Microsoft’s device roadmap has been leaked, and it contains a lot of information about upcoming devices. The most interesting one is the mythical pocketable dual-screen Andromeda.
They do, however, say that Andromeda, Microsoft’s mythical pocketable, two-screen, hand-held device that’s supposed to carve out a whole new market for itself, is due for release in 2018. The documents also say that, after Andromeda, Microsoft OEMs will produce their own comparable products, just as they’ve done with Surface Pro.
The big question for Andromeda is the same as it has always been: why? To define a new hardware form factor, as appears to be the intent, its design needs to be particularly suitable for something. Surface Pro, for example, has appealed particularly to groups such as students (taking notes with OneNote) and artists, thanks to its form factor and multimodal input support. To succeed, Andromeda needs to offer similar appeal – it needs to enable something that’s widely useful and ill-suited to existing hardware. But presently, there are few ideas of just what that role might be.
From what I understand, it will look something like this, and its entire UI is Modern/Fluent Design/Metro – there’s no Win32 here, no traditional Start menu, and so on. With the device being pocketable, my biggest open question is whether or not it will have phone functionality, effectively making it a Surface phone, and a new attempt at breaking into the smartphone market.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/9/17444200/intel-tiger-rapids-dual-s…
I’ve done my part on it
I think the device will come with a 4G sim support, but not to compete with a phone.
More as a source of data. My guess is that this is better thought of as an evolution of Netbooks, not Phones.
With one screen acting effectively as a keyboard most of the time. I see this as the first major commercial attempt to replace the physical keyboard with a dedicated touchscreen. When not used as a keyboard, gives a larger note-taking/viewing area.
If the price point is right (I am thinking around £500) then this could easily carve itself a nice little niche. I would certainly buy one.
Reinventing the wheel : http://mycalcdb.free.fr/galerie/P/psion.revo_PLUS.7.jpg
Might call it a revolution of said wheel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J17VQaq4utQ
It just needs the words “Don’t Panic” written in large friendly letters on the front.
Remember how the first surface was a complete flop and MS had to eat tons in inventory? Yeah, I’m predicting that kind of approach if they try to produce it in the same numbers. They might be wise to try a limited roll out to prove the demand first.
With a good PR campaign, you can always generate some demand to the target audience.
What? No. Don’t hype something terrible. You don’t need to launch to five billion customers if you don’t know if 10,000 will even buy it.
See the microsoft kin phones for another example. Great marketing on that, which just made it more painful for everyone. Made people less sure of buying new microsoft devices.
Zune
I’m not qualified to judge the portable audio player wars. I bought a creative labs zen, early. Never needed to update it. Never understood why people liked ipods or itunes, or the click wheel.
Had (have) a Zen (4GB) too, the biggest drawbacks it had : stupid memory partitioning, uncompressed video format, oled screen that turned pink and almost invisible even in the dark. Otherwise great device, even used one normal AA battery, so convenient.
Oh, the portable audio player war was quite simple, really. iPods won not because they were versatile or even amazing, but because Apple were one of the first to integrate a comprehensive music store with their devices. No more buying a CD, ripping it, then loading the files. One click, purchase, and sync it over. The DRM wasn’t overly intrusive and they had a large amount of record labels on board so most current music could be purchased in a digital format the day it came out. The fact that iPods were the first players in 2001 to offer a decent amount of storage didn’t hurt either, though their initial exclusivity to Macintosh users would have seriously hurt them had they been dumb enough to continue that way.
There were dozens of better audio players out there; Cowon sounded better, iRiver could play a lot more audio formats, and most of them had USB mass storage support to boot. The iPod still won despite this, because of the iTunes ecosystem behind it. It took years for other ecosystems to catch up and, unfortunately, by that time it was too late and the dedicated audio player market was on its way out.
Only in few most visible / loud markets. But if you look at sales chart ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ipod_sales_per_quarter.svg ), it’s clear that iPods (even in those visible markets) really took off only with iPod Nano and Shuffle …and by that time, in most other places, people were already listening to music mostly on mobile phones / they leapfrogged dedicated music players (I read once that in 2006 already ~25% of European mobile phone users consumed music on their phones …only in that one market that was already more people that the total number of iPods ever made)
If it’s got that ugly distorted display around the hinge, then forget it.
It needs to add two notches and matching chins. Then it’ll sell like crazy, why not out a fruit on the back. Like a rasbutan
It’s a pocket Courier!
http://i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/000/264/241/9e9.gif