

#50

Post by michaelbrooks »

Clubber wrote: post #38
qubex wrote: post #2

The total failure of Windows Phone to gain acceptance in the market is a huge pity. I have a Lumina 950 as a secondary device (for loading with a local SIM while abroad) and it’s a solid performer with a polished OS, refreshingly ’different’ UI, and excellent basics (build quality, call quality, and battery life). The basic, core apps I ’need’ in this role are available (WhatsApp, Facebook/Messenger, Twitter, & ceter…

I was really hoping to have a full Windows 10 phone that ran x86-64 apps and you could then dock and use like a regular computer. I think Intel scuttled that idea when they dropped the mobile chip though. It could have been a game changer.

It's still 100% possible and could be happening either this or next year as mentioned by Snapdragon [0]. There is a Youtube video showcasing full Windows 10 running on an ARM processor [1].

Windows Central have also reported Microsoft's next vision of the OS called "Andromeda" there will be a base OS that can have components bolted on [2].

[0] http://www.itpro.co.uk/desktop-hardware/windows-10/28534/win... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_GlGglbu1U [2] https://www.windowscentral.com/andromeda-os

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