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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday October 11 2017, @03:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the playing-taps dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Wednesday October 11 2017, @08:28PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 11 2017, @08:28PM (#580775) Journal

    You're not looking far enough back. Look at Apple back in the same time periods I mentioned for Microsoft. Look back to the 80's and first half of the 90's. At that point, Apple really was a great company. I was, at that time, a card carrying Apple fanboy. And developer. Apple was all about tech and true ease of use. Not: do it my way because it is different. And not: this is what looks best rather than what functions best. At that point BYTE magazine wrote that the entire history of the microcomputer industry was basically an effort to keep up with Apple. And Apple was way ahead of PCs on everything. CD-ROMs. QuickTime video. Plug and Play hard drives (but with big fat SCSI connectors, but still anybody could easily plug in a drive). Not using a processor that had "segment" registers. Having a 24-bit and later 32-bit flat memory model. It took Microsoft until Windows 95 to have a quite decent Mac knockoff. At that point Apple was going downhill. No new innovations.

    By 2000, OS X was out, Jobs was back. Apple was a different company. And I didn't like it. In 1997 I happened to become highly interested in Linux. In 1999 I got my first Linux box. Within a couple years, I was no longer using my old Macs and was pure Linux.

    You're talking about the modern Apple. And I would agree with you. The modern Apple bought or copied.

    The iPhone was a visionary idea. But it was just software. All of the hardware was from third parties, and much of it from Samsung. Apple sues the whole industry (Motorols, then HTC, then Samsung) over crap like bouncy scrolling or slide to unlock? Really? If I were an engineer wanting to solve the how to unlock a phone problem when there is no keyboard, the only solution is some sort of screen gesture.

    The iPhone's Apps was not visionary. I was already playing with writing Java "midlets" that ran on most all candy bar phones and flip phones of the day. Anyone who was doing this could see the potential to have a standard app store instead of each mobile network having it's own app store. And various compatibility nits between different devices your app might run on. Apps were an obvious thing to many people when the iPhone appeared. But the iPhone brought uniformity.

    Apple should just die. And I could never have imagined myself saying that thirty years ago in my twenties.

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    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
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