Understanding what WP7 is and the true pros/cons.

[DavidinCT]

Originally Posted by gTen

It is not illegal to modify software as long as you don't plan to resell it and those that use it are licensed to use it.

Just a question....Don't take offence to it..

Have you ever actually read a ULA when installing Windows or read one for Windows Mobile ? By hacking WM, your breaking/disasembling Microsoft owned code.

No not illegal but, against the licence agreement, and if they wanted to, they could cause a big nightmare for some people.

Hacking open WP7 will be a big deal for them....Don't be shocked when you see the "letter" posted in the annoucement area, and all talk about it has to stop ASAP.

[gTen]

Originally Posted by DavidinCT

Just a question....Don't take offence to it..

Have you ever actually read a ULA when installing Windows or read one for Windows Mobile ? By hacking WM, your breaking/disasembling Microsoft owned code.

No not illegal but, against the licence agreement, and if they wanted to, they could cause a big nightmare for some people.

Hacking open WP7 will be a big deal for them....Don't be shocked when you see the "letter" posted in the annoucement area, and all talk about it has to stop ASAP.

That makes me wonder actually..where is the Windows mobile EULA? when buying a pc it is always included...but I have never seen one for a Windows Mobile phone or device...

[testacon]

Originally Posted by cohowap

1.) I'll start with the hardest one, No Multi-Tasking.

So not be able to listen to music while say reading an email is acceptable after having this ability for quite some time--real innovation talking here...

Originally Posted by cohowap

2.) No Side-Loading Application.

I guess censorship in the marketplace shouldn't bother anyone, frankly I'm getting ready to go to a book burning right now as I type. Having the ability to delete apps from your phone without user permission is all good especially when the carriers go crying to Microsoft about bandwidth or other concerns--hey where did that netflix app go?

Originally Posted by cohowap

3.) No Backward Compatibility.

I can live with this one, no harm no foul...

Originally Posted by cohowap

4.) No Copy and Paste.

I guess businesses should just avoid this phone altogether then, I copy and paste contacts, emails, and links daily on my phone. Considering I run an IT department for a college, I probably don't know what my students/faculty/administration wants. Plus it's not like other phones have this ability.

Originally Posted by cohowap

5.) No File System.

I hope they pay Apple some serious money for stealing ALL of their ideas.

Originally Posted by cohowap

6.) No removable storage.

If the built in memory is someone between 32G and 64G, I can live with it...

Originally Posted by cohowap

7.) No USB Drive Mode.

Even though it has a file system, I can't even use it as a basic thumbdrive? How stupid is that? So much for one device in my pocket that can be used for everything. This will most likely be broken soon after release, so why waste our time with implementing it to begin with.

Originally Posted by cohowap

8.) No 3rd Party UI Replacements/Customization.

If it makes the phone more stable, I can live with it.

Originally Posted by cohowap

9.) No Native Code Execution.

I could have lived with it provided that Microsoft had little to say about whether or not an App is approved. But this just smells more like Apple type censorship. I can't wait for all you developers wasting months and resources creating apps only to have Microsoft deny them for no reason like Apple does, just please don't complain to us later on about it.


Post rant:
For all the new great things this phone does, it breaks what made it Windows. There is NOTHING Windows-ish about this phone. They should have just called it AppleMobile7, or ZunePhone and killed the product line called Windows Mobile.

Time will only tell who is right and who is wrong.

All I know is this, sitting back and waiting to see what Microsoft dictates to us isn't going to accomplish anything. The only way to make change is to complain about it and hope that mainstream media outlets pick up the story and bash Microsoft article after article and then maybe they'll come to their senses. Every day the Android EVO is looking better and better.

[gTen]

Actually..M$ said that their programs will run in background so you can play music and read an email..for everything else there is android (pun of the mastercard commercial >.>)...

[testacon]

Originally Posted by gTen

Actually..M$ said that their programs will run in background so you can play music and read an email..for everything else there is android (pun of the mastercard commercial >.>)...

But you get the general concern, you get an email with a pdf or word attachment, you open up the attachment while listening to music probably will end something else that's running concurrently. Even placing the cap at two or three processes concurrently is much better then just one. This is a optimized 1Ghz CPU and currently we are able to do this now, with a significantly slower CPU and less ram. This is the best they can come up with in the 4 years of development since the release of the iPhone? For the amount of slamming I do with Apple, they got copy and paste, they are rumored to be getting multitasking in the new release and Microsoft is bringing even less features to the table then that which they are trying to clone. Yet for some reason, everyone is excited and pleased by this. Why?

I truly don't understand why more of you don't get this. What makes your phone different then a PC? Would any of you complain if suddenly Microsoft XP/VISTA/7 turned off the DVD/CD player on your computer. What about not be able to install programs that aren't signed by M$? Prevented you from building OEM equipment like Apple does? Made you activate Windows every time you installed it, even know it's their crappy programing issues that causes the exploits that viruses use and then punished because of a re-install--whoops they do that now, don't they? Would any of you care then, why is the phone any different?

This blind loyalty to M$ just kills me!

[gTen]

Originally Posted by testacon

But you get the general concern, you get an email with a pdf or word attachment, you open up the attachment while listening to music probably will end something else that's running concurrently. Even placing the cap at two or three processes concurrently is much better then just one. This is a optimized 1Ghz CPU and currently we are able to do this now, with a significantly slower CPU and less ram. This is the best they can come up with in the 4 years of development since the release of the iPhone? For the amount of slamming I do with Apple, they got copy and paste, they are rumored to be getting multitasking in the new release and Microsoft is bringing even less features to the table then that which they are trying to clone. Yet for some reason, everyone is excited and pleased by this. Why?

I truly don't understand why more of you don't get this. What makes your phone different then a PC? Would any of you complain if suddenly Microsoft XP/VISTA/7 turned off the DVD/CD player on your computer. What about not be able to install programs that aren't signed by M$? Prevented you from building OEM equipment like Apple does? Made you activate Windows every time you installed it, even know it's their crappy programing issues that causes the exploits that viruses use and then punished because of a re-install--whoops they do that now, don't they? Would any of you care then, why is the phone any different?

This blind loyalty to M$ just kills me!

who is blindly loyal to M$? Most people on this forum are unsatisfied with what they are doing...we already accepted the fact that M$ has abandoned us in favor of the "general consumer"..in my opinion the way they did it will most likely drive their mobile division bankrupt..but thats just me...

[testacon]

Originally Posted by gTen

who is blindly loyal to M$? Most people on this forum are unsatisfied with what they are doing...we already accepted the fact that M$ has abandoned us in favor of the "general consumer"..in my opinion the way they did it will most likely drive their mobile division bankrupt..but thats just me...

I didn't mean to make you the recipient of this post, I was commenting about how the email multitasking was still going to have issues, and then went off tangent--apologies...

[cohowap]

Actually, I think people are getting more bent out on the multi-tasking than they should.

The reality is, you will still be able to do any of the phone native features (zune, web downloads, phone calls, etc...) without being interupted. There is essentially 2 layers of code execution.

Layer 1) System Level - These are apps designed to run in the background, most likely writting with the NDK that MS isn't releasing publically but can be requested by OEMs and larger development companies, such as pandora and other main stream companies.

Layer 2) The everyday Joe. This is code that you and I write. These apps run on the Silverlight or XNA runtime and are essentially ran in "Protected" mode, where the OS will execute them outside the realm of the OS. This will keep resources secured and functionality of the native phone features to a maximum performance level. Moreover, it will allow the third part application your running to get more resources to power it.

Now, while this model doesn't sound ideal, the fact is, to a user you will only have 1 of these apps open at a time anyways. Thus, it doesn't really matter if the OS makes it pause or kills the resource. If the third party app is coded correctly, it will be transparent to the user anyways. You will go back to the application in the same state it was left. The only problem here is if the app was downloading data or set to update some data on a schedule, the app would have to be opened instead of running in the background running essentially as a polling service which would be killing your battery life and slowing the phone down overall.

Moreover, you'll notice in multi-tasking environments that applications take a little bit to launch. While this doesn't really matter much on a laptop, it can mean alot on the phone. Do you want to wait a minute for an app to load? It's not an ideal scenario, but if they can suspend a few processes and make the phone run alot faster, apps load alot quicker, web sites load in half the time, it's probably worth it. You aren't really loosing much if you just step back and look at it.

You WILL be able to listen to music, including a few streaming sites while using the phone. This is the primary concern many have, and in reality it is of zero concern because it will be allowed.

What won't be allowed is for you to run (as an example) MyNiftyFartingApp and MyNiftyBeerDrinkingApp at the same time. But really, who the hell would do that or even care?

I promise in the end, once the platform develops, we'll all be happy. This is a first release of a product that was designed and developed in 18 months. There is already plans to expand the development, and we will be seeing updates quite often. Hopefully Microsoft controls the update and not carriers or OEMS.

There's an arguement for both sides, but sit a WP7 phone and a WM6.5 phone side by side, I promise 9 out of 10 will pickup the WP7 phone. If anything, you guys should be bitching about how the SDK will prevent people from creating apps like WiFi Router, which isn't a limitation of the phone more than it is a limitation of the SDK/SL/XNA.

But like I said, 6 months after release, it will be a totally different story.

[gTen]

Originally Posted by cohowap

Actually, I think people are getting more bent out on the multi-tasking than they should.

The reality is, you will still be able to do any of the phone native features (zune, web downloads, phone calls, etc...) without being interupted. There is essentially 2 layers of code execution.

Layer 1) System Level - These are apps designed to run in the background, most likely writting with the NDK that MS isn't releasing publically but can be requested by OEMs and larger development companies, such as pandora and other main stream companies.

Layer 2) The everyday Joe. This is code that you and I write. These apps run on the Silverlight or XNA runtime and are essentially ran in "Protected" mode, where the OS will execute them outside the realm of the OS. This will keep resources secured and functionality of the native phone features to a maximum performance level. Moreover, it will allow the third part application your running to get more resources to power it.

Now, while this model doesn't sound ideal, the fact is, to a user you will only have 1 of these apps open at a time anyways. Thus, it doesn't really matter if the OS makes it pause or kills the resource. If the third party app is coded correctly, it will be transparent to the user anyways. You will go back to the application in the same state it was left. The only problem here is if the app was downloading data or set to update some data on a schedule, the app would have to be opened instead of running in the background running essentially as a polling service which would be killing your battery life and slowing the phone down overall.

Moreover, you'll notice in multi-tasking environments that applications take a little bit to launch. While this doesn't really matter much on a laptop, it can mean alot on the phone. Do you want to wait a minute for an app to load? It's not an ideal scenario, but if they can suspend a few processes and make the phone run alot faster, apps load alot quicker, web sites load in half the time, it's probably worth it. You aren't really loosing much if you just step back and look at it.

You WILL be able to listen to music, including a few streaming sites while using the phone. This is the primary concern many have, and in reality it is of zero concern because it will be allowed.

What won't be allowed is for you to run (as an example) MyNiftyFartingApp and MyNiftyBeerDrinkingApp at the same time. But really, who the hell would do that or even care?

I promise in the end, once the platform develops, we'll all be happy. This is a first release of a product that was designed and developed in 18 months. There is already plans to expand the development, and we will be seeing updates quite often. Hopefully Microsoft controls the update and not carriers or OEMS.

There's an arguement for both sides, but sit a WP7 phone and a WM6.5 phone side by side, I promise 9 out of 10 will pickup the WP7 phone. If anything, you guys should be bitching about how the SDK will prevent people from creating apps like WiFi Router, which isn't a limitation of the phone more than it is a limitation of the SDK/SL/XNA.

But like I said, 6 months after release, it will be a totally different story.

So why not just get an iPhone and have all that now and more?

The point of windows mobile was for it to be like a pc..if they take that away might it is no different then an iPhone thats years behind...

[orangekid]

Originally Posted by gTen

So why not just get an iPhone and have all that now and more?

The point of windows mobile was for it to be like a pc..if they take that away might it is no different then an iPhone thats years behind...

true. If winmo7 ships out like it looks, I'll just get an iphone 4G. But if they actually change some of this garbage and/or we can "play" with it like 6.1/6.5 then I'm game. This won't be RTM for a while, they still might be changing some things. Remember they had a whole different WM7 and just basically changed the whole thing and came up with this garbage. But all in all android and iphone OS look better and better compared to this iphone Jr crap they're trying to pull.