Microsoft just demonstrated one of the intriguing possibilities from its single platform/multiple form factors approach for Windows 10: the ability to use your phone as your desktop computer.
In contrast to Apple’s “Continuity,†which aims to make moving between phone, tablet and desktop seamless, Microsoft’s Continuum instead has the phone you’re using adapt its interface depending on the context you’re using it.
My dream device is getting close, one step at a time.
I agree with you – not because I want to run phone/tablet apps on a desktop, but because I’d rather do that than run web apps. Too many devs making mobile apps that say, ‘Well, if you’re on a desktop, you can just use our web app’. And having a web browser with 30 app tabs open than then goes into a coma and refuses to do anything just gives me Windows 3.1 flashbacks and PTSD
Why did we make all of this effort to make modern, stable desktop operating systems only to digress into running them all in one app inside that OS? It’s ludicrous.
Still though, Microsoft has a long, long history of over-promising and under-delivering, so we’ll just have to wait and see.
Edited 2015-04-29 21:51 UTC
My take? Many reasons:
– “In the cloud ..” has the potential to provide a continued source of income, be it by storage or by other services;
– It is easier to control who is using the apps/resources;
– It is also easier to “force” apps usage to better follow version cycles more aligned with the producer interests;
– It lessens the cost of support/maintenance (see previous item);
– Lock-in by migration encumbrance besides the already present data format incompatibilities;
– If all things are stored on cloud and the data is only presented on a convenient way to us, how can we apply reverse engineering to effectively migrate it to a competitor offering (or how can the competitor do it)?
– There is a huge business potential associated to collecting/analysis of data that goes to the “cloud”. That would make advertising tailoring way more effective (besides what we already have with browsing habits);
Seems reasonable to you?
Edited 2015-04-29 23:54 UTC
No, not really. There are potential benefits to running apps from the cloud…. I’d just rather it not be in a web browser.
Your point is fair but, looking from a developer point of view, there are so many things already in place on modern browsers that not using them just to present the data to you is almost insane. No matter how the processors or systems would evolve, “the browser” will be there on almost any device.
As I said, the vendor keeps its back-end to him and just show your data in a convenient way to you.
And when you are in a ‘No Data Spot’ what happens then?
And when you are in Foreign parts and data is $1/Mb what price the cloud then?
And what use if the cloud if you are flying on a plane with not internet connection?
A No Data Spot is somewhere with no 3G (or better coverage).
Everything is so connected these days that the ‘what if you don’t have Internet access’ just doesn’t hold water anymore, since most apps wouldn’t work regardless. If you live in a place that doesn’t have Internet access or it’s horribly slow/expensive, it’s probably time to move if you want to compete in today’s economy.
http://www.osnews.com/story/28350/Video_demos_Ubuntu_Convergence_on…
If you go back a lot further then to me it all seems like people have been trying to do for a long time:
https://blog.mozilla.org/labs/2010/09/seabird/
Anyway, your mobile phone will be able to do a lot more in a couple of years like virtual reality:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mg-zZXeWyJU
Edited 2015-04-29 21:54 UTC
Indeed it is very like Ubuntu. In fact I’d say that Microsoft lucked into a situation where they could steal (ahem, “borrow”) the idea from Mark Shuttleworth. It certainly wasn’t planning.
Shuttleworth has dreamed this convergence dream since at least late 2010, which as a reference point was only just after Windows Phone 7 was released and almost two whole years before Windows 8.0 came out.
Meanwhile, over at Microsoft, it’s only very recently that the underlying structures necessary for a Continuum-like feature have started to become available.
A form factor scaling version of Office has really only become possible in the last few months thanks to the complete redesign of the codebase to make it easier to compile the same source on all of the various supported platforms (Win32, Metro, OSX, iOS, Android-Phone, Android-Tablet); see http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-microsoft-is-taking-on-the-cross-p…. (On a side note, Microsoft got dragged into doing this after failing to convince people to switch en masse to first-party Windows devices.)
Similarly, the whole idea of “universal” Windows apps only got off the ground in mid-2014 after the dearth of Phone and Metro/RT apps individually unexpectedly continued well past the point of fashionable lateness.
So I suspect that both of these two key building blocks happened largely as a response to the poor sales of Windows Phone and the disastrous reception of Windows 8. Yet once those two key features were in place, the possibility of doing something like a Continuum then became technically feasible without too much further difficulty. And because Microsoft has far more resources than Canonical, I’d say they have a better chance of bringing convergence to market before their British rival, despite being the Johnny-come-lately to the idea.
Fascinating.
Your assumption that Microsoft is always late to the party with ideas, and even code to support those ideas is completely wrong. Microsoft does not develop one idea at a time. They have several teams developing several ideas at once. A lot of good stuff has been shelved thanks to poor decisions from the higher-ups. Microsofts problem has been with its managers and executives, not its think tanks and developers.
Microsoft and ideas can be problematic, especially for ideas from Microsoft Research (as with a lot of research). Getting from idea to product/implementation needs high placed backers inside the company.
A tremendous amount of coordinated software engineering had to occur create what Microsoft presented yesterday. Projects even spanning several years.
Desktop, Phone, Xbox, IOT, Holo graphics, Android compatibility, Objective C in VS, Azure all aligned, are just part of what was announced, not even Google or Apple (2x as big) would try to tame that kind of complexity..But the proof is in the pudding, and as such we shall soon know how well they have done..
Edited 2015-04-30 07:35 UTC
Looks like Nadela is really delivering. Ballmer must have been really poorly managing the company in his last years as with only one year of the new CEO tenure they manage too pool off what they were promissing from 2011.
It’s like a night and day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oi1B9fjVs4
This looks awesome, I could be finally leaving Android for Windows on my phone at this rate.
Considering the size of the latest Macbook motherboard, I think Apple might be the first to produce a phone with desktop-class performance.
If they manage to combine that with wireless 4k+ video output, you got yourself a dream device indeed.
They already did. A8X is faster than Core-M in Macbook.
Is it? The benchmarks I’ve seen put the A8X at roughly equal performance to the bottom-performing 5Y10, which is the lowest performance model, while the MacBook uses the top-performing variants.
But Motorola did it first. The Atrix phones had this 4 years ago. The only thing they didn’t do was put enough ram into the phone to support firefox properly. That and unlocking the environment for custom software would leave Windows phones in the dust. I had two of the Atrix phones. They were fantastic, well made, and other than the ram were pretty damn cool.
Edited 2015-04-30 13:08 UTC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3PUYoa1c9M
Kind off.
Hope this feature will be enabled on existing Lumia devices. The ending of the presentation does state that this feature will rely on hardware implementation from OEM’s that will be available after Windows 10 launch..
There’s also the developer support to take into account. I do hope this will catch on, but Windows phone is not exactly a first priority right now..
When I saw the demo, my first thought was if a phone could have enough processing power to run a desktop. Of course the answer is yes. I’ve got a first gen Surface RT that does a passable job and that’s with a Tegra 3 processor.
My next thought was that this may be the beginning of the end of the desktop. If you have a solution where you just plug your phone into a cradle and you’ve got a full sized keyboard, mouse, and monitor – what would you need a desktop computer for? They would be relegated to workstations for power users. Regular home users could just use their phones.
This is where Intel comes in. If this works and it’s using ARM processors, Intel will lose a HUGE chunk of its market. I think they’ve seen this possibility and that’s why they’ve put so much energy into the Atom mobile processor. I also think that they’ll put as much pressure as they can on Microsoft to put an Atom into the new flagship Windows Phones. They’ve already got their CPUs into some Android products but Android isn’t positioning itself to take over the desktop – not yet. Windows Phone is.
While this new technology increases the usability of a smartphone or tablet, no way does it replicate or replace the function of an actual desktop computer.
An incredible leap of multiple technologies would be necessary in order for a smartphone to compete with the performance and capability of a ‘real’ computer. Graphics, processor, power wattage, storage, memory…
I can see the point though, and the idea is moderately attractive. A smartphone or tablet would ~only~ be useful to me if it could be used with a real keyboard and monitor. And it could interact with a multi-port hub to allows for drawing tablets, optical drives, card readers, printers, scanners, hard drives, other portable appliances, or practically any standard device.
But if connecting all of that stuff to a smartphone/tablet to make it usable, why not just snap together an actual computer?
I don’t see that Continuum offers any advantage over simply connecting a portable device to a computer via USB. ??? What am I missing?
That’s the beauty of it – you would be able to do all those things. Sure mobile processors and gpus are not up to snuff for serious gamers (at least not yet) but for the average user, they are fine.
As for peripherals, there’s no reason that you couldn’t get a docking station for your phone that would give you all the expandability you need. The limitation is becoming less about hardware an more about programs.
With continuum, programs are designed to support multiple screen sizes. My thoughts were always “who wants to run phone apps on a full sized monitor?”, however Microsoft is not saying that the same back end code will be able to support multiple screen sizes. So, once the phone knows that a full monitor is plugged in, the apps become desktop apps.
Sure you can have a full desktop, but for the average user, there will be less of a need.
First, I love the idea.
But the problem is that the operating environments between the two are so different.
The touch based mobile interface vs a mouse/keyboard based desktop have different idioms of interaction.
Then combine with a UI designed for a small display vs one for a large display, or even the domain of 10s engagement of a mobile app vs the sit down and work of a desktop environment. Obviously there are cross over apps, “real” apps on “mobile”, but…still.
It puts a large burden on developers to create two different UI experiences.