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Bill Gates Switches to Android Phone

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday September 27 2017, @12:56AM   Printer-friendly
from the use-what-works dept.

Both Phoenix666 and takyon wrote:

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has revealed he uses an Android-powered smartphone, rather than a Windows one.

"Recently, I actually did switch to an Android phone," he said, speaking on Fox News on Sunday.

Microsoft's own Windows-powered phones have failed to make a significant impact on the smartphone market, which is dominated by devices running Google's Android operating system.

However, Mr Gates said he had installed lots of Microsoft apps on his phone.

When asked whether he also had an iPhone, perhaps as a secondary device, he replied: "No, no iPhone."

He did not reveal which particular smartphone he currently uses.

Beware the chef who won't eat his own cooking.

Also at VentureBeat and CNET

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by coolgopher on Wednesday September 27 2017, @03:49AM (4 children)

    by coolgopher (1157) on Wednesday September 27 2017, @03:49AM (#573654)

    Honestly, I find Windows 10 Mobile to have the least infuriating user experience at the moment. iOS drives me nuts with insisting on The Limited One Right Way to do things (and sync through iTunes?!), and Android consistently fails to feel consistent and usable and responsive. W10Mobile mostly lets me do things I want to do, when I want to do it (email, text, browsing, whatsapp, play music without iTunes, some other stuff).

    The "live tile" desktop is, quite honestly, Really Good*. I can pin stuff there that actually provides information at a glance, and arrange & size it as I want without having to deal with pixel precision. If I want to run a less used apps I swipe to get a nice alphabetical listing of everything installed, with quick jumping to the desired letter. No stupid page-after-page of cryptic small icons to scroll through. When the time comes to move off this platform, this UI is what I'm going to miss. It works. It's clean. It's usable.

    And even though the MS app store is frequently ridiculed, I've found the necessary apps there (mostly various banking/authentication apps, some local weather apps).

    Also, Cortana. I've been impressed with how well Cortana has coped with some of the stuff I've thrown at "her". I've also been frustrated by the inability to cope with far less complex queries, but on the whole I find Cortana more useful that not. Maybe Siri & OK Google are up to the same level these days, I really don't know. It's been a few years since I tried out Siri last.

    So yeah, currently Windows 10 Mobile is my preferred mobile OS. I type this on a Mac Book Pro (with MagSafe, thank-you-bloody-much), sitting next to my Linux workstation.

    *) On a phone! Don't get me started on the abomination it's turned the "start menu" into on a regular desktop...

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by WillR on Wednesday September 27 2017, @12:46PM (3 children)

    by WillR (2012) on Wednesday September 27 2017, @12:46PM (#573764)
    Sync through iTunes hasn't been the One Right Way To Do Things(tm) for several years now, it's all iCloud sync by default and if you know exactly which hoops to jump through in the right order you can still use iTunes if you insist.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 28 2017, @12:17AM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 28 2017, @12:17AM (#574113)

      Sync through iTunes hasn't been the One Right Way To Do Things(tm) for several years now, it's all iCloud sync by default and if you know exactly which hoops to jump through in the right order you can still use iTunes if you insist.

      Can you put files on and take files off without that gawd awful iTunes interface? Just asking because My last Apple stuff was an iPhone 3gs and iPod Touch 4. It was infuriating to copy a PDF onto it or take off the recorded audio I captured. I won't even talk about putting on Music or trying to move it off. I finally gave up on it, moved to Android and never looked back.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by coolgopher on Thursday September 28 2017, @01:37AM

        by coolgopher (1157) on Thursday September 28 2017, @01:37AM (#574158)

        MS is moving to the cloud sync option too, annoyingly enough, but I can at least still do MTP mounts of the phone and copy things to/from it relatively easily. It used to be even better back when they had the explicit phone-sync app for the Mac.

        For other reasons I do use OneDrive (for syncing some stuff to the VM at work), but iCloud has always been disabled.

      • (Score: 1) by WillR on Thursday September 28 2017, @02:56PM

        by WillR (2012) on Thursday September 28 2017, @02:56PM (#574368)
        Yes, at least in iOS 11. They finally added a file manager app, but it's pretty limited (everything has to go through iCloud or Dropbox or the like, there's no way to use a USB connection to your PC that I can find). Moving music on and off the device still goes through iTunes, and is still just as much of a pain as it was with a scroll-wheel iPod.