Posted on 04/25/2017 9:12:38 PM PDT by dayglored
With so few features, for so few phones, one wonders what the point is.
Microsoft’s Windows 10 Mobile Creators Update rides the coattails of the desktop OS, heavily leaning on improvements in Cortana and Edge to nudge Microsoft’s nearly comatose mobile platform further ahead.
As the free upgrade rolls out Tuesday, our review of the Creators Update can't help but conclude that it's even less of an improvement than the Windows 10 Mobile Anniversary Update. We can tell you that Windows’ new ability to buy and read ebooks within Edge represents its most potent addition. You can turn off a screen while using Continuum, a tweak that better approximates the PC experience. Cortana’s slightly smarter, as she is on the desktop. You can also pause updates, view the Glance screen while charging and enjoy a limited but refreshingly simple 3D content creation app, 3D Builder.
In the end, though, you have to wonder whether it matters. Windows 10 Mobile is in limbo, struggling for relevance even within the most devoted Windows communities. Microsoft’s most recent mobile hardware announcement involved an Android phone, of all things. Recent Insider builds have been moved off of the development track used by the PC, into their own “feature2” track. Microsoft still says it’s committed to Windows Mobile. But without any evidence to justify the claim, most users basically wrote off Windows 10 Mobile long ago.
[Much more at the link]
(Excerpt) Read more at pcworld.com ...
The good news is, there aren't too many additional choices your company hasn't tried. Maybe they'll finally settle on something. :-)
I've seen articles saying the availability of Surface Phone was pushed out to 2019. Any updates?
> I’ve noticed over the past few years that PC World articles are anti-PC and anti-Microsoft.
It's unfortunately true that a lot of the tech press has developed a sharply negative attitude towards Microsoft, after so many years (decades!) of carrying water for them. I suspect it reflects the changing makeup of their advertisers as well as a general shift of tech consumers away from Microsoft's offerings, and towards the newer stuff from other outfits.
I may post this as a separate vanity as the time approaches for a new phone but perhaps here is as good a place as any to ask this question:
What is the best smartphone to get? Not too difficult right? Haha
Let me give some backstory: I’m now on my third iPhone 6 Plus in a year. When I bought it I got the extended Apple care so thank God I did or I would’ve been out a phone months ago. But it is the third one in just over a year (about a year and a half, with the problems with the first one starting a month after I got it) and my experience with Apple Care the last time was, without over exaggerating, a nightmare pure and simple (it literally took 3 months to get my phone back).
So I’m done with Apple, even though when they work they work great, I was a big Apple fan before all this mess with my phone this past year, but with all these problems I’m not even sure the linchpin of the Apple selling point is applicable anymore: it’s reliability. I can’t even trust that anymore, much less putting up with their crappy business model that puts customer needs second (had to send a broken phone away to be examined before they’d give me a new one, instead of just GIVING me a new one in the store I bought it from while they took my broken one to be examined in the mean time. That’s what a compnany who really cared about customer service would do. It was under warranty after all), and on top of all that I can’t bear the thought, again, of the possibility (however remote) that if my new (replacement) phone were somehow lost in shipment (i.e. Stolen by someone who works for UPS) that I would again be forced to prove the phone was mine by providing a receipt I was never sent. This is all what happened (and more much more) by the way with a company everyone says is so wonderful and good to its customers. Can’t deal with this possibility again.
So I’ve looked into other phones but I’m sorely disappointed in other possibilities as well. As this thread’s starting article shows, Windows phones have limited, if any capability to host third party apps which I do use, more than Mail more than browsing to FR. From my various financial related apps to PDF creators and eFax app my business is done on the phone. I can’t go with a Windows phone.
So I’ve looked into Android phones and here’s my central question for anyone to chime in about: is it, or is it NOT true, that Android phones’ OSes do NOT update regularly if at all? If this is true, how can it be said that they are secure? Forgive my ignorance but it seems to me if this is true, it’s analagous to walking around with a Windows 98 machine when the entire world (hackers included) have moved on to Windows 10.
Take the latest build for Android, the “Nougat” I believe. If one has a phone with that it’s all good right? Well what if I’ve bought an android phone with the Lolipop version? Or Marshmellow? As far as I’ve been able to determine, it’s not possible to “upgrade” a phone running Lolipop or Marshmellow to Nougat, the only way to upgrade the OS is to buy a new phone. Is that right?
If that’s correct then it shows a serious flaw when compared to the iPhone in my opinion because when a new iOS comes out the update “just works” (when the phone itself works see above).
Also, I’ve read (again don’t know if it’s true) that updates to particular OSes in Android devices can sometimes take months to get pushed out to all devices running that particular OS, because of the way different manufacturers of various and sundry Android phones make their phones and use the OS on them. So for example, I believe I read somewhere that an update to the Marshmellow OS on Nokia phones took almost a year to be applied (and then of course they were out of date) because of the way Nokia (again assuming this was Nokia) made and installed Marshmellow on their own device. It somehow was incompatible with the Marshmellow update so the update wasn’t applied when it should have been.
Again I’m not sure if it was Nokia or even Marshmellow that suffered from this (but it was some manufacturer and one of those Android OSes) so to me this seems crazy! You’re waking around with a phone that hasn’t updated in a YEAR!?
So any help in the form of education and correction is appreciated. Because I dread the thought of being enslaved to an iPhone again, but I can’t see Windows or Android being much better. At this point I am even considering ditching “smart phone” slavery all together so I certainly don’t reject even that suggestion if it’s on anyone’s mind after reading all this. But i wouldn’t mind some other suggestion if possible.
Thanks.
Loved my Icon - when it came out that camera was stunningly better than other phones. Plus it’s a beast that took so much of my careless abuse. I’d be using it still but went over to ATT to get the 950, which has been great and as rugged as the Icon, including taking a nasty bicycle fall. The photos/video on the 950 are brilliant.
I’m all in on Win 10, Office 365, and OneDrive, which fully support my business functions across all my devices (950, laptop, desktop, and Surface 3 LTE). MS has done a great job covering all the basic needs of a phone user, especially for business, so if there is an app gap here I don’t know it.
The only trouble I’ve had w/ the 950 is that cellular-wifi handover is sometimes shaky when I walk away from the house, as it wants to cling to the weakening wifi signal and so doesn’t allow cell to take over the data connection. This only bothers me if I’m streaming a podcast or radio station. If the podcast is already downloaded, not an issue.
Windows Phone 10 is an excellent product.
I can feel my jealousy starting to ooze as I type. I was on the Verizon page daily just waiting for a 950. It never came. My next hope will be the Surface phone. I feel that Verizon will let me down again. It will be very hard to step backwards if my Icon dies.
I respectfully disagree. Trashing Windows or Microsoft is not "trashing PCs".
This may seem like splitting hairs, but Microsoft and Windows do not own the name "PC", and PC World owes them no special treatment or attitude, just because a lot of people say "PC" as a careless shorthand for "Windows computer". It's like calling any car made by General Motors a "Chevy".
"PC" (personal computer) is hardware architecture nomenclature, from the IBM-PC, which appropriated "personal computer" and named their product line with it. But the "PC" architecture runs a lot more than MS-DOS and Windows -- notably OS/2, BSD Unix, and Linux, all of which were developed on and for the "PC". Today, the majority of the world's millions of Linux computers, especially workstations, are PCs. A large percentage of them are Windows computers, with Windows removed and Linux installed.
The title "PC World" includes any operating system that can run on a PC. Thus, "PC World" is not analogous to "Windows World" or "Microsoft World", which would be the analogs to "Mac World" or "Apple World".
And BTW, that's why my ping list is the "Windows" ping list, not the "PC" ping list. It's for Windows topics (and very occasionally, non-Windows Microsoft news).
All that said, I acknowledge that for many people "PC" and "Windows" are essentially synonymous. It's unfortunate, but true.
I currently work in IT dept. for a large healthcare company. I have also worked either directly or consulted with many other companies. When you say “PC”, almost everyone knows your talking about a Windows computer.
Oh, I don't disagree that most people have the impression that "PC" and "Windows computer" are the same thing. And that unfortunate conflation was reinforced by Apple in their famous "I'm a Mac / I'm a PC" advertising campaign of a decade ago.
Those of us who have been working with PCs -- personal computers -- since the mid-1970's take a longer view. :-) The term "PC" was in use back then; it was generic.
"PC World" magazine got its start shortly after the IBM Model 5150 ("IBM-PC") was released, and covered CP/M-86, IBM BASIC, and others in addition to PC-DOS (MS-DOS). Windows, although released in 1985, didn't become a household name until the mid-1990's. And ironically, the term "PC" is finally becoming generic again after 30 years of being tied to the IBM-PC architecture.
In any case, and back to the topic of this thread, "PC World" isn't trashing anything by describing Windows Phone as having an "increasingly uncertain" future -- that's simply an appraisal of its current state and a prediction that it's unlikely to improve dramatically. I think that appraisal is unfortunate, but basically accurate... Do you disagree?
I have the 950XL. I use it more than my Surface, mostly because it’s faster and has more memory. Plus the interface to the OneDrive is seamless. I wish I could go up there and slap these people around. The problem isn’t with Win10 mobile, it’s with them.
Well, yeah... PC World, like most of the PC/MSDOS/Windows tech press, fell out of love with Microsoft a while ago. Everybody was "Rah-rah Windows" for a long time, until Vista fell on its face. Things got better with Win7, but then Win8 fell on its face; things got better with 8.1. Win10 was supposed to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, and the tech press fatuously talked it up like crazy. Well.... reality arrives eventually.
The tech press is no longer Redmond's "extended marketing&sales force". They're more like Redmond's "extended customer support force". Social media has increased the noise level about Windows problems to an unbearable level. The press now hears the ever-increasing complaints about Win10 always changing (it being a service instead of a finished product); user concerns about privacy; complaints about compatibility, how updates are handled, and so on.
I don't post many threads from PC World (or PC Mag for that matter). I posted some strongly pro-Win10 articles a while back, and was loudly accused of being a Microsoft shill. LOL. More of the time I get loudly accused of being anti-Microsoft. LOL again. Granted, I post a lot of threads from The Register, but they hate -everybody-, more or less equally, so their articles come off balanced, on average. :-)
I personally really like Win7. They'll have to pry it from my cold dead fingers. But I also like Linux, MacOS, and a few others. And I find fault with all of them. It shouldn't be a big deal, it's just a computer.
I did need to put my 950XL on ATT, although I delayed for months. But one day my Icon wouldn’t connect a call, so I had to use my daughter’s 950. That was it. I switched. I pay $45 a month pre-pay for 6G a month of LTE. I was paying ~$58 a month for 2G with Verizon.
I don't mean to be dense, but who is "them"? PC World? The tech press in general? Microsoft? The public? Somebody else?
I’ve learned to turn off my Wi-Fi and make sure I’m streaming before I leave the house. I actually got into that habit with the Icon because when it switched it dumped whatever I was connected to, like iHeart radio.
Microsoft.
Yep, they've worked so hard to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory so many times it boggles my mind.
I understand that a company should be criticized when things go awry. However, PC World seems to go out of their way to have much more negative than positive articles about Microsoft or Windows in my opinion. It would be like Outdoor Life having mostly articles about the dangers of going outdoors like hikers getting killed, fisherman drowning, dangers of sunburn, etc. Really? I just wish PC World would be more balanced.
Yep, that's the workaround.
I think MS will get it right in the next round, as even the 950, as was the Icon, is a hybrid Nokia/Win 10 transition, which means some defects have carried forward. My biggest complaint over the Icon was w/ the headphones jack -- very poorly designed/made and was a headache for me even w/ several different Icons. Haven't had that problem w/ the 950.
I see them keeping course for true OS integration across all devices.
I thought my daughter’s 950 would he a smaller, less powerful version of the XL, but it’s really different. I was disappointed. But she’s happy.
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