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Windows Phone will not receive new features, and there will be no new Windows Phone hardware. The initial release was on October 21, 2010:
During the weekend, Microsoft's Joe Belfiore tweeted confirmation of something that has been suspected for many months: Microsoft is no longer developing new features or new hardware for Windows Mobile. Existing supported phones will receive bug fixes and security updates, but the platform is essentially now in maintenance mode.
Microsoft's difficulties in the mobile market are no secret, but for a time the company looked as if it was keeping Windows Mobile as a going concern regardless. Through 2016, Microsoft produced new builds for the Windows Insider program and added new features to Windows Mobile. At around the time of release of the Windows 10 Creators Update in April this year, that development largely ground to a halt. Windows Mobile, which already lacked certain features that were delivered to Windows on the PC, had its development forked. PC Windows development continued on the "Redstone 3" branch (which will culminate in the release of the Fall Creators Update later this month); Windows Mobile languished on a branch named "feature2."
[...] We might well wonder why Microsoft didn't say so sooner and instead strung along not only the platform's fans but even OEM partners; it's hard to imagine that HP would have built its Elite x3 phone had Microsoft been clearer about mobile.
Even with this announcement, there's still speculation that Microsoft is going to bring out a new device—something phone-like but not a phone—that'll compete, somehow, in the mobile space. For all the rumors about a "Surface Phone," though, it's unclear precisely what this device would do that is meaningfully different from anything else on the market or if it will be compelling enough to reverse the company's mobile fortunes. For now, all we can do is mourn: the best mobile platform isn't under active development any more, and the prospects of new hardware to run it on are slim to non-existent.
They should release an app that runs full Windows on an external display when an Android smartphone is docked. Put those 8-10 cores to good use.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by KiloByte on Wednesday October 11 2017, @06:54PM (4 children)
Try GNOME's user interface. That's horror show.
And this on an operating system type that has 10 or so desktop environments and north of 50 window managers, many if not most of them far better than GNOME, to choose from.
Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @08:01PM
Witness the power of (company backed) code churn...
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday October 11 2017, @09:13PM (1 child)
I have to disagree to an extent. Windows's UI is horribly ugly, just looking at it. Gnome actually looks kinda nice, but that's the only thing good about it (it has too much wasted space, but at least they pick some non-objectionable colors and try to make it somewhat pretty). Gnome's problems are with user interaction: lack of features, ever-changing API, reliance on extensions to do anything useful but these break with every release, etc. Windows is a mixed bag; some parts haven't changed in a very long time, other parts (the Metro stuff mainly) is new and awful, and it's an inconsistent mish-mash of the two, plus the whole problem with forced updates, ads on the start menu, etc. But at first glance, Gnome at least looks better; Windows is just SOOOOO ugly.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday October 11 2017, @09:15PM
Oh whoops, I guess I should have looked at the context more, I thought we were talking about something else. I actually haven't tried printing from Gnome. You probably need to memorize a hotkey combination to do it, considering their idiotic bent on minimalism.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @10:16AM
Do you mean Great Gnome (aka Gnome 1), Acceptable Gnome (aka Gnome 2) or Despicable Gnome (aka Gnome 3)?