Chris That is the most informative response I have seen - I (for one) appreciate it. You have described what I suspected were the technical problems behind the decisions on WP8's new start in the smartphone business.
Bill McCarthy obviously (imo) has some valid arguments about the evolution of WP since mid-2011 Mango timeframe, and compares Apple's / Google's upgrade planning. What happens will happen. I'd like to WP8 succeed. A few weeks ago I inferred that I thought the Lumia 900 was an advance on the 800, but still underpowered and had less than optimum screen resolution (or, at least I think I did; I haven't looked for the evidence). Bill McC who owns a Lumia 800 mildly chastised me, rightly pointing out that it was better than the desktop screens (RGB, etc) that we had a few years back. But I hate these small screens with inadequate resolution for my eyesight. And the trivial "apps" - lumping phone + tablet together here. If I want info from IMDB on a movie or its participants, I don't want a summary of this week's box office successes, and other superficial fast food approaches to data or opinion. Admittedly I've seen less than a hundred iPad apps, but enough for me to be unimpressed by the median quality of the other 250K that are available. Actually - and hindsight is a great convenience if not a wonderful thing - I've had the lingering discomfort that all of the WP hardware used by the manufacturers of Windows Phones has been lagging or lacking. But that depends on what you want in a smartphone, of course. I don't really know what I want in one - I use my non-smart mobile phone for voice and SMS only (and not for data), and really dislike my Sony Ericsson W508a (freed from Telstra but with its highly-modified menus and links to useless stuff. And it PC to phone software is the worst I have encountered. But when a decent Windows Phone catches my imagination, I might buy and use it. Maybe I want a tablet/slate instead? I'm attracted to the Windows Surface as a tablet<--> PC, add Skype, and maybe I would dump my mobile account entirely. ________________________________ Ian Thomas Victoria Park, Western Australia -----Original Message----- From: ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com [mailto:ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com] On Behalf Of Chris Walsh Sent: Thursday, June 28, 2012 7:22 AM To: ozDotNet Subject: RE: Windows Phone 8 announced Bill, "I'm pretty sure the ACCC told telcos they had to warranty devices for the length of the contracts" Complete bullhonky there mate. Telco's can have whatever length of contract they like, the Hardware warranty isn't anything they can control. You can pay extra to the telco and NOT get a 24month play, you get the luck of the draw getting a phone on contract. The ACCC tried to enforce it, but the ACCC didn't have a leg to stand on. As for the commentary on whether 1st & 2nd gen handsets would get the update, let's have a discussion about this. Take a step back and look at your Lumia 800/900 "new" device for a minute. The silicon running that device is 2+ years old, single core, no expandable memory, 16GB of flash, with 512MB of RAM. As for the reason why existing devices couldn't be upgraded, you only need to look at the "Shared Core" features to realise that WP8 Core has been "re-written" from the ground up. Basically putting existing gen 1 & gen 2 device manufacturers & Microsoft in a position, where they need to create new bootloaders to support "Secure Boot" & bitlocker encryption, even if they could magically do that, they've then got to repartition the NAND which stores the OS, RIL firmware, and even the separate update partition. Try bundling that up into an update and pushing it out to existing devices. Short answer is you can't. To repartition the NAND you need to supply a complete device image (FFU), inside the FFU the partition maps are picked up by "updatewp" aka Zune and your device is repartitioned ready for the update. One little tidbit, you've just lost your ENTIRE OS image, data, SMS messages and the Plants vs Zombie saved games you were hanging onto because you'd gotten past the first level. And we all know that you can't backup anything with WP7+ devices :) Now that you've got a device image, you have one, there are 15+ devices out there, each device has the possibility of having a DIFFERENT image for each Mobile Operator, with 300+ MO's out there, you are looking at creating 4500+ complete device images. Do you have any idea how long it takes to create complete device images? Even once you've created one, the MO needs to TEST the image, they find an issue, it's sent back to the handset maker to fix, if it's Microsoft issue, then it goes back up the chain to fix a core issue, then another image is created, and you repeat the process, over & over & over again. Miraculously the MO's have tested and approved the update, you have to cross your fingers, legs, toes & basically anything else when the END USERS are performing a COMPLETE device re-flash. If there was one little stuff up, the user failed to download the update correctly, user was updating his/her device with a shitty 3rd party microUSB cable, they've now got a brick, a brick that can't be recovered. The only possibility of a recover is if they didn't stuff up the bootloader flash, which is generally the first thing that gets flashed, which if something was to go wrong, is the first thing to break. Even having the ability to JTAG a device, it won't recover it (if you are lucky to have a device that it's JTAG isn't locked). Now, you've got a bricked device, that's out of warranty, but bricked because Microsoft & the Handset manufacturers decided to push down an update, even though you ticked a million boxes saying updating it was your fault, the end user still has a whinge, complains to 10+ people about shitty company X & Y because they bricked their phone, they'll also complain to the MO and most likely move to another carrier. If the update was somehow successful, how many people was that end user tell and phrase Microsoft to? Your answer is 1-2. But you are still going to whinge about losing your Plants vs Zombie game saves! Now you've got a commercial issue which is really a cluster f**k of a decision and I've got no idea on how they make those. Make sense? -----Original Message----- From: ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com [mailto:ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com] On Behalf Of Bill McCarthy Sent: Wednesday, 27 June 2012 9:13 PM To: 'ozDotNet' Subject: RE: Windows Phone 8 announced Hi Stephen, Yes phones will be out of date, the question is whether it is months or years. In Australia, typical contracts are 24 months, and I'm pretty sure the ACCC told telcos they had to warranty devices for the length of the contracts. So two years is fair to expect to be a current lifetime; obviously there will be hardware improvements in that time, but the software and apps available you'd reasonably expect to be current. Apple deal with that by controlling the release dates of devices to a new device a year and OS support roughly of +1: hence you can be sure to get two years of being current. Android has been all over the place, but the big players such as Samsung are also moving to give that period of currency by providing OS updates (eg Galaxy II). For Windows Phone there isn't that. Personally the thing about this I dislike the most is not the fate of my own phone (I do like my lumia), but that I can no longer recommend to people they currently buy a windows phone. This is the real shame. It'd be a lot better if people could upgrade: would probably still be worth waiting for the newer devices for NFC. The sooner they get the new devices out the better.
