the kernel wasn’t the problem with Windows Mobile; separate the kernel from the APIs and user interface. WM’s problems were that it tried to be a portable version of desktop Windows, not to mention was only usable with a stylus. I mean, if you went into the file explorer it looked almost like Windows XP, the only thing missing was bloody drive letters :rolleyes:
You never responded to this. Why are you upset? I don’t understand.
And you never responded to this. Do you disagree that past negative experience can have a lasting impression o consumers?
This is my point:
So you got me curious and it turns out there is tons of crap out there about wp7 freezing consistently on multiple models.
So, discussing just wp7 - after having googled and looked at the extent of the problem - do you still think my friend couldn’t have had a wp7 while he was having freezing problems? (remember I don’t know what he had, I didn’t ask and he only told me windows phone)
Not sure if the kernel necessarily gets off the hook with regard to stability and reliability issues. I agree the UI was pretty atrocious and buggy of itself though.
I wonder what data (if any) jz78817 has that makes him think that the kernel wasn’t part of it.
I didn’t respond because it’s not relevant and I don’t owe you an answer to anything.
I don’t disagree at all.
I’m not saying he couldn’t. I just find it extremely unlikely that he would have had multiple WP7 handsets from different manufacturers all be equally troublesome. And yes, I know you say you don’t know if they’re all WP7, but when it comes to talking about stability it’s not really useful to talk about WM6. Especially when- like PCs- lockups and OS crashes are frequently caused by bad hardware.
Which is why I noted that there are plenty of hits on iPhones freezing, yet I’m not going to hold that up as evidence that iPhones have some endemic problem with it.
you want to press someone for “data,” open a GQ thread about it.
As somebody who works doing tech support for smartphones, I would wager part of this is because supporting wired sync is a huge, huge headache, whereas supporting wireless sync is a lot easier. You seriously minimize the variables out of your control. ActiveSync was always a mess.
One of WM’s huge problems was that it took actual expertise, like, practiced skill to handle some common tasks. That’s fine for nerds who will develop those skills, but it’s death to a commercial product.
MS is trying to crib from Apple’s playbook – don’t include something unless you can make it mostly idiot-proof. They did a good job in WP7, since everything is really, really intuitive and easy but it means there’s lots of things it can’t do. It’s the reason Apple’s iPhone absolutely demolished WM, despite WM doing way, way, way WAY more on launch. The iPhone did the things it did well, whereas WM did them…minimally.
Arguably they moved too far in the opposite direction with “version 1” of WP7, but Mango looks to improve things.
And, take this with a grain of salt, but in my position I get tons of calls about iPhones freezing (almost always fixed by power cycling). I get tons of calls about Androids freezing, which is usually cumbersome to fix.
I get comparatively few calls about WP7 period, but of those I’ve never heard an issue with freezing. Regardless of the (only kinda) shared kernel, WM and WP7 look, feel, and behave absolutely nothing alike.
Well, this doesn’t make it look very promising…
I recently went from a WinMo Pro 6.5 HTC to an LG running Android 2.2. My only beef with the new phone is that the camera isn’t as good as my old one; otherwise it’s as if I’ve been let out of jail. There are so many more apps available for Android that I can simply download and run, as opposed to crawling the Internet (literally, it almost seemed at times), to find a third party workaround like GSPlayer. I had to use Shoutcast to find .pls files for streaming radio stations, and that was only until Shoutcast stopped working on my mobile. With Android I can often just use the station’s Android app. Or I can use iHeartRadio, or TuneIn, neither of which worked on my Windows phone. With the Windows phone, if the broadcaster offered an .asx stream I could listen to that in WMP; otherwise GSPlayer and that only if they offered the .pls version.
I’ll mention another feature that may or may not bee a Windows thing; I don’t know. But with my HTC I had to plug my ear buds into the mini-USB port via an adapter, and said adapters tended to wear out. The new LG, by contrast, simply offers a 3.5mm receptacle.
Windows would just about have to offer a personal teleportation app for me to go back now.
This tends to be a manufacturer choice, not based on the OS. When I was doing Windows Mobile phones at my old job, we opted to use the micro-USB port for audio so we could eliminate the space required to place a 3.5mm jack. It was electrically almost the same, after a detection circuit. The OS didn’t care at all.
At the time, we were told the entire company was going in that direction..they did, in fact, release a handful of phones with no 3.5mm jack. Since then, they’re changed their minds.
-D/a
I didn’t really think it was OS dependent, but it was sure an annoyance with my old HTC Pure. And what was especially foolish about the adapter that shipped with the device was that there was a bright! LED which lit up whenever I plugged the ear buds into the other end. Fortunately the third party adapters I used after the first one wore out didn’t have that liability, and the battery life was noticeably longer.
Those usb-to-headphone dongles were one of the worst decisions I’ve ever seen. It’s a bold statement that media features are an afterthought. That companies still did this after Apple unequivocally proved that consumers want converged entertainment / communication devices was just brutally sad.
If I’m not mistaken, WP7 licensing requires that the phone has a true, built-in 3.5mm jack. MS is being very, very smart by making manufacturers commit to not screwing up the hardware.
I left the Windows Mobile game because of, and during, Microsoft’s long transition to create WM7. The preliminary versions I had way back then did specify particular hardware capabilities, and included the 3.5mm jack.
Spectre of Pithecanthropus -I used to get sooo annoyed at my phones when they would start flashing a light and beeping to tell me it was low on battery. I know it’s low on battery. Stop wasting it! If I was carrying a fairly current prototype I could occasionally get away with using a hacked internal build to disable those features..but not all the time.
-D/a