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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: 5, Informative) by Grishnakh on Wednesday October 11 2017, @03:25PM (41 children)
For now, all we can do is mourn: the best mobile platform isn't under active development any more
Where'd this biased garbage come from? There was never anything good about Windows Phone. It was workable I suppose, but nothing great, with a butt-ugly UI. iOS and Android certainly have their problems and aren't wonderful either for different reasons, but that doesn't make Windows Phone "the best". Ridiculous.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Gaaark on Wednesday October 11 2017, @03:31PM (17 children)
I was coming to say essentially the same thing.
Why mourn when you can cheer: turn that frown upside down! :)
Wish the same would happen to Windows and MS
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Wednesday October 11 2017, @04:24PM (16 children)
I'd love to see Windows go belly-up, but at the same time I'd like to see Apple go bust too. Holy shit, I just had to use a Mac at a hotel just to try to print some tickets, and it was an awful experience. Where the fuck is the right button for bringing up a context menu? (And no, there's no obvious place to click to bring up a context menu either.) I determined that there was actually *no* discoverable way of printing within the Safari browser; luckily, I was able to guess that Command-P would bring up a print dialog, but I though Apple touted that its shitty software was "user friendly". Sorry, having to remember cryptic OS-specific key combinations is not "user friendly" (luckily, P for print isn't that hard, after remembering that Macs use the "Command" key for stuff instead of Control, but what if I was trying to do something else like look at the history or cookies or saved passwords or something?). Hotkeys are supposed to be shortcuts for experienced users who've taken the time to learn them, not the only way to to something.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday October 11 2017, @05:29PM
Knowing a little about the Mac user experience (*shudder*), the answer is probably something like click and drag the document to the printer icon. You essentially have to regress to the technical sophistication of a toddler in order to get how to work with Macs.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Gaaark on Wednesday October 11 2017, @06:02PM (1 child)
My wife was having trouble printing an image from windows (she was yelling from another room) so i told her "Ctrl + P".
Next thing i know, she's trying to tell her mother the same thing: her mother, who clicks "Print" 500 times because the printer doesn't start printing right away, until her print queue is so full nothing will print and who keeps "Losing facebook" on her windows 10 laptop.
Funny how my wife thinks her mother will learn and remember Ctrl + P when she can't even print from a dialog.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday October 11 2017, @07:44PM
Mom saves everything she ever cared about on the Desktop of her Mac. Should a document somehow go into the Documents folder, she will never find it again.
One day she asked me "If I keep saving my email, will I run out of gigabytes?"
"No you have so many gigabytes that you will never run out." Actually she has eighty of them.
One day I showed her how to do a Cleanup By Name of her desktop.
How did she react?
"How do you put it back?" Meaning she wanted to know how to put all of her documents in little piles.
The next time I visited her Desktop had lots of little piles of documents."
She drops me at Starbucks. "Come in Mom and I'll treat you to a Frappucino"
"I've got to go grocery shopping."
But now I speak Mom's special dialect of English:
"All work and no play makes Patty a dull girl."
Mom thought her Frappucino was the best thing since sliced bread.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(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)?
(Score: 2) by damnbunni on Thursday October 12 2017, @01:28AM (2 children)
Print in Safari is in the exact same place it is in Firefox and Internet Explorer, and only one place off from where it is in Chrome.
It's in the menus. In the 'File' menu, specifically.
(Chrome has it in the top-level menu.)
You don't need a 'cryptic OS-specifc key combination'.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday October 12 2017, @03:45AM (1 child)
Ok, and where the fuck is this elusive menu? I was looking for the menu; it wasn't there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @05:45AM
Macs are weird, they use a global menu location in the upper left that changes with your window focus. So you probably think it is the OS menu but its a combo menu for OS and application.
(Score: 2) by quacking duck on Thursday October 12 2017, @01:28AM (2 children)
File menu > Print. Where it's been since literally 1984, over a year before Windows v1.0 was a thing.
Granted, maybe you didn't see a menubar at all, due to a recent and IMHO frustrating feature that Apple's introduced, the full-screen mode. In this mode the menubar disappears entirely unless you move the mouse to the top of the screen.
Disabling full-screen mode is one of the first things do when I set up a new Mac for myself. My girlfriend moved to Mac from Windows and wanted the full-screen mode but it's not at all like Windows, and there are a number of other serious UX issues with it.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday October 12 2017, @03:44AM (1 child)
I didn't see a menu at all, and the browser wasn't in full-screen mode: I could still see their dumb "chooser" thing at the bottom, and some extra wasted space on either side of that. Maybe they still call that "full-screen mode", but when I hit F11 in Firefox on Windows or Linux, it really does take over the entire screen. I was certainly looking for a menu, but it wasn't anywhere to be found.
(Score: 2) by quacking duck on Thursday October 12 2017, @03:38PM
I presume you mean the Dock at the bottom, which predates the Windows Taskbar due to modern Mac's NeXT roots. If you saw the Dock though then it definitely wasn't in Fullscreen mode.
I found out newer versions of macOS (since late 2015) have an option to hide the menu bar [tekrevue.com], but like fullscreen mode, shoving the mouse to the top of the screen would reveal it again. Someone (hotel staff? prankster?) had to change this setting though, as hiding the menubar is not default for very obvious reasons.
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Thursday October 12 2017, @07:08AM (1 child)
The is that crazy thing called a "menu bar", running along the top of the screen. In it, there are a number of menu's, each of which contain menu items.
In pretty much every Mac application that supports printing, in the File menu, there is a "Print" menu item.
That is the "discoverable" method for finding the print menu item.
I suppose if the location has set the safari browser window to full-screen, then the menu bar gets hidden, and most people wouldn't know to make the menu bar visible by moving the mouse to the top of the screen...
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday October 12 2017, @02:30PM
I didn't see a menu bar at the top of the screen, and I was looking all over, so it must have been in some sort of full-screen mode. So no, it really wasn't discoverable. Just like mobile devices (esp. Android with the pull-down menu) expecting you to just somehow know that particular swipes do particular things, Macs apparently require the same sort of secret knowledge. That's fine if your system is designed for experienced users, but I haven't even touched a Mac in over a decade. They cannot rightfully claim to be "easy to use" if basic functions are not discoverable by completely inexperienced users.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday October 11 2017, @03:35PM (2 children)
Let me ditto your post. Come on World - just let it die. Windows is alright on the desktop, if that is your cup of tea. It positively sucks everywhere else. (cue the diehard Windows server fans who pay for every seat they serve)
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @05:54PM (1 child)
Or they could set it free, blobs, the lot and become the first phone that can properly run linux. Then we could develop new features.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @03:37AM
We had some stories about how Ubuntu Touch was coming along nicely.
That's Ubuntu on a handheld device that recognizes when a keyboard and monitor are connected to the device and it switches to a desktop-type interface.
One guy demo'd it on a Nexus.
Ubuntu's Convergence Vision is Looking Amazing (Video Evidence) [soylentnews.org]
...and a Spanish company was putting it on their devices.
How Good is the Ubuntu Bq Tablet? [soylentnews.org]
There was also this.
Tool Lets You Easily Install Ubuntu Touch OS on Mobile Devices [soylentnews.org]
...then Shuttleworth decided that he didn't want to be in the convergence business any more. 8-(
After that, an independent effort picked up what Canonical had dropped.
UBports is keeping the Ubuntu Phone dream alive (through third-party development) [liliputing.com]
Gotta say that last time I looked, their website is a poorly crafted, badly organized mess.
.
...then there's the Nokia N900 [wikipedia.org] which some folks thought was pretty awesome.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @03:36PM (9 children)
Ars Technica. In particular, Peter Bright.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday October 11 2017, @03:46PM (2 children)
What a contradictory last name.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @04:14PM
He polishes his peter regularly - it should be bright.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @03:52AM
He's been mentioned a bunch of times at TechRights. [google.com]
Roy Schestowitz calls him Microsoft Peter.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday October 11 2017, @04:45PM (4 children)
How does that guy type with Nadella's dick in his mouth and Gates' and Ballmer's in each of his hands?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Funny) by RamiK on Wednesday October 11 2017, @05:20PM
I believe we're observing a rather literal case of tongue-in-cheek where, following decades of extending one's reach to preform the infamous three-finger salute in the face of the dreaded B.S.O.D, Windows admins have transmuted extended digits, elongated tongues and even 3rd arms in a manner not too unflattering to ol' man Lamarck.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday October 11 2017, @05:30PM
You never saw "My Left Foot?"
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @05:43PM (1 child)
With his ass?
(Score: 3, Funny) by DECbot on Wednesday October 11 2017, @07:42PM
You and I are entirely on the same train of thought. But I couldn't decide if he was whistling out his ass to voice recognition software or if he had inserted a stylus and was using handwriting recognition software.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @08:04PM
Makes one really miss the days when they had a dedicated FOSS column, and Jon Stokes did deep dives of CPU internals.
These days they seem to be a Apple marketing company, with a token Windows apologist to claim neutrality...
(Score: 2) by t-3 on Wednesday October 11 2017, @04:42PM (5 children)
WP7 /was/ the best mobile platform when it came out, and there were high quality phones that used it too - WP8+ however are garbage and good riddance.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Wednesday October 11 2017, @06:35PM (2 children)
It was so sweet to watch Windows Mobile vs Android suffer the same problem that Desktop Linux vs Windows had.
No Applications. No Developers of applications, unless Microsoft paid them handsomely to port their apps to WP7/8. That was the only to get some top drawer apps ported to Windows Phone.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @08:07PM (1 child)
The crazy part is that so much of that was self inflicted. One would have thought that Microsoft of all companies understood the value of backwards compatibility, yet Winmob7 burned any bridges with the earlier PocketPC lineage.
Observe on the other hand how you can now get cheap as dirt Atom based tablets running Windows 10, that are able to handle even things from the 3.1 era of software (Atom CPUs are 32-bit).
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Wednesday October 11 2017, @08:40PM
. . . and Windows Phone 8 burned compatibility with Windows Phone 7. Yes, really.
(I am NOT a cowboy and there is nothing wrong with this speed.)
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @04:21AM (1 child)
WP7 /was/ the best mobile platform when it came out
There are a lot of folks who gauge "best" by marketshare. [techpinions.com]
Windoze Phone 7 was released on October 21, 2010.
At that time, the MSFT numbers were pretty small and had been getting smaller for some time.
So, "best"? Not so much.
...if you want to judge "quality" by marketshare.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(A Linux user who gets tired of marketshare comparisons from M$ fanboys.)
(Score: 2) by t-3 on Thursday October 12 2017, @07:22PM
I haven't used windows since I was in school at the computer lab. Ask my boxes run Linux or OpenBSD. WP7 was awesome. Android and iOS have apps and all that bs. WP7 worked extremely well for communication, even if I didn't have all kinds of stupid games to beg me to give them my CC info.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bob_super on Wednesday October 11 2017, @05:47PM (1 child)
Have you consider that windows phones could be the best for some applications [wikipedia.org]?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @12:04AM
Kindling?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @01:06AM (1 child)
I take it you never had a Windows phone? W7 had an awesome UI compared with Android and iOS. But Microsoft had three main problems: fewer apps, crappy management changing everything each version, and owned by Microsoft. Owned by Microsoft isn't as bad anymore since Google managed to become worse in that regard, but like so many other MS projects, they can never get over their death-by-poor-management hurdle. Microsoft can create awesome, high tech products they just never survive getting outside MS. (Yes, I worked there as an intern).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @03:12AM
Yep, Owned by Microsoft. Which means in three to five years, they will cancel it and do something else. They never stick with anything (other than Windows itself, Office, and for some reason Xbox). No one dares put much investment into a Microsoft product, as it will soon not be there anymore.