Homegrown mobile phone-maker Karbonn Mobiles is all set to launch dual-OS (operating system) devices, which will support both Android and Windows, by June.
The company has just signed the licence agreement with Microsoft to make Windows-based phones and will put this along with its existing Android system to bring out the dual-OS phones in about six months, the company’s chairman Sudhir Hasija said.
I wonder what will happen if Google were to resort to the same illegal tactics that Microsoft used to force OEMs into not dual-booting BeOS back in the day.
In the end, I’m just filing this one under ‘poetic justice’. Shoe’s on the other foot now, Redmond.
‘your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.’
Yep. This is yet another sign that more people need to be fired at MSFT.
That’s an interesting bit of information.
I wonder why they do that only now… perhaps the platform wasn’t attractive enough?
My first thought was “Well, they have an Android phone with the Nokia X, I bet they are exploring dual booting themselves and don’t want to be seen as hypocrites.” But really, that doesn’t make any sense; Microsoft has never cared about overt hypocrisy in the past.
I guess it’s just all about the profits after all. They get royalties on Android installs, and licensing fees for WP. Double dipping at its finest.
They do that only now because only now did any manufacturer agree to go along with them on it.
They tried to get HTC to do this last year. They proposed a low to no-cost license fee if they would offer dual OS phones. HTC told them no.
Karbonn has told them yes. So only now will it happen.
I once had a PC that was able to boot 6 different operating systems, which seemed like a cool thing to be able to do.
It turned out to be very inconvenient.
And I suspect it will be the same with a phone that needs to reboot to switch OS. In the end you prefer one of the operating systems. If you switch to the less preferred one there will be a lot of forced pulling you back to the system you like more. In the end you’ll stick with one OS.
MOS6510,
Granted, I don’t understand why a normal user would want to do it. I guess maybe it’d be good for users who are undecided and want to try out both. But as a developer I really like the option. For that matter I’d really like the option to run multiple versions of the same OS, which would be pointless for users.
At least on our PC’s it was fairly easy to configure our bootloaders however we wanted. Nowadays manufacturer imposed device restrictions really cramp the flexibility that we used to take for granted.
So, users will have to either synchronize and store contacts, schedules, bookmarks, etc. on both OSs? It will increase network usage and risk of loosing data due to compatibility issues, as well as limit users to services that support both Android and Windows Phone. Or users will be locked into proprietary “solution” by vendor, and be even more limited in choice of backup.
Oh, and both OSs will report bogus mobile bandwidth data usage, rendering user’s effort to avoid using pricy extra bandwidth futile.
Given that there’s actually no compelling reason to use Windows Phone, this projects seems so pointless and harmful…
Edited 2014-03-03 15:12 UTC
ddc_,
Hmm, why did you direct this to me? I agree there would be lots of usability issues. I said “I DON’T understand why a normal user would want to do it.”
By mistake. The comment was supposed to support and extend MOS6510’s comment.
I can now tell my friends that the nonsense I write on the Internet has support and even gets third party extensions. 🙂
Well, yes, I agree. Windows phone is pretty pointless.
However… if we can get phone hardware/software that has a standard way of dual booting, that would be a good thing.
There has been multirom for a while, but I couldn’t figure out how to update android OTA with it ( it kept failing).
Ubuntu is doing something to allow dual booting between ubuntu phone and android.
And now this. Just wish a universally adopted standard would emerge that would allow everything to just work.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
After all the bad press MS subjected itself to by contractually demanding that windows resellers lock users out of bootloaders on ARM UEFI devices, it’s not really clear to me that _this one_ will come with an unlocked bootloader. It may be restricted into dual booting the factory pre-configured operating systems and nothing else.
So my question is whether, in addition to dual booting, this will install open or homebrew operating systems? It’d be great if anybody who knows for sure could speak up!
For a developer I get it.
For a user I’m not sure it could serve as a way to decided which OS you prefer. I tend to prefer some OS, but another OS tends to have stuff I’d like to have in my preferred OS.
For the average user it may be better not to know what they’re missing if they opt for some OS.
They should use an Intel SOC and automatically switch from Android to a real Windows when the phone is connected to a docking station.
I am sure some day Apple will go that route with iOS and OSX – a cheap Mac mini for the masses.
Problem with that is a lot of us don’t want to have to do double configuration, which we would if our phone auto-switched os on us when docked.
Andyware can run Android Apps on Windows phone in parallel.
http://www.novapx.com
Can someone get more details?