Nvidia Tegra

[Mike11]

Windows Mobile and possibly Symbian and/or Android. All not very attractive OSs for Nvidia. I mean Windows Mobile is kind of the black sheep right now and will most likely remain it until the end of 2009 and WM7. Symbian is the biggest OS of all, but seems strangely outdated and is very Nokia heavy. And Android is very young and a little ugly, plus the whole Open Source thing. So not exactly the sexiest choices for Nvidia. But with Apple doing it on their own and Palm locked into TI for at least a year, nothing else out there. Well, RIM. But I have honestly no idea what Blackberrys are using and how flexible they are with their chipsets.

All in all I really hope Nvidia will support Android, because it's the most promising and it's likely gonna improve the most in the next half year (cupcake already looks very promising and is imho scheduled for late January, one more big update after that and most of the shortcomings should be history).

 

[Arun]

I mean Windows Mobile is kind of the black sheep right now and will most likely remain it until the end of 2009 and WM7.

WM6.5 products will be out in Q3 if not earlier; it will be announced at MWC. I don't expect everyone to suddenly love it, but combined with a few great phones with custom user interfaces it's possible that user sentiment might start to shift. WM7 is when there is a small hope that customer sentiment for not-very-custom user interfaces might shift a bit. As witnessed with Win7, the only thing you need to do to make people love you is to make sure it's been so long they forgot why they hate you in the first place... When was the last major WM release again?

Symbian is the biggest OS of all, but seems strangely outdated and is very Nokia heavy. And Android is very young and a little ugly, plus the whole Open Source thing. So not exactly the sexiest choices for Nvidia.

Exactly, but as you say yourself afterwards, those aren't "choices" because there is no alternative. RIM is not a very viable consumer play and is already lock & loaded with Marvell and Qualcomm. Palm is lock & loaded with TI for the high-end, and it didn't make any sense for NV to associate large software teams to Linux just because Palm might have made a product that doesn't [censored] for once.

 

[Mike11]

WM6.5 products will be out in Q3 if not earlier; it will be announced at MWC. I don't expect everyone to suddenly love it, but combined with a few great phones with custom user interfaces it's possible that user sentiment might start to shift. WM7 is when there is a small hope that customer sentiment for not-very-custom user interfaces might shift a bit. As witnessed with Win7, the only thing you need to do to make people love you is to make sure it's been so long they forgot why they hate you in the first place... When was the last major WM release again?

2005 (Windows Mobile 5).

I think WM6.x is a lost cause. No makeover can turn that ship around. And I really thought WM7 was supposed to come out Q4/09, but with WM6.5 coming out in the summer like you said I really don't see that happening (as far as I can remember WM6.5 was once planned of late 08?). At best Microsoft can stop losing marketshare with WM6.5, but gaining marketshare will require WM7. Maybe they can pull a Pre at CES 2010

Exactly, but as you say yourself afterwards, those aren't "choices" because there is no alternative. RIM is not a very viable consumer play and is already lock & loaded with Marvell and Qualcomm. Palm is lock & loaded with TI for the high-end, and it didn't make any sense for NV to associate large software teams to Linux just because Palm might have made a product that doesn't [censored] for once.

Handspring had some nice devices for their time (OMAPs I think)

 

[Arun]

I think WM6.x is a lost cause. No makeover can turn that ship around.

It's never going to convince the majority of people that it's a good OS. But that's hardly the point. You need only look at the user opinion scores of several newer WM6.x phones on gsmarena.com to see that more than enough people feel it's a viable platform when combined with good hardware and overall polish:
http://www.gsmarena.com/htc_touch_hd-2525.php
http://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_a3100-2622.php
http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_i900_omnia-2422.php
http://www.gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson_xperia_x1-2246.php
http://www.gsmarena.com/palm_treo_pro-2494.php
http://www.gsmarena.com/asus_p565-2606.php

Plenty of people think some or all of these phones are bad, but that's not the point. The point is that quite a few people don't, and those are honestly some rather unimpressive user interfaces compared to what I would speculatively expect to see on WM6.5 and/or Tegra devices. So if the question is whether there are plenty of potential buyers for a good WM-based product, the answer clearly seems to be 'yes' in my mind. At the right price, of course.

And I really thought WM7 was supposed to come out Q4/09

About one year ago, it was supposed to come out in 1Q09. Presumably it got delayed by about one year to 1H10 with WM6.5 having been created to fill the gap.

At best Microsoft can stop losing marketshare with WM6.5, but gaining marketshare will require WM7. Maybe they can pull a Pre at CES 2010

Once again I'm amazed at anyone being able to determine what user sentiment will be for both WM6.5 and WM7 before anyone, including myself, knowing at all what either will bring to the table...

What is it that everyone is expecting in WM7 that won't be there for WM6.5 that'll make such an enormous difference to user sentiment? If you've got the App Store, Opera, and a fully-custom user interface controlled by a capacitive touchscreen... What is it that'll still make people go "Gosh, anything but a WM phone!"?

I know one of the problems right now is that the custom user interfaces aren't really all custom; here's a nice example: http://www.gsmarena.com/showpic.php3?sImg=reviewsimg/se-x1/sshots/gsmarena_142.jpg - I think we can only hope this improves both from an OS flexibility and UI quality point of view going forward. I can fully understand why some people would prefer not to hold their breath though...

 

[Mike11]

It's never going to convince the majority of people that it's a good OS. But that's hardly the point. You need only look at the user opinion scores of several newer WM6.x phones on gsmarena.com to see that more than enough people feel it's a viable platform when combined with good hardware and overall polish:
http://www.gsmarena.com/htc_touch_hd-2525.php
http://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_a3100-2622.php
http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_i900_omnia-2422.php
http://www.gsmarena.com/sony_ericsson_xperia_x1-2246.php
http://www.gsmarena.com/palm_treo_pro-2494.php
http://www.gsmarena.com/asus_p565-2606.php

Plenty of people think some or all of these phones are bad, but that's not the point. The point is that quite a few people don't, and those are honestly some rather unimpressive user interfaces compared to what I would speculatively expect to see on WM6.5 and/or Tegra devices. So if the question is whether there are plenty of potential buyers for a good WM-based product, the answer clearly seems to be 'yes' in my mind. At the right price, of course.

Of course there will be people who buy one. I have one. I have PocketPCs and then WM phones since 2000. But the smartphone market is growing rapidly and if only the same people as always buy WM then Microsoft's marketshare will get smaller (and I'm not helping because a have an Nokia E90 (Symbian) and an iPhone 3G too ).

About one year ago, it was supposed to come out in 1Q09. Presumably it got delayed by about one year to 1H10 with WM6.5 having been created to fill the gap.

Once again I'm amazed at anyone being able to determine what user sentiment will be for both WM6.5 and WM7 before anyone, including myself, knowing at all what either will bring to the table...

You look at what they have done in the past, what they have announced for the future and what the competition will look like in the future. And then you speculate. Isn't speculation a big part of what is going on in any discussion of this kind?
In the summer of 09 the Pre will be out, most likely a new iPhone will be on its way and new Android devices will be available (and who knows what RIM will be doing). And then WM6.5 comes out. To win marketshare in this competitive enviroment WM6.5 would have to be much better than WM6.1 and on par with the competition. And a lot of people, me included, don't think it will be. But of course there are other people too.

What is it that everyone is expecting in WM7 that won't be there for WM6.5 that'll make such an enormous difference to user sentiment? If you've got the App Store, Opera, and a fully-custom user interface controlled by a capacitive touchscreen... What is it that'll still make people go "Gosh, anything but a WM phone!"?

Microsoft would have to change every dialog in WM6.5, update every build in program, change basic stuff like the task bar and the start menu and most likely brake backwards compatibility to make it work with a capacitive touchscreen and just finger control. And lots of other stuff. Some people just don't expect such radical change for a 6.x gap filler.

I know one of the problems right now is that the custom user interfaces aren't really all custom; here's a nice example: http://www.gsmarena.com/showpic.php3...marena_142.jpg - I think we can only hope this improves both from an OS flexibility and UI quality point of view going forward. I can fully understand why some people would prefer not to hold their breath though...

Microsoft doesn't have the greatest track record where WM OS updates are concerned. So everyone is hoping for a big change (from WM5). And that was supposed to be WM7. Radically new UI, all based on a new Windows CE version, 100% optimized and designed for (finger) touch. Now it's delayed and just another 6.x is created to fill the gap. 6.1 came out almost 1.5 years after the iPhone announcement and Microsoft didn't do anything about it! No optimizations for touch use. Absolutly nothing! So naturally user expectations are pretty low for another 6.x. Maybe that's not fair. But we have no reason to expect Microsoft to blow us away with this gap filler.

 

[Oompa Loompa]

Microsoft would have to change every dialog in WM6.5, update every build in program, change basic stuff like the task bar and the start menu and most likely brake backwards compatibility to make it work with a capacitive touchscreen and just finger control. And lots of other stuff. Some people just don't expect such radical change for a 6.x gap filler.

In total it is certainly a big job, but significant finger-friendly GUI enhancements like FingerMenu aren't as challenging as you seem to think.

We'll know what WM6.5 includes soon enough. For the time being... trying to predict the impact of an unknown new OS on unknown new hardware on future market share is beyond my meager abilities.

 

[Arun]

Of course there will be people who buy one. I have one. I have PocketPCs and then WM phones since 2000. But the smartphone market is growing rapidly and if only the same people as always buy WM then Microsoft's marketshare will get smaller (and I'm not helping because a have an Nokia E90 (Symbian) and an iPhone 3G too ).

I see your point, but I somehow doubt that those phones would have so good user opinion scores on gsmarena if there were so many people who *wouldn't* be willing to buy one of them. Whether they actually do buy one depends on competition and price points, but hopefully you get my point that it doesn't seem plausible to me that the market is so inherently limited...

You look at what they have done in the past, what they have announced for the future and what the competition will look like in the future. And then you speculate. Isn't speculation a big part of what is going on in any discussion of this kind?

Absolutely! However I believe it is only fair and good to try to make speculation as explicit as possible, so that it can be seen what is inherently subjective and what is not; i.e. what points are possible to debate based on facts, and what are a result of one own's experience and much harder to debate clearly and concisely.

Microsoft would have to change every dialog in WM6.5, update every build in program, change basic stuff like the task bar and the start menu and most likely brake backwards compatibility to make it work with a capacitive touchscreen and just finger control. And lots of other stuff. Some people just don't expect such radical change for a 6.x gap filler

Doesn't matter one iota. As Oompa implied, what matters is that OEMs can revamp the UI and make 99%+ of user interactions based on the capacitive touchscreen. I agree third party application backwards compatibility would be a problem, however if they do ship an App Store with WM6.5, which I fully expect them to do, then we'll just progressively see newer Apps replace the ones that don't work and aren't ported. There is a risk that people think there aren't many apps, but that risk exists anyway with any new App Store.

What I am most worried about is application compatibility between WM6.5 touchscreen phones and WM7 phones. Here's hoping they handle that transition sanely since they'll have an App Store for both...

 

[Mike11]

Doesn't matter one iota. As Oompa implied, what matters is that OEMs can revamp the UI and make 99%+ of user interactions based on the capacitive touchscreen.

But if the OEMs "design" the UI, isn't it a bad thing if all the WM6.5 devices look and handle differently? And are the OEMs gonna be happy that Microsoft "outsources" the UI work to them and that their UI work is just gonna have a shelf life of less than a year? And I'm not a 100% convinced that Microsoft is going with capacitive touchscreens for WM6.5. Even the mighty Nokia (42.4% smartphone marketshare in Q3/08) has chosen to go with resistive touchscreens for their upcoming S60 Touch devices.

I agree third party application backwards compatibility would be a problem, however if they do ship an App Store with WM6.5, which I fully expect them to do, then we'll just progressively see newer Apps replace the ones that don't work and aren't ported. There is a risk that people think there aren't many apps, but that risk exists anyway with any new App Store.

What I am most worried about is application compatibility between WM6.5 touchscreen phones and WM7 phones. Here's hoping they handle that transition sanely since they'll have an App Store for both...

If Microsoft does all that with WM6.5 then the question is really, as you pointed out, how well they planned for it. Because Microsoft can't break backwards compatibility with WM6.5 because of a new Touch UI and then break it again less than a year later with WM7 and a new Windows CE foundation and yet another modified Touch UI. I guess they can't do anything about the underlying Windows CE, but WM6.5 would have to have the WM7 UI but just put on top of WM6.1 or something like that...

 

[Wishmaster]

Maybe both WM6.5 and WM7 are based on Windows CE 6.0?
After all they couldn't have put WM6.5 on the same core as 6.1... not after more than a year working on WM7. IMO 6.5 will be somewhat a lite version of wm7 (this would help them keep backwards compatibility of 6.5 apps with 7)and windows mobile 7 will be released along with windows 7.
That would be a great idea to promote great windows 7 with its mobile counterpart windows mobile 7 ("With windows 7 and windows mobile 7 you can have your windows always with you" I know stupid but still this could be what marketing guys think about). I hope that I'm not the only one thinking like that

Meizu M8 is a good example of what can be done with windows CE 6.0 so lets hope that WM6.5/7 won't be worse.

 

[Oompa Loompa]

But if the OEMs "design" the UI, isn't it a bad thing if all the WM6.5 devices look and handle differently? And are the OEMs gonna be happy that Microsoft "outsources" the UI work to them and that their UI work is just gonna have a shelf life of less than a year?

For a consumer, yes, I think this is a good thing. There is plenty of room for experimentation and improvement in mobile user interfaces. People don't move between phones the way they do between desktop/laptop/netbook computers, so they don't need the consistency. Besides, I doubt that we'll end up with "night and day" differences between implementations.

For Microsoft, apparently it is a good thing. I'm surprised that they aren't going for the one-size-fits-all approach you mentioned, but they've been good about supporting OEM customization in WM6/6.1 and in a recent interview (Todd Peters? I can't find it) it was mentioned that they planned to expose even more of the OS for OEM customization.

For OEMs, well, I imagine some are more excited than others. HTC seems pretty gung-ho about doing their own interfaces for branded and un-branded phones. Sony-Ericsson, ditto. Third party software houses (SPB and the PointUI guys) are obviously delighted.

 

[Mike11]

Windows Mobile 6.5 Beta. Still a work in progress (but at least it seems pretty responsive). Let's hope the final version will look more attractive. It's running on an old device, no Nvidia Tegra just yet.
http://wmpoweruser.com/?p=2536
http://wmpoweruser.com/?p=2554

 

[Xmas]

I don't get why they would even allow disabling font antialiasing.

 

[Simon F]

Windows Mobile 6.5 Beta. Still a work in progress (but at least it seems pretty responsive). Let's hope the final version will look more attractive. It's running on an old device, no Nvidia Tegra just yet.
http://wmpoweruser.com/?p=2536
http://wmpoweruser.com/?p=2554

Why do amateur's taking videos rarely hold the camera or subject still for at least a few seconds?

I don't get why they would even allow disabling font antialiasing.

Perhaps the same reason why some developers turn off MIP mapping or even bilinear filtering in games? <shrug>

 

[Ailuros]

It's probably a dumb question, but doesn't MIP mapping and bilinear take a whole lot more stress on general purpose processors than garden variety font antialiasing?

 

[Simon F]

It's probably a dumb question, but doesn't MIP mapping and bilinear take a whole lot more stress on general purpose processors than garden variety font antialiasing?

I don't mean the workload. I meant some apparently prefer the aliased look!

 

[Ike Turner]

Tegra now supports Android.
Gotta love this slide tho...
http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadgetmobile.com/media/2009/02/tegra_android_feb1520093.png

Fast TimeTo Market? sure....

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadgetmobile.com/media/2009/02/tegra_android_feb1520094.png

YEah sure. So far only one Android device is available and Zero have been announced at MWC yet (G2 is comming on Vodafone in March in Europe though). Android has a long way to go..

 

[INKster]

Well, they're just trying to cover all the possibilities. They certainly don't care which OS wins, as long as it's running on top of their SoC's.

Personally, i would love to see what even a low-end, lower clocked Tegra-based device could do under Symbian S60 5th Edition, for instance.
It has been historically and practically a pretty frugal OS in terms of clockspeeds and RAM -compared with Windows Mobile, at least-, and even the current Nokia's workhorse (a 369MHz Freescale ARM11 core) can easily cope with it, minus 3D-accelerated apps, of course.
I know first hand, my current "toy" is the 5800 XpressMusic, and it seems even faster than S60 3rd Edition FP1 on the same processor and RAM capacity, in the "old" Nokia E71.

 

[Ike Turner]

Interesting answer from HTC regarding SnapDragon and Tegra support.

http://www.mobinaute.com/258878-frederic-tassy-htc.html

Qualcomm (Snapdragon), Nvidia (Tegra) et Intel (Moorestone) ont développé des puces mobiles très avancées techniquement. Comptez-vous les intégrer sur vos prochains produits ?

Nous regardons de près les trois technologies proposées. Toutes sont intéressantes et allons sans doute exploiter celles de Qualcomm et Nividia dans de nouveaux terminaux qui devraient voir le jour début 2010.

So there you have it. Tegra and SnapDragon HTC products wont be out until early 2010. My guess is that they will probably announce a SnapDragon phone this summer to counter Toshiba (TG01) and Acer (F1) but it wont hit the market in time for the holidays.

 

[wco81]

Has MS described or characterized WM6.5 as "gap-fillers" or is that the perception?

In any event, the fact that their roadmap shows a major release coming less than a year after WM6.5 would seem to be a problem.

Or do people go through phones so often that interim products sell well?

 

[Wishmaster]

Interesting answer from HTC regarding SnapDragon and Tegra support.

http://www.mobinaute.com/258878-frederic-tassy-htc.html


So there you have it. Tegra and SnapDragon HTC products wont be out until early 2010. My guess is that they will probably announce a SnapDragon phone this summer to counter Toshiba (TG01) and Acer (F1) but it wont hit the market in time for the holidays.

I hope he's wrong
I wanted to buy a new phone in the middle of this year (after first year of college as as gift for myself ) and I wanted it to be HTC device based on either tegra or snapdragon but I won't wait till 2010
I wonder how sure is this information. Besides HTC as the biggest qualcomm client should release snapdragon earlier than the others...