A large reason for the halt of sales, says the memo, is Microsoft has a “new policy” of not supporting dual-OS products. Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy, told us in January that “Microsoft does not want [dual-OS devices] to happen,” and now tells The Wall Street Journal that “Google wants all-Android devices” as well.
While I doubt many consumers are waiting for dual-boot devices, I personally would love to have a tablet that boots both Android and Windows 8. It’s a shame that’s not going to happen.
I do wonder why the policy is proclaimed to be “new”. Microsoft has always fought dual-booting products tooth and nail.
A terrible idea and a crummy experience for end users. This project had to be killed with fire.
I hope it gets killed on phones too where its an even worse idea.
I don’t even see how anyone would use it. Maybe something like bluestack, but google wouldn’t sanction that anyway. The only way to bring Android apps to Windows that might work is if Microsoft built it in and controlled ran their own app store ala Nokia X. And visa-versa with Android/Google. The average user isn’t going to go hunting for apks to install on their windows machine.
The average user will not use a dual boot device, it will likely be in one OS all the time.
It would be extremely useful for me if implemented properly. I don’t want a Windows Metro tablet for purely touch stuff but don’t mind an Android one. OTOH, from time to time I need to get some work done in conditions where a laptop is impractical. That way I could have had the best of both worlds: mainly Android tablet which I could also use for working with specialized Windows software when needed. The boot time would be irrelevant for me in this case since reboots would not be that frequent.
I understand why 99% of users would not want this. I get it. However, I’m in the 1% that would like an on boot choice of operating system for mobile devices in the same way that it can be accomplished for traditional PCs.
I’d love to run sailfish, ubuntu, and android on the same device.
I don’t think this story has anything do with what you want. This is about a manufacturer doing it. There are already examples of mobile devices with Dual boot, like my HP touchpad. I’m pretty sure this is possible with Ubuntu as well, not sure about Windows though.
Well, obviously, it doesn’t. Most stories are never about what I want. If they were, I wouldn’t add a comment explaining what I would want.
I have a unusually unhealthy enthusiasm towards operating systems. This is one of the reasons I spend so much time at osnews.
A terrible idea to lock the device with a lame excuse of “avoiding bad user experience”. Those hypocrites can’t excuse their desire for control with concern for users’ well being. While it often happens that security and usability are used as an excuse for locked up systems, in reality more than often it ends up simply aiming at taking control away from the user.
Edited 2014-03-14 18:00 UTC
Do you ever give it a rest?
Considering he’s ranting about a locked boot loader on x86, despite x86 not having locked boot loaders, I’m going to say that no, he never gives it a rest.
Ever.
Well if he was talking about Google and ChromeOS he’d be right as so called “Chromebooks” take bog standard X86 hardware and lock it worse than a cellphone so ONLY a few distros that have either hacked bootloaders or whom have jumped through the hoops will work,whereas the exact same hardware in the same form factor only not having the label of “chromebook” can run anything from BSD to WinXP if you want.
THIS, this right here, is why I REALY don’t like Google ATM as they seem to be taking both the worst practices of MSFT in the 90s and the worst practices of OEMs in the 90s (such as “Compaq RAM” only applied to the entire system) and melding them together into a corporate nasty that has been unseen before. In the old days thin clients could get away with this shit as it used specialized hardware designed for the tasks such as custom ARM and MIPS chips that wouldn’t run anything else, but what Google is doing is taking the most open platform that has ever existed with X86 and locking it down as bad as any game console…am i the only one who has a serious problem with that?
People should stick with ChromeOS because they WANT to stick with it, because it has a better experience…Google seems to think the way to go is to make the hardware about as useful as a doorstop if you aren’t running THEIR OS and their OS alone, no dual boot for you.
No, when such hypocrisy is placated as caring for users.
And what is it that you pretend to do, care for users? Protect them from the mythological Microsoft and locked, anti-freedom bootloaders?
A very fringe amount of neck beards even give a damn about anything you talk about, and the only reason you have this soapbox is because this place happens to have a significant concentration of them.
Your concerns are outside of the mainstream, and while you dismiss the potential of this actually being done for usability’s sake you place an absurd amount of weight on the idea that you resonate with any sizeable demographic.
So you might have this sense of self righteousness and purpose (amusing as it may be), but honestly you don’t come off as principled. You’re just annoying.
Nelson,
I’m sure you’d say the same thing about me, Nelson. However I think your annoyance is completely misdirected (not to mention it’s an ad hominem attack). The secure boot restrictions were an undeniable fiasco. The only reason the locked bootloaders aren’t worse than they are is because
1) MS backed off with respect to the x86, thankfully
2) MS failed to grab to grab much market share with ARM
3) other devices (ie ios & android) have local kernel exploits required to jailbreak them (yeah for security flaws!)
Would dual boot on mobiles be useful for most people? No of course not and I’ve said it before myself on osnews. However I actually think you’ll agree that it’s still no excuse for overzealous corporations to actively interfere with such products from reaching their target niches.
What’s annoying is your pretense that you don’t understand the issue. I’m most sure you do, you just aren’t sincere and attempt to whitewash these practices.
Edited 2014-03-14 21:34 UTC
As long as manufactures are still releasing tablets that aren’t locked down to just one OS, I’m fine. My Surface Pro II has a triple boot with; Fedora, Win8 and Androird ,works great. I also just bought a Dell Venue Pro 8 and would love to run Android on it, thank goodness the hacking community doesn’t care about silly turf wars so it’s now possible.
Edited 2014-03-14 21:37 UTC
calden,
Agreed. I don’t care if things are shipped with dual boot. What’s more important is the capability to do it yourself once you own it. That way if you read about some indy project, your device won’t impose artificial barriers and ban you from trying out alternatives. Unfortunately most mobile devices are built to restrict these capabilities.
Linux became popular because people were free to give it a go on commodity hardware. The barriers to entry would have been much more prohibitive if we weren’t able to load it up on cheap/generic/secondhand computers. I’m afraid today’s factory restricted mobiles make indy OS development much less viable or appealing. Unlike in the past where we could hand friends a disk with our creation, today few of them can defeat the restrictions in place on their mobile device. This decimates the viral network effects required to take a homebrew project from hobby to mainstream. This shift saddens me because I don’t want the future of computing to be dictated by a few corporations (who often have anti-consumer agendas). Of course they are an important part of the ecosystem, I just want them to compete by improving their own products rather than by blocking out others.
Not being able to choice is a bad user experience.
Every end user except for all the developers out their trying to target multiple platforms. IS this something that mainstream people need? No. Doesn’t mean some people wouldn’t like the convenience.
People are a lot more savvy about OSes other than Windows these days, so if it was labeled as a *continued* policy, then somebody would bring up the BeOS dual-boot clusterfuck, the Halloween documents, and the intentional perversion of the APCI standards to hurt Linux. That’s bad PR juju.
Yup…what you said…:-)
We finally get Microsoft and Google to agree on something, though…
Then how do they explain Windows 8?
*rimshot*
Microsoft I can understand but Google? Why would they care?
I guess Google is nothing more then just another M$ wannabe!
There’s nothing really stopping you from doing it yourself on a Surface Pro, if you were so inclined.
http://www.Android-x86.org seems to be chugging along and keeping fairly current.
Forget dual boot. Both Android and Ubuntu run on the Linux kernel.
No reason they can’t “run” at the same time.
Ubuntu had a project for this but it seems dead.
Wop, wop wop “Ubuntu” style!
Beyond OEMs, Google and Microsoft are bullying Intel, which is not exactly a small startup.
Microsoft and Intel are like an old couple which have lived for far too long together. Their love affair has ended decades ago.
It is becoming ugly.
Edited 2014-03-14 21:59 UTC
It doesn’t really make sense for OEMs to ship dual boot pre-installed because surely it doubles the effort required for development and support (even if both OS’es are third-party ones and even updated by those third parties)?
What might make sense is to ship a device in a state where the *user* can convert it to dual boot (e.g. like the way you can update the MBR, install GRUB and a second or more OS on a desktop/laptop – in other words, an unlocked bootloader that doesn’t need a hack and can provide a menu of installed OS’es [moboot did this years ago with the HP TouchPad]), with the shipped first OS fully supported and the second/third/etc not supported at all?
Then you leave it to the community to sort out distros for your tablet/phone (CyanogenMod, Ubuntu Touch or whatever) and there you go…
Edited 2014-03-16 08:56 UTC
rklrkl,
I wish I were allowed to upvote your post. As you indicate, most of us aren’t really looking for support, merely a way to do it without hacking.