Microsoft has confirmed that Windows Phone 7 will be launched worldwide October 11. “Horror, shock, surprise! Microsoft CEO and prime fanboy of all things Windows and developer-related, Steve Ballmer, will be the keynote speaker at Microsoft’s New York launch event for Windows Phone 7. He’ll be joined on stage by AT&T’s Ralph de la Vega and when the pep rally is over, we’re promised opportunities to finally handle the official incarnations of retail Windows Phones for ourselves.”
What’s the deal with the US/at&t and exclusivity? Does the extra money Microsoft get equal what they would expect to have made by opening up to everyone?
The only phones I can remember being carrier exclusives in Australia recently have been the HTC hero, then the Desire. (The big brother of the hero and both on Telstra.)
What exlusivity? T-Mobile is announcing something shortly there-after.
Besides, remember the Google G1? Only on T-Mobile first? It just depends which carrier can get their butt in gear and get the products onto shelves quickest, I’m guessing.
Couldn’t agree more. Honestly, it’s looking like Microsoft is trying to repeat Apple’s mistakes, for reasons I can’t even begin to comprehend. They’re capable of doing so much better than this, but somehow they just never live up to what they could do if they tried.
There is a tech issue here though which is that AT&T uses GSM while the others use CDMA. MS said they were going to build around GSM and then bring it to CDMA next year.
Not exactly correct. T-mobile is also GSM, though AT&T and T-mobile do use different HSDPA frequencies for 3g.
No one really cares about T-mobile but they are getting WP7 as well.
http://www.i4u.com/40379/windows-phone-7-coming-att-and-t-mobile-20…
It will only be T-Mobile and AT&T, as WinMo7 is only GSM at release.
Just wondering why this is “Horror & shock” ? More competitions are welcome, to get better iPhone 5.
The “Horror, shock, surprise!” is probably that Steve Ballmer will be the speaker.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1274983729713522403#
I hope MS is going to work on multitasking for Windows Mobile 7.
Like Android and Apple iphone 4 allowing you to have multiple apps open at once.
This might not be a dealbreaker for most people but other “powerusers” will like it.
Maybe I’m just behind and they are already.
winmo 6 had multitasking so would be pretty weird that 7 wouldn’t. I know they’re completely different OS’s but would be a shame to start dropping features.
What they should have is opt-in multitasking.
The reason they would freeze running apps in the background is to preserve battery life. It’s an artificial limitation, the underlying kernel can multitask just fine.
http://www.androidauthority.com/index.php/2010/09/30/the-myth-about…
Multitasking does not impair battery life at all. And I don’t rely solely on the article I linked – I speak from experience. When I first bought my Nexus One I used Advanced Task Killer religiously, put a shortcut on the home screen. Then I realized that with like 20 tasks that are open (which doesn’t mean they are all running or doing something all of the time) – it makes no difference whatsoever. Heck, let me check, this is what I have running at the moment:
Twitter
Gmail
Voice Search
Gesture Search
Facebook
MixZing
Calendar
Market
News and Weather
Available memory: 213M
After pushing the KILL button, I have 245M free. Not a terrific gain. And 99% of the time these apps do nothing at all, use 0 CPU cycles, they are just sitting there.
Modern ARM CPUs are designed to power up and finish tasks quickly. So that News and Weather widget that is “running” may periodically check for update. That should take a 1-2 second spike in CPU use, than it goes back to sleep for 3600 seconds. Most apps are like that. Multitasking is not a problem on today’s smartphones, their impact on battery life is truly negligible. To translate it into numbers, these are the top 4 parts of the system that use battery on my phone:
Cell standby 32%
Phone Idle 29%
Display 24%
Wi-Fi 7% (Have it turned on non-stop btw)
That article you linked to doesn’t prove anything.
Let me ask you this, which consumes more power?
3 browser windows processing Javascript.
1 browser window processing Javascript while 2 others remain frozen.
We are talking about webkit based browsers on Android/iOS and Opera (presumably, no one uses IE for mobile) on WinMO. Opera allows loading multiple pages. If each page that’s not in the foreground would be “frozen” as you suggest, it would mean that you can’t load pages in the background. On my on my HTC Touch HD I used this feature all the time, just as you do it on your PC (middle click on links to open them in the background). In this context, your example is complete nonsense. Do you suggest “freezing” each unfocused browser page? Or do you mean allowing a page to load in the background than freeze it once it finished loading? It already works that way – once a page is rendered, no
code is being executed on the CPU… opened pages only use RAM. I can confirm this right now on my Nexus – if I have like 6 open pages in the Browser, once they are all loaded, Android System Info reports no CPU use.
Multitasking is not a problem on modern smartphones. If I understand correctly, iOS implements multitasking in this weird frozen/running way – not sure about the specifics though. Maybe Steve Jobs came up with some sort of bullshit explanation about the impact on battery life (before iOS had multitasking) – not sure about that either. But my own experience with the Nexus One as well as the article I linked suggest that there is no need for this frozen crap. Actually, in a linux context, doesn’t make sense at all. I’m not sure it makes sense in any context actually. Applications are in a variety of states.
Some applications are “sleeping”, waking up for a few milliseconds from time to time for polling something or whatever. These applications are not actively executing code on the CPU (ie don’t eat battery). Other applications are waiting for user input (no battery use there either). Browsers are different (see above). One obvious case for a backgrounded application that uses CPU cycles would be a media player, but again, we WANT to be able to play music while browsing the web and doing other things on our phones.
Yes and it would save battery life because people will often open new pages and then not return to pages they have opened.
It is not that simple because:
Javascript will often continue to run.
Some loaded pages will keep contact with the server for updates. This is especially true for multimedia websites.
File transfer can be delayed by bandwidth.
Processes still have to be polled for resource sharing.
Yes they are trying to find a balance between battery life and concurrency. That is why they allowed limited concurrency for playing music in the background. MS engineers are doing the same unless you think they are somehow incapable of fully implementing NT’s preemptive multitasking on a mobile device.
Your link proves nothing and you still didn’t answer my question.
Here’s another question for you:
What uses more power?
An OS that has to constantly poll every process and manage shared resources with multiple processes.
An OS that knows exactly where to devote resources and only has to manage one process.
Multitasking operating systems requires greater complexity which takes more power, that’s a pretty basic fact.
Or maybe you would like to tell me that all those complex algorithms required to juggle a bunch of processes can magically use less energy.
Edited 2010-10-06 19:13 UTC
Battery life is quite comparable on the iPhone4 and the Nexus one – that’s proof enough that you don’t really need extra layers like opt-in multitasking and freezing background programs. Moreover, that terminology does not make sense on the Android platform. Can’t speak for Windows Mobile 7, but I can explain it maybe in another way. Let’s get back to your original point:
“What they should have is opt-in multitasking.
The reason they would freeze running apps in the background is to preserve battery life.”
There is one common misunderstanding here. When we say running, we usually mean it does something (executes code on the CPU). But running in the background does not necessarily means that. What makes zero sense is the opt-in multitasking in your post. An app either needs to run continuously or periodically, ie it needs to be awake, or it doesn’t. Examples for the former are alarm clocks (needs to poll the current time), email clients (if you don’t set them for manual sync), or Skype that waits for an incoming call. Incidentally, I just checked, having Skype in the background (signed in, online) uses 0 CPU (stared at the CPU use for half a minute).
Other programs do exactly nothing. I file manager does not need to be closed, gallery (the photo app on android) needs not to be closed, the calendar app needs not to be closed, etc. They don’t execute any code on the CPU at all. In fact, and that’s the main point of the article I linked, starting these apps use CPU cycles (=battery) – so backgrounding them makes sense, and in fact may save battery. In fact this was the default behaviour on WinMO 6.1 and 6.5. On my Touch HD I had to long-press the exit button to actually exit it, just pressing it once would background the given application. WinMO 6.x had tons of faults (ugly and clumsy interface for instance), but battery life was never one of them.
You don’t need special magic to preserve battery life, regardless of SJ’s marketing talk. And my beef, as I said, is with the opt-in part. It’s superfluous. Either an app needs to run code constantly (music player) or periodically (alarm clock) or not – it depends on its function. All apps that don’t need to run code on the CPU simply don’t do it NOW. A backgrounded Notes app or a file manager would use exactly zero CPU. Of course you can say that these apps did not opt in for multitasking but that sounds like nonsense to me. Similarly, you can call applications that need to wait on an interrupt, or need to poll periodically opt-in multitasking apps.
If this doesn’t convince you nothing will. WinMO has been out with full multitasking for years, and battery life was never a problem. Android has full multitasking without any opt-in magic, and it has no problems either. Apple is out (finally!) with a multitasking mobile OS, and as far as I heard, it works well too. You seem to believe that they did something special here, and in a sense they did. But it’s not something that is better than the way multitasking is implemented in other mobile operating systems. In other words, your suggestion is a solution to a non-existent problem. My phone works very well without it thank you very much. My previous phone multitasked without impact on battery life as well.
Actually we are both talking shit. I did a little research, and it seems that all mobile OSs do some sort of freeze in the background. Android suspends an app that is not visible to the user (no processing whatsoever), winmo 6.x does that too I believe (my experience tells me that at least), and iOS of course. The way they handle apps that needs polling (location, music, skype) is different however.
That leaves Windows Mobile 7 the only mobile os that does not do multitasking in any form. What the hell are they thinking?
Anyway, it was an interesting conversation, thanks
Edited 2010-10-06 20:42 UTC
Problem is, it does not matter. User satisfaction matters more than battery life or any other non-critical technological concern.
Mobile internet connections have crappy speed as a general rule, with high bandwidth being the exception.
Therefore, it’s fairly common when browsing a news website using a phone to open all interesting items in the background. While you’re looking for them, the first background items get loaded. The user is kept busy most of the time, he does not lose time, so he is happy.
If you freeze background loading, it means that the user will have to wait for EDGE-speed downloads, one tab at a time. During the time he waits, he constantly polls the device, so the screen keeps on permanently, which is a waste of energy too. With a unhappy user as a bonus.
You do have a point with background JS, but only on pages that already loaded, and even then under certain circumstances only (what if I’m listening to music on a multimedia website and the music stops each time I go to another tab ?).
Choosing which JS should be stopped when in the background is a problem for mobile web browsers, NOT multitasking abilities of the OS itself. Simply put, freezing tasks is not always the best thing to do.
Edited 2010-10-07 09:34 UTC
WinMo multitasking (at least in 5) was awful. You’d open up a task bar, and try to kill apps. You’d never know if the app was eating up CPU, and killing your battery. And killing the App didn’t always result in its demise. And sometimes it would crash the phone.
Does this mean we will be seeing BSODs, malware, virus/spyware scanners, defraggers and such on these phones?
Oh yeah and will one have to reactivate the phone every other day to make sure ms has gotten every dime they think is owed to them?
Edited 2010-10-05 18:28 UTC
Quick, alert the police in your area, there’s going to be a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center buildings on September the 11th using hijacked planes. Have you got that?
Although the op does not have a point technically, as your sarcasm indirectly points out, nevertheless there is a point from a PR or marketing perspective as “Windows anything” is a very tarnished brand.