Items tagged with Windows Phone
Let the record show that Bill Gates, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft who forever altered the computing landscape with Windows, has a tremendous amount of respect for the late Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple. He also thinks Apple is doing "good work." Be that as it may, you will not find Gates wielding an iPhone—his mobile device of choice these days is actually an Android handset "with a lot of Microsoft software" installed. The former Microsoft boss turned full-time philanthropist (through is Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) revealed his phone of choice during an interview with Fox News. Prior to the revelation, it would have been reasonable to assume that Gates was using a Windows...
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Law enforcement officials in New York are not happy with NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Information Technology Jessica Tisch, who made the decision two years ago to purchase 36,000 Nokia brand smartphones running Microsoft's unpopular Windows Phone platform. Due to Microsoft's lack of ongoing support, all of the phones have to be decommissioned, and replaced with iPhone models from Apple.The move to replace what are essentially outdated and obsolete Windows Phone hardware comes just months after the last one was handed out to police. While this may seem like an overreaction, bear in mind that law enforcement sometimes rely on these devices in life and death situations. Trusting those moments to...
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Do you remember the last time you saw someone with a Windows Phone handset? For me it was yesterday—I was outside chatting with my neighbor, who was taking pictures with her smartphone. I noticed the Windows logo on the bottom and thought to myself, "Heh, you don't see those much anymore." That is not just my observation, either. According to IDC and its latest quarterly tracking data, the Windows Phone platform accounts for just 0.1 percent of all smartphones in existence. Windows Phone was never really a competitive solution to begin with, at least from a market share perspective. However, this is a new low, and it comes as Microsoft continues to show disinterest in the mobile phone market....
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Windows phone users have no need to worry about being abandoned; Microsoft recently stated that it will continue to support the platform. This announcement was in response to Microsoft’s increasing focus on support for iOS and Android devices. Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore remarked at Build 2017, “We’re going to continue to support Windows phone. Windows is a platform that drives the experience on a whole range of devices. We live in a highly diverse world.” At the moment, Microsoft only has a 0.3% share of the smartphone global market. This past financial quarter, Microsoft earned $5 million in revenue from phone hardware, while in the same quarter in 2015, they took in $1.4 billion. Microsoft...
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Let’s face it, Microsoft’s decision to purchase Nokia’s Devices and Services division was an epic fail. The acquisition resulted in billions of losses, plummeting market share for Microsoft’s smartphone operating system, and the laying off of thousands of employees. It’s quite amazing how far Microsoft has fallen when it comes to smartphones. In its most recent quarter (fiscal Q3 2017), it booked just $5 million in revenue from phone hardware. That is a big drop from fiscal Q3 2015, when Microsoft reported $1.4 billion in revenue on phone hardware. Looking at its performance in the smartphone arena, it’s quite apparent that Microsoft either needs to completely rethink the way it approaches smartphones...
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Don’t be fooled by the form factor and your initial impressions -- what we have before us is not a typical smartphone. Well, technically we suppose it is, but the experience is not intended to replace your commonplace iPhone, Galaxy S, or other handset. In fact, you should not even consider running to your nearest wireless carrier to pick one up. No, instead HP is billing the Elite x3 as a corporate device flexible enough to eliminate company-issued laptops and workstations for many users. This sounds like quite a tall order. Certainly, many professionals do rely on powerful number crunching machines. This isn’t aimed at dual-Xeon monstrosities -- at least not yet. For a majority of business...
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The writing has been on the wall for quite some time — Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia’s Devices and Services Division has been a complete disaster and a money pit. Microsoft bought the division for $7.9 billion in spring 2014, and a year later, the company had to take an impairment charge of $7.6 billion for the purchase. Since that time, the Redmond, Washington-based company has laid off thousands of employees that it brought over from Nokia along with additional Microsoft employees that were already working on smartphone hardware and software. To make matters worse, smartphone sales have plummeted despite Microsoft’s steady supply of promotional offers on Windows 10 Mobile smartphones. During...
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There's probably isn't a huge crowd of smartphone shoppers fretting over the decision to go with Android or Windows Phone, but for those pondering the two platforms, Samsung may one day make the choice easy—go with both! That's the idea behind a patent application Samsung filed in South Korea, one that describes a phone running both OSes at the same time.Samsung's approach is different than that of a dual-booting solution. What Samsung conceived is a much slicker solution in which switching between Windows Phone and Android would be similar to bouncing around different open apps like you can already do in Samsung's Multi Window feature for its Galaxy handsets.According to the patent filing, Android...
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In the smartphone OS market, there’s Android and iOS; then there’s everyone else. Google’s Android operating system is by far the most popular smartphone operating system in the world, while Apple’s iOS comes in a distant second. But what about industry veterans Microsoft and BlackBerry? According to the latest figures from Gartner, smartphone operating systems from those companies barely made a blip on its radar screen. Sales of smartphones running Windows Phone/Windows 10 Mobile and BlackBerry OS 10 fell dramatically year-over-year. Microsoft managed to sell just 1.9 million smartphone running Windows Phone during Q2 2016. Compared to the same period last year, when Microsoft sold 8.2 million...
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It looks like Windows Phone could soon be enjoying an update that lets Xbox One gamers stream their favorite titles over to their mobile devices. As many revelations have been made known lately, this one was discovered by a reddit user who quickly revealed their discovery on the website. It's not a light one, either; there has since been other people to back the original founder up. When a friend messaged them on their Windows smartphone, reddit user eric5949 accidentally clicked on the name of the game that it was attached to and noticed interesting wording: "Play from console". Normally, this says "Play on console", so it stood out like a sore thumb. Unfortunately, tapping on that option doesn't...
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Remember the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man that lumbered through New York City in the original Ghostbusters? That's how big Android has become, which coincidentally is on its Marshmallow release. That's not to say that Android is bloated and slow, just that it's really big—out of the 349 million smartphones shipped in the first quarter of 2016, Android was installed on over 293.7 million of them, according to Gartner. Android now accounts for 84.1 percent of all smartphones in the world, up from 78.8 percent in the same quarter a year ago. Meanwhile, its closest rival (iOS) is now at 14.8 percent, down from 17.9 percent in the same time frame. That's an 8.4 percent swing in the gap separating first...
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The latest global smartphone sales data is out from Kantar Worldpanel Comtech, and things are looking decidedly rosy for market leader Android. Android’s growth is accelerating, with iOS and especially Windows Phone taking the brunt of its punches. For the first quarter of 2016, Android showed remarkable gains in the EU5 (Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Spain), where it picked up 7.1 percentage points to hit a 75.6 percent share of the smartphone market. Among the EU5, Android showed the biggest gains in Italy and France, where its share rose 12.1 and 9.7 percentage points respectively year-over-year. Android’s gains in the United States and China were no less impressive. Android grew...
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If you have a sneaky suspicion that Microsoft isn't putting as much effort into its Windows Phone plans as perhaps it could be, the first day of its Build Developer Conference in San Francisco would have done nothing to change to your mind. Microsoft talked about Windows 10 and all sorts of related technologies, but not much about Windows Phone. That wasn't by accident.Like it or not, Microsoft's focus just isn't on phones at this point in time. Instead, the company is much more excited about the possibilities of HoloLens, its augmented reality headset and platform, and how Windows 10 can improve the Xbox One experience. That doesn't mean Microsoft is turning its back on Windows Phone, it just...
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Microsoft has just released another update to Windows 10 Mobile, bringing us up to version 10586.122. The company notes that this isn't going to be the bulkiest release it's let loose, but that those coming from Windows Phone 8.1 should notice the most obvious improvements with regards to the upgrade experience. The company also added support for 4 new phones: MCJ Madosma Q501, BLU Win HD W510U, BLU Win HD LTE X150Q, and ALCATEL ONETOUCH Fierce XL. This is one of the rarer builds that actually goes to the Slow and Release Preview rings, so if you're running the Fast ring and want to go with a more "stable" version for whatever reason, you will have to switch to one of those rings temporarily...
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Since Satya Nadella stepped into the role of Microsoft CEO, the company's outlook has been a lot more positive than it had been in recent years. As the company's latest financials highlight, the company's killing it where cloud services are concerned, and as we've reported a few times over the past year, its latest OS, Windows 10, has proven to be a grand success. When Microsoft unveiled its first cloud initiatives, many revolving around its Azure platform, it was hard to grasp just how important they'd become for the company. As we now see, and Nadella backs up, it's proving to be an extremely important market for the company. Nadella even uttered this bold statement, "The enterprise cloud opportunity...
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When we last left Joe Belfiore, he announced that he was taking a nine-month-long break from Microsoft to travel the world with his family. Belfiore is Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President for the Operating Systems Group and has been the most recognizable face at Microsoft when it comes to championing the Windows Phone platform. So can understand why many were quite shocked this morning when Belfiore resurfaced on Twitter with a tweet about his visit to Kyoto. And it wasn’t his luscious golden locks that people were most interesting in; it was the fact that he was posting from an iPhone. That’s right, the chief evangelist for the Windows Phone platform is using an iPhone in his downtime — we...
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One of the most ambitious features Microsoft has packed into Windows 10 Mobile is Continuum, which lets users plug their smartphone into a dock, and then take advantage of it as if it were a PC, complete with mouse, keyboard, and monitor. It's a niche feature, but for those who could take advantage of it, it can prove to be a real boon to on-the-go productivity. Up to this point, Continuum has required beefier hardware to work, such as the hardware featured on the Lumia 950 and 950 XL. Microsoft has now added another SoC to the list: Qualcomm's MS8952, also known as the Snapdragon 617. At the moment, this chip is featured in only one Windows 10 Mobile smartphone, the NuAns Neo, but given its...
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Be sure to check out our Lumia 950 review here... Microsoft rolling out an update to one of its OSes isn't often that big of a deal, because let's be honest, it happens all the time. An update just issued for Windows 10 Mobile is a bit of an exception. Not because of what it actually introduces (or fixes); but because of how it was released. Typically, any mobile OS update needs to go through the carrier that sold a customer their phone, and often, that can take a long time. Thanks to Apple's tightly-run ecosystem, there's never a delay there, but on Android, many will never see the latest version of the OS hit their phone (unless they're on a Nexus device). We're two months after the launch...
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Microsoft and Nokia have done a great job of making Lumia smartphones difficult to break into at a low-level, but software hacker Heathcliff has just proven that it's not impossible. He's just released a great-looking tool called Windows Phone Internals, and it can do everything from unlocking the bootloader to replacing the phone's ROM. WP Internals is a completely free download, though Heathcliff welcomes donations by those who've found the tool useful. Based on the introduction video, it seems that a lot of effort went into this, and unlike most tools of this nature, detailed descriptions are found everywhere to ensure that you know exactly what's going to happen once you click a button. According...
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Microsoft’s venture into the smartphone market has been a disaster. The Redmond, Washington-based company purchased Nokia’s Devices and Services Division last year, and earlier this month announced that it was taking a $7.6 billion write-down on the $7.2 billion purchase. The Nokia folly also resulted in Microsoft positing a $2.1 billion loss for fiscal Q4 2015. So how does Microsoft plan on reversing its fortunes in the cutthroat smartphone market that is dominated by Android in market share and iOS in profits? For CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s smartphone revamp will start at the top and trickle down. “We're going to have great flagship phones for Windows 10,” said Nadella during the company’s...
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In early March, managing director of Microsoft Research managing editor Eric Horvitz hinted that the Cortana digital assistant would be making its way to both iOS and Android platforms after being a Windows Phone exclusive for quite some time (it has also found a home in Windows 10). Microsoft made that news official in late May, confirming that the world’s two top mobile operating systems would receive Cortana support. The iOS and Android Cortana apps were supposed to debut later this month alongside the retail launch of Windows 10, but the Android app has leaked early and can be download right now as an APK. As you might expect, Cortana functionality on Android for the most part mirrors what...
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Nokia is down, but not out. The Finish telecom company has been planning a way forward after a stunning fall from grace (similar to that of BlackBerry) as consumers turned away from inexpensive cell phones to smartphones running Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android operating systems. And, like BlackBerry, Nokia said this week that it is planning to revive its phone business and is looking for a manufacturing partner. The move follows a dramatic few weeks in which Microsoft threw in the towel on its efforts to make the company’s purchase of Nokia’s phone business into a viable venture. The $7.2 billion purchase, announced after then-CEO Steve Ballmer departed two years ago, flamed out recently...
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