3 ms·

I've owned a couple of BlackBerry and each new one was a worse experience than its predecessor. I was pretty happy with my Bold 9000, by that time it was conven

I've owned a couple of BlackBerry and each new one was a worse experience than its predecessor. I was pretty happy with my Bold 9000, by that time it was convenient, fast and very good at email and texts (what I do mostly). Then others caught up. The newer BlackBerry had a crappy keyboard and they weren't very good at playing MP3 and there were very few applications. At some point I gave up and I switched to the Lumia 700. My only regret is that I didn't switch earlier. Except for the lack of keyboard and S/MIME support, it has got everything I want and offers it with a great interface. It's very good with emails, excellent with Exchange integration (and free!) and has a decent application offer (although not up to par with the iPhone, but I don't really care, all the ones I need are there). I've been extremely impressed by Microsoft and this pivot. I knew the heart of Windows CE was very good (very solid real time Operating System), but all Windows PocketPC and phones I had sucked a lot and were awful to use because of the interface and the crappy hardware. I don't see how BlackBerry can survive this.

masklinn 14y ago
> I knew the heart of Windows CE was very good (very solid real time Operating System) That's been scrapped for Windows Phone 8 though. It is NT-based.
- gouranga 14y ago
  Indeed. Without wanting to gush too much, but NT is a wonderful piece of technology. It's orders of magnitude better than anything else on the market without a doubt for any application. The bit people have the "hate problem" with is the Win32 subsystem that is chucked on top of it.
  - shin_lao 14y ago
    I've got many years of experience working with the NT kernel world (filesystem layer especially) and I can't upvote you enough. There aren't that many OS that have a working, unified, cache, a good hardware abstraction layer or the possibility to run any subsystem. My only regret is that Microsoft didn't open the subsystem API enough. I submit they want to keep some freedom in this area.
  - sageikosa 14y ago
    I believe Windows NT is wonderful as well. But it wasn't designed as a real-time OS, whereas CE was; hence the comments that CE was "scrapped" for NT in Windows Phone 8. The lack of real-time handling probably won't have much impact on the phone platform, since users (the primary interface consumers of the OS) don't operate anywhere near "real-time" anyway.
    - gouranga 14y ago
      This is true. I think most of the RT stuff i.e. GSM/3G stuff is offloaded onto dedicated devices.
    - shin_lao 14y ago
      It's not a lot of work to make Windows NT real-time. Back in the time of NT 4.0 there was a modified kernel that was hard real-time (as far as I can remember).

masklinn 14y ago

> I knew the heart of Windows CE was very good (very solid real time Operating System) That's been scrapped for Windows Phone 8 though. It is NT-based.

gouranga 14y ago
Indeed. Without wanting to gush too much, but NT is a wonderful piece of technology. It's orders of magnitude better than anything else on the market without a doubt for any application. The bit people have the "hate problem" with is the Win32 subsystem that is chucked on top of it.
- shin_lao 14y ago
  I've got many years of experience working with the NT kernel world (filesystem layer especially) and I can't upvote you enough. There aren't that many OS that have a working, unified, cache, a good hardware abstraction layer or the possibility to run any subsystem. My only regret is that Microsoft didn't open the subsystem API enough. I submit they want to keep some freedom in this area.
- sageikosa 14y ago
  I believe Windows NT is wonderful as well. But it wasn't designed as a real-time OS, whereas CE was; hence the comments that CE was "scrapped" for NT in Windows Phone 8. The lack of real-time handling probably won't have much impact on the phone platform, since users (the primary interface consumers of the OS) don't operate anywhere near "real-time" anyway.
  - gouranga 14y ago
    This is true. I think most of the RT stuff i.e. GSM/3G stuff is offloaded onto dedicated devices.
  - shin_lao 14y ago
    It's not a lot of work to make Windows NT real-time. Back in the time of NT 4.0 there was a modified kernel that was hard real-time (as far as I can remember).