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Microsoft may be ditching Lumia line by end of 2016 for Surface Phone


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Old 14-09-2016, 14:06
LostFool
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I would genuinely love to be using a Surface to replace my laptop, would definitely be a better option for when attending meetings or moving around the office.
Have a word with your boss. A Surface Pro and docking station is a great combination to balance working at your desk and being mobile for meetings.

I tried to get a Surface Book to play with but that would have blown the IT budget out of the water.
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Old 14-09-2016, 14:20
IvanIV
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I have both Surface 3 Pro and Surface Book. I love the Pro, not so enamoured with the Book. It's heavier to start with. The Pro feels better to use as a tablet. The Book is more a laptop and when you detach it, you get a limited battery life. You can flip the screen part around with the keyboard inside, but then it's heavy.
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Old 14-09-2016, 16:52
Cloudane
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HP Elite will have 4.1Ah battery, which is pretty mad. But the problem is you have a processor with 4 cores clocked at some mad frequency, 4GB RAM, over 64GB disk, anything with less than QHD display is for losers and it has to have unlimited multitasking, God only knows what for. Those are specs of a computer not a phone. So whatever battery you hang on it, the difference will be a few hours, not days.
The resolution race is certainly quite silly. Reminds me of megapixels being seen as the be all and end all indication of cameras. The original Apple "retina" display of 326ppi is more than enough - I can never tell the difference on these ultra-high ones and it just means they need a more powerful GPU and sap more battery life.
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Old 14-09-2016, 20:12
gomezz
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many still see an iPhone as something of a status symbol that they can pose with.
Back in the 80s we shared round a mobile phone to whoever was on call for 24/7 support for any banking IT issues that week and it was referred to as the poser-phone.
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Old 16-09-2016, 09:16
clonmult
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Have a word with your boss. A Surface Pro and docking station is a great combination to balance working at your desk and being mobile for meetings.

I tried to get a Surface Book to play with but that would have blown the IT budget out of the water.
Was chatting with one of our PC guys yesterday, not a chance of the Surface in any form. We're exclusively Lenovo. Apparently lenovo are trying to get us to buy their new touchscreen devices ...

Back to Microsoft; their software developers working on W10M are close to incompetent. The latest (fast ring) build of W10M has broken the phone functionality, wifi doesn't work right, the keyboard refuses to appear. Oh, and it suffers regular reboots (every 5-10 minutes).

Whilst I'm on the fast ring and acknowledge the potential problems, Microsoft are semi regularly breaking too many things and obviously there is little in the way of internal testing. Quite amazing how they're happily breaking the basics.

Microsoft are showing that they really have no idea with mobile. Whilst the interface is actually pretty good (much prefer it to Android and iOS), the actual updates and operation is seriously flawed.
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Old 16-09-2016, 21:13
finbaar
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I heard a rumour from a reliable source that the Surface phone could be running Android.
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Old 16-09-2016, 21:30
Cloudane
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I heard a rumour from a reliable source that the Surface phone could be running Android.
I did think I heard it mooted at one point to at least have an Android compatibility layer so you can have a few more apps. Though I was reminded of what happened to IBM OS/2 basically ending up like a bad way of running Windows 3.1 applications, so if it's just running full Android it's probably not a bad call.
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Old 16-09-2016, 22:23
jonmorris
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It can't just run Android apps as there needs to be a proper mechanism for updates, which you'd get via the Play store.

And I guess IAPs and so on too.

Many systems before seemed to just work on sideloading or downloading APKs, or relying on a store devoid of apps.
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Old 16-09-2016, 23:06
Gigabit
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I suspect Nokia might be one of the biggest Android OEMs if they'd gone with Android. I miss their hardware.
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Old 17-09-2016, 00:19
jonmorris
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I suspect Nokia might be one of the biggest Android OEMs if they'd gone with Android. I miss their hardware.
They're coming back, but it will never be truly Nokia. I doubt there will be the same innovation, at least for a while.
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Old 17-09-2016, 00:29
aurichie
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I suspect Nokia might be one of the biggest Android OEMs if they'd gone with Android. I miss their hardware.
Elop made a lot of money burying Nokia by wedding them with his former employers.
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Old 17-09-2016, 01:22
Everything Goes
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Elop made a lot of money burying Nokia by wedding them with his former employers.
He made a $25 Million bonus for his treachery in Microsoft's acquisition of Nokia. It's good being able to shaft everyone and walk away stinking rich. Bit like our own Philip Green. Anyway these days he works for Telstra in Australia.

He is very much from Steve Ballmer's disastrous era at Microsoft. They are still paying the price for that today.

When Apple introduced the iPhone, Steve Ballmer laughed. “No chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share,” he said in 2007

Plenty of people can make predictions that prove boneheaded. But Ballmer’s bad calls have been particularly damaging for him inside Microsoft
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/busin...-steve-ballmer
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Old 17-09-2016, 08:41
finbaar
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I did think I heard it mooted at one point to at least have an Android compatibility layer so you can have a few more apps. Though I was reminded of what happened to IBM OS/2 basically ending up like a bad way of running Windows 3.1 applications, so if it's just running full Android it's probably not a bad call.
Well actually the rumour was on Windows Central podcast when they where having a joke near the end. Of course Microsoft could release an Android device without the Play Store but I think that would be even worse than W10M.
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Old 17-09-2016, 08:50
IvanIV
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Was chatting with one of our PC guys yesterday, not a chance of the Surface in any form. We're exclusively Lenovo. Apparently lenovo are trying to get us to buy their new touchscreen devices ...

Back to Microsoft; their software developers working on W10M are close to incompetent. The latest (fast ring) build of W10M has broken the phone functionality, wifi doesn't work right, the keyboard refuses to appear. Oh, and it suffers regular reboots (every 5-10 minutes).

Whilst I'm on the fast ring and acknowledge the potential problems, Microsoft are semi regularly breaking too many things and obviously there is little in the way of internal testing. Quite amazing how they're happily breaking the basics.

Microsoft are showing that they really have no idea with mobile. Whilst the interface is actually pretty good (much prefer it to Android and iOS), the actual updates and operation is seriously flawed.
With this insider programme I at first thought, yes we see into MS kitchen how they cook things and something is bound to get burnt before they get it right, but there are too many bugs that should have been ironed out that are in public releases. After they sacked people from Ballmer era quality turned to shit. I work in SW development and I know it's not easy with all dependencies that can create side effects in parts you would never expect. But they used to manage pretty well. Their quality management was second to none. Now one has to work around bugs daily. This is not how continuous development is supposed to be. It's not supposed to be a bad construction site where a brick may fall on your head any time, but it does. I could not install latest updates for W10 on my Surface Book, which is 100% MS product, what chance do other OEMs stand? I had to download and install the update manually using the KB number. Luckily, that worked.
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Old 19-09-2016, 02:09
Pencil
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I haven't seen a half-decent Windows Phone since the Nokia Lumia 930.

The Windows Phones after that have been poorly designed, tacky and very undesirable.
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Old 19-09-2016, 08:11
jonmorris
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I haven't seen a half-decent Windows Phone since the Nokia Lumia 930.

The Windows Phones after that have been poorly designed, tacky and very undesirable.
Lumia 1020 for me. Such a shame they never continued with the idea, although given the OS it would never have been a massive hit.
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Old 23-09-2016, 15:00
cooler
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In my experience, the worst thing about Windows Phone is that you can't use USB tethering and there is no option to change the WiFi frequency when using it as a WiFi hotspot. So when the WiFi interferes with other WiFi networks and stops functioning, nothing can be done to fix it apart from having to keep manually turning off Internet Sharing and turn it back on.

Windows Phone's are useless for internet sharing, they won't even do anything to fix it. Can't they release a software update to enable USB tethering?
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Old 23-09-2016, 15:20
Stig
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In my experience, the worst thing about Windows Phone is that you can't use USB tethering and there is no option to change the WiFi frequency when using it as a WiFi hotspot. So when the WiFi interferes with other WiFi networks and stops functioning, nothing can be done to fix it apart from having to keep manually turning off Internet Sharing and turn it back on.

Windows Phone's are useless for internet sharing, they won't even do anything to fix it. Can't they release a software update to enable USB tethering?
Windows Phone 7 used to be able to do it.
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Old 23-09-2016, 15:23
IvanIV
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I haven't seen a half-decent Windows Phone since the Nokia Lumia 930.

The Windows Phones after that have been poorly designed, tacky and very undesirable.
The new HP phone is supposed to be something special. But. It comes with an older build of W10M that does not support the fingerprint scanner. One was supposed to install Anniversary Update, only this one was delayed for this phone, because it does not reach expected performance and there are some other issues, too. Not looking good for MS and its competence. Maybe I should cancel the order and get Galaxy Note instead. At least I could use that one as a hand grenade
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Old 23-09-2016, 19:55
cooler
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Windows Phone 7 used to be able to do it.
Why would they remove a feature that was already on Windows Phone?
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Old 23-09-2016, 20:21
Stig
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Why would they remove a feature that was already on Windows Phone?
Because Microsoft have rewritten the code, twice.
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Old 23-09-2016, 20:43
finbaar
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The new HP phone is supposed to be something special. But. It comes with an older build of W10M that does not support the fingerprint scanner. One was supposed to install Anniversary Update, only this one was delayed for this phone, because it does not reach expected performance and there are some other issues, too. Not looking good for MS and its competence. Maybe I should cancel the order and get Galaxy Note instead. At least I could use that one as a hand grenade

The X3 is a business device hence the "Elite" moniker, the roll out is phased along with the firmware, accessories docks etc. HP will sort it but don't think of it as a normal consumer device.
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Old 23-09-2016, 21:08
jonmorris
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Businesses love buying unfinished, bug ridden kit that will be fixed 'eventually'.

You'd think they'd be built to an even higher standard.
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Old 27-09-2016, 15:12
IvanIV
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The X3 is a business device hence the "Elite" moniker, the roll out is phased along with the firmware, accessories docks etc. HP will sort it but don't think of it as a normal consumer device.
I cancelled it. The shipping date was end of August, then end of September, beginning of October and now middle of October. I have no time for MS games. And W10 is shite anyway.
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Old 27-09-2016, 15:22
Stereo Steve
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Got a Surface Pro 4 and love it to be honest. Not sure how it translates to a phone. Probably doesn't.
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