Can you believe it's been only six months since Microsoft first unveiled its brand-new and most likely last-ditch effort to regain some significance in the smartphone market? Well, today the company announced that the Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools will go gold September 16, and applications submissions will be accepted from early October onwards.
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Member since:2009-03-11
Member since:2010-02-26
Well, it's hard to explain because what is missing is elegance and cleverness of design, among other things. This is a quite nebulous concept, but, nevertheless, quite real. Perhaps some background is necessary. I spent of number of years, before I retired, as an Apple Trainer. This helped me to see on a one-to-one basis who the average Apple customer is and what it is about the product that attracts them. A very large sector of apple users are intelligent, affluent, and not interested in technology other than how it can serve their non-technical interests. For example, pushing a song to another iPod user is much less valuable than having a fully integrated calendar, to do list, and notes that integrates seamlessly and automatically with all other owned electronic devices. How accurately that sync automatically resolves conflicts would be an example of the cleverness of design. Say what you will of Apple, they have always understood their primary customer and have been brilliant in meeting their needs.I find that very technical people and Microsoft users have a difficult time seeing this perfect match of customer and needs because Microsoft has never accomplished this for primary user. I hear things like, Apple dummies down the software so stupid people can use it. However, it has been my experience that the average Apple customer is quite capable of "understanding;" They''re just not interested. They want elegant, simple, and automatic. Such is the eye of the Apple beholder.
However, a probably critical question is how DO you explain the runaway success of Apple and the lackluster performance of Microsoft products. If the Zune, for example, is just as good as an iPod, why are it's sales so low? After seeing Apple customers act like children with candy when they see all the things their new iPod can do, I don't doubt that Apple fans love their products because of what they personally experience using them. In a training session customer often said their experience was almost "transedental". They are not BS'n: it really feels that way for them. I find it weird, but I have never seen a PC product evoke this level of awe in these same types of customers, who, btw, make up a large part of technology users.
All that said, I am not an Apple Fan. Apple gave most employees an iPhone when it was first released. I gave mine to my son. I hope in the near future to buy an Android phone and/or a chrome OS tablet. These will meet my needs, but, for true Apple Fans, they'll fall short of expectations. And so, life goes on.
Member since:2005-07-06
1) Zune is unavailable outside a few niche countries where as Apple were shippnig iPod globally for years in some countries before the iTunes store even appeared. There is absolutely no excuse what so ever that I am unable to purchase a Zune in New Zealand - I don't care about the 'service' because I already own CD's and I already have ripped my music. The lack of Zune availability (coupled with point 2) has made such a device lacking in the qualities that I demand out of a media player.
2) iPod support exists on Windows and Mac yet Microsoft refuses to provide software for end users to use their Zune with Mac OS X or even use an open protocol such as MTP which was originally designed to stop fragmentation in the media player market (instead of having many competing proprietary protocols for synchronising there would be one). If they want their base of users to be as wide and deep as possible then they should at the very least support the two major platforms out there - the fact is they have chosen not too.
3) The Zune media synchronisation tool is crap in that it treats the end user as though he or she was intellectually retarded - stick to the MTP protocol and stick to the standard Media Player that is bundled with Windows - I don't care about 'branding', I just want a media player with a good interface, great battery life, decent storage and a media player that allows me to synchronise, rip and so forth but giving me to the power to tweak the settings as I see fit rather than accepting the 'one size fits all' assumption Microsoft makes with the current Zune software.
Edited 2010-08-24 05:06 UTC
Member since:2005-07-13
. I personally am really excited about windows phone 7 (mostly windows CE 7). It's an exciting time to be in the embedded and small form factor device world.
Member since:2007-06-02
Member since:2005-07-07
Can you give some examples of the qualities? After using both iPods and Zunes, I feel that the Zune devices and software offer a better experience. If given the choice, I'd choose a Zune over an iPod. In fact, I use my Zune exclusively and my iPod now belongs to my son.
Windows Phone 7 will have a Zune Interface and I know several people, myself included who are interested in seeing that in person. XBox Live on their phone is something else many are anticipating.
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces."But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
"Android and iOS, the number one and number two ranked smartphone operating systems worldwide, combined for 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013 as Windows Phone crept past BlackBerry for 3rd place. According to the International Data Corporation Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Android smartphone vendors and Apple shipped a total of 199.5 million units worldwide during 1Q13, up 59.1% from the 125.4 million units shipped during 1Q12." Windows Phone doubles from a few to twice few, iOS loser market share as its growth is slower than that of the overall market. BlackBerry continues slide into irrelevance."According to the latest research from our Wireless Smartphone Strategies service, global Android smartphone profits reached US$5 billion in total during the first quarter of 2013. Samsung dominated and captured an impressive 95 percent share of all Android smartphone profits." Wow.
Member since:
2010-02-26
Microsoft's version of Gold is pyrite. Balmer is in such denial and so without a clue that this company is unable to create ANY strategy that would would give its cellular phone products credibility. I don't dislike Microsoft and have a really treasured Sony Vaio laptop with windows 7 which has been absolutely problem free. I have a very nice iMac, but prefer my Sony Laptop.
Phones on the other hand are a different matter. Even if Balmer were to go (we can only hope), I think they would still be coming to the game too late. The Zune is an example of this. Once again, not a bad product, but without any of the qualities that make the iPod so compelling. Qualities which seem to be invisible to Microsoft designers. Hey, if you don't get it, you don't get that you don't get it. Sad really.