6 ms·

Microsoft Wants to Embed Windows Phone into Every Android Device

32 points by codelion 13y ago

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
Daegalus 13y ago
I disagree. Even though it seems most people hate WP8, or Microsoft, or whatever gets your panties in a bunch about it, I would love to get one of these. I really like WP8, and have had up to the 920, but there are just some apps that I need right now that don't have even 3rd party equivalents, so I am forced to use Android (its not bad, but I still would prefer WP8 with the same apps) I would buy this in a heartbeat. I have an HTC One anyway, so if its just an HTC One with both, i am right at home.
manojlds 13y ago
At a time when Lumia 520 and Lumia 925 have been selling like hot cakes ( don't know about 1020, but it has excellent reviews so far ) in many regions and WP is slowly, slowly gaining some market share, the article seems to underestimate WP a lot.
- camus 13y ago
  > At a time when Lumia 520 and Lumia 925 have been selling like hot cakes "Selling like hot cakes" is not enough given all the money poured into this fiasco. People just dont want Microsoft Phones. Microsoft will learn the hardway eventually that its reign is over, and no MSFT PR can change that. Remember when MSFTbots "were spamming" WP7 as a success? WP8 will meet the same fate. The Open Handset Alliance is a success no MSFT cant beat.
molecule 13y ago
Stage 3: Bargaining http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model
TYPE_FASTER 13y ago
Instead of effectively dual-booting Android/WPF, Microsoft should add a compatibility layer to WPF to run Android apps.
- Raphael 13y ago
  Not mutually exclusive.
- Someone 13y ago
  == Microsoft should kill their platform. If all windows phones ran all android apps, why would anyone write apps for Windows phones? That's especially true for the long tail. A popular a Windows phone OS with Android support may get a Twitter app and a Facebook app, but your bank's app or that public transport one? Forget it. We have seen that with OS/2 and its Windows compatibility layer, with Mac OS when Apple advocated Java, and in some sense with Linux and Wine (a great effort, but it does give people an excuse for not porting their stuff to Linux.) I think they would be better of writing a launcher for Android that launches Windows apps. If that gets popular, they could start leveraging that by releasing new features on their hardware first and on the Android layer later. Good idea? I wouldn't know, but the reverse certainly isn't.
  - timthorn 13y ago
    That's effectively the same argument as if all smartphones run HTML5 apps, why would anyone write native code?
    - Someone 13y ago
      Only slightly so. The answer to that question is "because they can do more things, better". A native compatibility layer does (almost) everything the 'real' system does, (almost) equally well. If it doesn't, people will be disappointed with it, and by extension, with your system ("yes, Windows Phone can run Android apps, but some will crash, and that game does only 20 frames per second") If/when HTML can provide the same experience as native code on a mobile phone, many of what now are apps will move to web-only.
bsullivan01 13y ago
"Revise Windows Phone. Right now, as nice as it looks, there are a lot of reasons to choose Android or iPhone over Windows Phone, but few reasons to choose Windows Phone over Android and iPhone" Revise what exactly? Windows is perfectly fine for probably 95% of the people. Revising it will not make a difference, but price, branding, apps, deals with Verizon, AT&T etc will make a difference.
- manojlds 13y ago
  The article talks about lots of "reasons" without giving any example.
beloch 13y ago
How is more choice bad for consumers? There are phones I currently wouldn't touch that I would consider using if I could put any mobile OS I wanted onto them. We should applaud HTC if they choose to make phones that aren't locked to one OS. If MS wants to provide a struggling HTC with incentives to do just that, so much the better.
- Raphael 13y ago
  Wastes storage space.
  - bsullivan01 13y ago
    That's exactly why Microsoft doesn't make it easy /easier for dual boot Windows /Linux machines. They want you to have more space available. Isn't that great? ;-)
  - fiatmoney 13y ago
    I don't understand the downvotes here. On a device with 16gb of storage, 2gb or so for another OS that you may or may not be able to get back is significant - especially since things like "usable capacity" are rarely disclosed at the point of sale.
- camus 13y ago
  > How is more choice bad ? Oh please , Windows has never been about choice. How many people buying computers "chosed" Windows? MSFT did not become what it is by letting customers, businesse,OEMs choose.
- ihsw 13y ago
  Three words: embrace, extend, extinguish. Microsoft will push for better interoperability between the two OSes, however MS will notably utilize proprietary features (disk access protocols or some-such) and encourage handset manufacturers to utilize and rely on these proprietary interfaces. What's the problem with this? More features are better, right? Wrong. When it comes to Microsoft, they will happily and quickly change proprietary communications protocols and file formats so that competitors -- AHEM, partners -- cannot keep up with these changes. At some point in the future, MS will ignore requests for technical specifications on the changes made and the partner's features will languish into obsolescence. Features built on top of this integration between the two OSes will be half-baked and second-rate compared to the native Windows Phone experience, and they will be frequently incomplete or unstable. MS will be using this opportunity to influence the direction of Android (and its derivatives), and they will be pushing it directly into the ground. Integration between the two OSes will break and Android will be left out in the cold.
itsbits 13y ago
I am using windows phone for more than 3 months now..and I am happy I moved from Andriod to Windows...
rxp 13y ago
This article is weirdly convinced that Microsoft is talking about dual-booting WP and Android, but even the source article they cite says that that's pretty unlikely.
- xerophtye 13y ago
  Yeah... from the cited article[1]: "Of course, there’s no official confirmation this type of deal has been discussed, so it must be taken as a rumor for now." [1] http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/microsoft-wants-windows-phone-on-htcs-android-phones/ http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/microsoft-wants-windows-...
tass 13y ago
If I had the option of a good, dual-booting phone, I would take it. If I could then quickly switch to the other OS within a virtual machine to run an app or access some data, even better. There's a lot of crud behind why it's a bad idea rather than actual reasoning.
zobzu 13y ago
i'd be happy if i could load "whatever os i want" on my phone. android, windows, firefoxos, or a random linux distro. ;-)
- Mikeb85 13y ago
  This of course would be the ideal situation for the consumer. Doubt it will happen though.
void-star 13y ago
Triple boot to iOS and I'll think about it...
PakG1 13y ago
Microsoft is taking something out of Google's playbook. Google is doing something similar with their Chrome apps on Windows, just that this is a lot crazier and resource intensive.
- Mikeb85 13y ago
  Except at least Google is making their platform available on every other platform (that allows them in anyway). With Microsoft you know that eventually they're just going to pull out the rug and lock everyone in...
guardian5x 13y ago
This article is based on rumors that are not even very likely. I'm surprised its voted up so high. I guess when its about bashing MS, the facts don't even matter so much.
uvTwitch 13y ago
What Microsoft should probably be doing instead, is writing some software layer to enable running apps based on a certain popular open-source operating system to run seamlessly on their device alongside native apps. If they did, it wouldn't be the first time MS has written a better Java VM than the official implentation.
kilroy123 13y ago
The Lumia windows phones actually don't look that bad, and I've heard from people they're pretty slick. However, it's not just a phone you're buying and wanting, it's an ecosystem. You want email, music, video, apps, and everything in between, to sync seamlessly with all your devices. I don't want Microsoft's ecosystem, and more and more people don't these days. As far as dual booting windows, I would probably try it once, and never try again.
- tluyben2 13y ago
  I think this is the point; I don't know many people who care at all what OS the phone is running. They buy Lumia because it was a good deal but don't really notice what is running on it. They start complaining when it's hard to put their music/movies on it; when they cannot play the games their friends are playing or when they cannot use certain apps. My wife has a Lumia and is complaining how it is far more annoying to transfer music/movies/pics to it than Android / iOS which currently is the reason she doesn't really use it despite it being decent smartphone. I see some changes as well when it comes to apps and games; in 'the olden days' when you wanted to create software you picked some eco system and was kind of bound to it if you wanted to have a half decent user experience. Like you had to pick DOS or Win or Unix or Mac OS (before that even options like Amiga/Atari); cross platform stuff hardly existed and if it did it was horrible. Now, especially for games, it is possible to reuse almost all code on all platforms, so launches of apps/games are simply across platforms. So why would you care about what OS you are running? It's not like the interfaces are vastly different... Which is the other difference; I still know people who cannot 'use' anything else than Windows; they just don't 'get' it when they are in front of Mac OS X or Ubuntu. That's why Win8 without start button was such a bad idea; a lot of 'non geeks' just couldn't use it at all after the previous versions since '95. With touch devices all are simple enough for my 93 year old grandfather to use; all of them. Android, iOS, Firefox OS, WP8 etc. They are not the same but so simple they are interchangeable after a few minutes interface wise. Another reason to not care about the OS at all.
josteink 13y ago
What Microsoft is slowly discovering is what their competitors discovered back in the 90s: how hard it is to enter an established market. Back then Apple was also ahead of the curve for a long time and carved out is own niche market, slowly to see a competitor take the mainstream market share. No matter how good your solution is, no matter if it is technically superior, like Linux was in most respects compared to 16-bit and pre-nt versions of windows, once an established player appears, the dominant platform already has the key applications and mindshare and because of that gets to keep it. Thus in Linux-land people made wine to cover their windows compatibility needs. Will Microsoft admit defeat and add an android compatibility layer into windows phone? I doubt it, but I have no doubt they should.
dnautics 13y ago
They tried to do this with BeOS back in the day. They forced hitachi and sony to release their BeOS machines with windows as the primary boot and hid the BeOS from usage.
jpd750 13y ago
Isn't this just point of desperation! MS just needs to learn they wont rule in an android-iphone dominated market ... kinda like blackberry... wait who?

32 points by codelion 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

I disagree. Even though it seems most people hate WP8, or Microsoft, or whatever gets your panties in a bunch about it, I would love to get one of these. I really like WP8, and have had up to the 920, but there are just some apps that I need right now that don't have even 3rd party equivalents, so I am forced to use Android (its not bad, but I still would prefer WP8 with the same apps) I would buy this in a heartbeat. I have an HTC One anyway, so if its just an HTC One with both, i am right at home.

manojlds 13y ago

At a time when Lumia 520 and Lumia 925 have been selling like hot cakes ( don't know about 1020, but it has excellent reviews so far ) in many regions and WP is slowly, slowly gaining some market share, the article seems to underestimate WP a lot.

camus 13y ago
> At a time when Lumia 520 and Lumia 925 have been selling like hot cakes "Selling like hot cakes" is not enough given all the money poured into this fiasco. People just dont want Microsoft Phones. Microsoft will learn the hardway eventually that its reign is over, and no MSFT PR can change that. Remember when MSFTbots "were spamming" WP7 as a success? WP8 will meet the same fate. The Open Handset Alliance is a success no MSFT cant beat.

molecule 13y ago

Stage 3: Bargaining http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model

TYPE_FASTER 13y ago

Instead of effectively dual-booting Android/WPF, Microsoft should add a compatibility layer to WPF to run Android apps.

Raphael 13y ago
Not mutually exclusive.
Someone 13y ago
== Microsoft should kill their platform. If all windows phones ran all android apps, why would anyone write apps for Windows phones? That's especially true for the long tail. A popular a Windows phone OS with Android support may get a Twitter app and a Facebook app, but your bank's app or that public transport one? Forget it. We have seen that with OS/2 and its Windows compatibility layer, with Mac OS when Apple advocated Java, and in some sense with Linux and Wine (a great effort, but it does give people an excuse for not porting their stuff to Linux.) I think they would be better of writing a launcher for Android that launches Windows apps. If that gets popular, they could start leveraging that by releasing new features on their hardware first and on the Android layer later. Good idea? I wouldn't know, but the reverse certainly isn't.
- timthorn 13y ago
  That's effectively the same argument as if all smartphones run HTML5 apps, why would anyone write native code?
  - Someone 13y ago
    Only slightly so. The answer to that question is "because they can do more things, better". A native compatibility layer does (almost) everything the 'real' system does, (almost) equally well. If it doesn't, people will be disappointed with it, and by extension, with your system ("yes, Windows Phone can run Android apps, but some will crash, and that game does only 20 frames per second") If/when HTML can provide the same experience as native code on a mobile phone, many of what now are apps will move to web-only.

bsullivan01 13y ago

"Revise Windows Phone. Right now, as nice as it looks, there are a lot of reasons to choose Android or iPhone over Windows Phone, but few reasons to choose Windows Phone over Android and iPhone" Revise what exactly? Windows is perfectly fine for probably 95% of the people. Revising it will not make a difference, but price, branding, apps, deals with Verizon, AT&T etc will make a difference.

manojlds 13y ago
The article talks about lots of "reasons" without giving any example.

beloch 13y ago

How is more choice bad for consumers? There are phones I currently wouldn't touch that I would consider using if I could put any mobile OS I wanted onto them. We should applaud HTC if they choose to make phones that aren't locked to one OS. If MS wants to provide a struggling HTC with incentives to do just that, so much the better.

Raphael 13y ago
Wastes storage space.
- bsullivan01 13y ago
  That's exactly why Microsoft doesn't make it easy /easier for dual boot Windows /Linux machines. They want you to have more space available. Isn't that great? ;-)
- fiatmoney 13y ago
  I don't understand the downvotes here. On a device with 16gb of storage, 2gb or so for another OS that you may or may not be able to get back is significant - especially since things like "usable capacity" are rarely disclosed at the point of sale.
camus 13y ago
> How is more choice bad ? Oh please , Windows has never been about choice. How many people buying computers "chosed" Windows? MSFT did not become what it is by letting customers, businesse,OEMs choose.
ihsw 13y ago
Three words: embrace, extend, extinguish. Microsoft will push for better interoperability between the two OSes, however MS will notably utilize proprietary features (disk access protocols or some-such) and encourage handset manufacturers to utilize and rely on these proprietary interfaces. What's the problem with this? More features are better, right? Wrong. When it comes to Microsoft, they will happily and quickly change proprietary communications protocols and file formats so that competitors -- AHEM, partners -- cannot keep up with these changes. At some point in the future, MS will ignore requests for technical specifications on the changes made and the partner's features will languish into obsolescence. Features built on top of this integration between the two OSes will be half-baked and second-rate compared to the native Windows Phone experience, and they will be frequently incomplete or unstable. MS will be using this opportunity to influence the direction of Android (and its derivatives), and they will be pushing it directly into the ground. Integration between the two OSes will break and Android will be left out in the cold.

itsbits 13y ago

I am using windows phone for more than 3 months now..and I am happy I moved from Andriod to Windows...

rxp 13y ago

This article is weirdly convinced that Microsoft is talking about dual-booting WP and Android, but even the source article they cite says that that's pretty unlikely.

xerophtye 13y ago
Yeah... from the cited article[1]: "Of course, there’s no official confirmation this type of deal has been discussed, so it must be taken as a rumor for now." [1] http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/microsoft-wants-windows-phone-on-htcs-android-phones/ http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/microsoft-wants-windows-...

tass 13y ago

If I had the option of a good, dual-booting phone, I would take it. If I could then quickly switch to the other OS within a virtual machine to run an app or access some data, even better. There's a lot of crud behind why it's a bad idea rather than actual reasoning.

zobzu 13y ago

i'd be happy if i could load "whatever os i want" on my phone. android, windows, firefoxos, or a random linux distro. ;-)

Mikeb85 13y ago
This of course would be the ideal situation for the consumer. Doubt it will happen though.

void-star 13y ago

Triple boot to iOS and I'll think about it...

PakG1 13y ago

Microsoft is taking something out of Google's playbook. Google is doing something similar with their Chrome apps on Windows, just that this is a lot crazier and resource intensive.

Mikeb85 13y ago
Except at least Google is making their platform available on every other platform (that allows them in anyway). With Microsoft you know that eventually they're just going to pull out the rug and lock everyone in...

guardian5x 13y ago

This article is based on rumors that are not even very likely. I'm surprised its voted up so high. I guess when its about bashing MS, the facts don't even matter so much.

uvTwitch 13y ago

What Microsoft should probably be doing instead, is writing some software layer to enable running apps based on a certain popular open-source operating system to run seamlessly on their device alongside native apps. If they did, it wouldn't be the first time MS has written a better Java VM than the official implentation.

kilroy123 13y ago

The Lumia windows phones actually don't look that bad, and I've heard from people they're pretty slick. However, it's not just a phone you're buying and wanting, it's an ecosystem. You want email, music, video, apps, and everything in between, to sync seamlessly with all your devices. I don't want Microsoft's ecosystem, and more and more people don't these days. As far as dual booting windows, I would probably try it once, and never try again.

tluyben2 13y ago
I think this is the point; I don't know many people who care at all what OS the phone is running. They buy Lumia because it was a good deal but don't really notice what is running on it. They start complaining when it's hard to put their music/movies on it; when they cannot play the games their friends are playing or when they cannot use certain apps. My wife has a Lumia and is complaining how it is far more annoying to transfer music/movies/pics to it than Android / iOS which currently is the reason she doesn't really use it despite it being decent smartphone. I see some changes as well when it comes to apps and games; in 'the olden days' when you wanted to create software you picked some eco system and was kind of bound to it if you wanted to have a half decent user experience. Like you had to pick DOS or Win or Unix or Mac OS (before that even options like Amiga/Atari); cross platform stuff hardly existed and if it did it was horrible. Now, especially for games, it is possible to reuse almost all code on all platforms, so launches of apps/games are simply across platforms. So why would you care about what OS you are running? It's not like the interfaces are vastly different... Which is the other difference; I still know people who cannot 'use' anything else than Windows; they just don't 'get' it when they are in front of Mac OS X or Ubuntu. That's why Win8 without start button was such a bad idea; a lot of 'non geeks' just couldn't use it at all after the previous versions since '95. With touch devices all are simple enough for my 93 year old grandfather to use; all of them. Android, iOS, Firefox OS, WP8 etc. They are not the same but so simple they are interchangeable after a few minutes interface wise. Another reason to not care about the OS at all.

josteink 13y ago

What Microsoft is slowly discovering is what their competitors discovered back in the 90s: how hard it is to enter an established market. Back then Apple was also ahead of the curve for a long time and carved out is own niche market, slowly to see a competitor take the mainstream market share. No matter how good your solution is, no matter if it is technically superior, like Linux was in most respects compared to 16-bit and pre-nt versions of windows, once an established player appears, the dominant platform already has the key applications and mindshare and because of that gets to keep it. Thus in Linux-land people made wine to cover their windows compatibility needs. Will Microsoft admit defeat and add an android compatibility layer into windows phone? I doubt it, but I have no doubt they should.

dnautics 13y ago

They tried to do this with BeOS back in the day. They forced hitachi and sony to release their BeOS machines with windows as the primary boot and hid the BeOS from usage.

jpd750 13y ago

Isn't this just point of desperation! MS just needs to learn they wont rule in an android-iphone dominated market ... kinda like blackberry... wait who?