Windows Phone 8 vs. iOS vs. Android: One giant leap for Microsoft

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/131487-windows-phone-8-vs-ios-vs-android-one-giant-leap-for-microsoft

by evo_9 • 14 years ago

53 67 14 years ago

mindstab• 14 years ago

"Now that Windows Phone has managed to clobber iOS when it comes to customization without losing its aesthetic charm, it’s time for Apple to step it up"

This sentence really leapt out at me. Are we looking at the same rainbow disaster screen shots? Windows phone looks like a unicorn puked on a phone.

I don't think it give any compelling reason on it's own for iOS to shift.

pilgrim689• 14 years ago

I guess it's subjective, but you would be in the minority [1] for thinking Metro UI is a "unicorn vomit/rainbow disaster".

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_UI#Response

vibrunazo• 14 years ago

How can you be sure? Your link only have a few select critics, whose opinion are 99% useless. I wanna know what real users think. My own personal anecdote asking a few people about it is closer to unicorn puke than acclamation. But I don't like anecdotes. Are there are quantitative study with a large sample of users' opinions about how Metro looks? I'd be very interested in one.

There have been many reports here and there about how people like metro. But without such study, anyone saying it looks "good" or "bad" are just worthless anecdotes. Of course it's subjective, what really matters is what the majority of the target audience thinks.

meepmorp• 14 years ago

I hate the Metro UI. I hate the live tiles,I hate the way text seems to drift off the edge of the screen; I hate the way it looks, and navigating through it annoyed me. I've only ever seen it on a phone, though, so maybe a tablet would improve things.

I'm not a UI expert, so maybe I'm missing something awesome. I am, however, a user of consumer electronics, and as far as that qualifies me to comment, I think it looks like crap and would never buy a Metro UI based product.

cmelbye3• 14 years ago

I think he/she is talking about the screenshots of the new start screen that accompanied the announcement. Personally, I love the current WP7 and I thought that the new screen ditched a lot of the simplicity and looked very busy and unattractive.

electrograv• 14 years ago

Well you could also say that the iPhone home screen looks like a bin of shiny colored glass children's toys were spilled onto the screen.

This type of criticism doesn't really help, because the vast majority of people seem to think both (metro, and iOS) look fine, if not great. What matters is how usable these phones/OS'es will turn out to be once people start trying them.

mrdodge• 14 years ago

The critics think it looks great.

I haven't heard anything positive, however, from normal people. Just my experience though.

untog7• 14 years ago

It's a matter of taste, really. I disagree with you, but I can't exactly say that you're wrong.

For me, the iOS homescreen is too limiting. All an app can do is show its icon and a number of pending notifications. Android is too far the other way- widgets can be far too attention grabbing and obtrusive- silly animations of clouds moving in front of a sun, nonsense like that. WP hits a great balance between the two- widgets/tiles are of a fixed size, and the metro aesthetic means that none are too visually invasive.

I have a Windows Phone that I used as my primary phone for a few months before switching back to Android. The third party support wasn't there and the Maps functionality was dire. But I think that it has the best UI of any mobile OS out there right now- it's genuinely a joy to use. Getting Nokia on board looks to solve the issue with maps, and hopefully this codebase synchronisation will result in more third party developers making quality apps.

We'll see. Well, I won't, because my phone won't run WP8...

hammersend5• 14 years ago

Android is "too far the other way" because some developers throw everything they have at making a whiz-bang widget? How about just not using that widget instead of using it to cast the platform in a negative light?

huggyface4• 14 years ago

It is odd when people hold subjective aesthetic opinion as fact. Personally I prefer ICS, by leaps and bounds, over either iOS and WP8, but that's just my personal taste.

And what accounts for all of the fawning over the Lumia devices? Those things are terribly ugly in my opinion. Subjective opinion again.

vignesh_vs_in• 14 years ago

finally, games can be ported to WP.

KeyBoardG3• 14 years ago

Yes and this is great for developers. Develop once, run on phone, tablet and laptop/desktop.

AndrewDucker• 14 years ago

Have we had that confirmed? I was hearing that compiling a WinRT application for phone and desktop was going to take tweaking and recompilation.

glimcat• 14 years ago

It's very rare that the situation isn't really "develop once, debug everywhere." You might as well promise me a perfect optimizing compiler while we're at it.

And even then, is the GUI actually appropriate for all of your deploy targets? Usually not.

amolsarva• 14 years ago

Those homescreen tiles are a cool new idea in mobile UIs and keep getting better. Kudos to those guys.

KeyBoardG3• 14 years ago

Agreed. I've been on WP7 for just over a year the the live tiles with update counts have replaced the need for a notification center for me.

zanny2• 14 years ago

One giant leap for Microsoft that I won't touch with a 5 meter stick because the company has way too much of a treasure chest of influence to ever get my money ever again, and one that I will continuously tell anyone I am related to or friends with never to associate with.

The secure boot nonsense doesn't help. The image of M$ is destroyed, and even if they try to repair it I can never forgive them for ie6.

untog7• 14 years ago

And there I was, thinking that HN is above using "M$".

Do Apple and Google not also have a "treasure chest of influence"?

zanny2• 14 years ago

Absolutely, they are all massive corporations. They are beyond the scale anyone can reasonably expect a company to act in the interests of their customers.

I'm not saying Microsoft is evil - they are just a massive company, who like Apple is controlled by shareholders and therefor maximizes profit at the expense of everything around them.

I have no idea what is going on with Google. Android 3.0 and the unified privacy plans being closed source seems like a good example of how their benevolence may only be skin deep, but they have acted "better" than the others at some superficial level. They are still absurdly powerful and I would always be hesitant to give them money, because companies like all three can turn around and use that absurd influence to harm consumers.

akmiller• 14 years ago

" and even if they try to repair it I can never forgive them for ie6."

You can never forgive them for making the absolute best browser on the market at the time it was released? Don't blame Microsoft because there are people out there are still trying to use IE6 today.

Toshio• 14 years ago

Friends don't let friends give money to microsoft.

rrreese• 14 years ago

I used a WP7 for several months last year. In many ways I really liked it, the UI was pretty slick, live tiles where great, the whole thing was surprisingly polished.

But I now use an iPhone. The reason is lack of quality 3rd party software. The PDF viewer available for WP7 (there was only one) was absolutely abysmal. Very poor UX. And that was all to often the case. Where Android or iOS would have numerous great apps, WP7 would have significantly less and usually all lower quality. Such a shame as the OS itself is pretty nice.

untog7• 14 years ago

Absolutely agreed. The issue now isn't that the major players aren't in WP, but it's that their apps are absolutely terrible, and obviously barely tested. The Rdio app didn't even play music for months, and the Spotify app is glitchy as hell. So the "100,000 apps" boast is a little hollow.

barista2• 14 years ago

Apparently that is what Microsoft is trying to solve with the unified core. If the developers have ability to write code one time and target both the phone and the tablet/desktop, it is quite appealing proposition.

Mythrl3• 14 years ago

The 3rd party app criticism is in my view an outdated one. One year ago would have been premature to make a declaration on the availability of 3rd party apps for the Windows platform since it was still relatively new.

Windows Phone has been catching up and can probably do so more quickly now that the phone and desktop OSes can use similar code.

Edit: Since I am being downvoted for my opinion, I will add some evidence

"An app for Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 can share the same code and the same basic user interface, since both platforms use the Metro design language, according to Wissinger."

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/258094/microso...

wtallis3• 14 years ago

That's not evidence, that's just a claim from Microsoft's marketing. The code-sharing doesn't apply to any current desktop applications - it only applies to the hypothetical future Metro-based desktop apps. And it's irrelevant anyways.

You can't expect a user to stick with an incomplete platform when there is viable competition, based solely on promises that the situation will improve. In fact, since Microsoft has announced that current Windows Phone 7 hardware will not run Windows Phone 8, anybody who was counting on their phone getting more useful over time has been proven to be a sucker.

deepGem2• 14 years ago

Come to think of it. You can't share a video on youtube from a WP7 phone. The default option is Skydrive.

recoiledsnake• 14 years ago

From Microsoft's antitrust complaint from last year. http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/archive/2...

First, in 2006 Google acquired YouTube—and since then it has put in place a growing number of technical measures to restrict competing search engines from properly accessing it for their search results. Without proper access to YouTube, Bing and other search engines cannot stand with Google on an equal footing in returning search results with links to YouTube videos and that, of course, drives more users away from competitors and to Google.

Second, in 2010 and again more recently, Google blocked Microsoft’s new Windows Phones from operating properly with YouTube. Google has enabled its own Android phones to access YouTube so that users can search for video categories, find favorites, see ratings, and so forth in the rich user interfaces offered by those phones. It’s done the same thing for the iPhones offered by Apple, which doesn’t offer a competing search service.

Unfortunately, Google has refused to allow Microsoft’s new Windows Phones to access this YouTube metadata in the same way that Android phones and iPhones do. As a result, Microsoft’s YouTube “app” on Windows Phones is basically just a browser displaying YouTube’s mobile Web site, without the rich functionality offered on competing phones. Microsoft is ready to release a high quality YouTube app for Windows Phone. We just need permission to access YouTube in the way that other phones already do, permission Google has refused to provide.

redsymbol2• 14 years ago

With the recent WP8 press coverage, it's interesting (from a PR perspective) that many stories complain about WP7 phones not being upgraded. Some tech journalists seem almost angry about it.

I don't know if this will die down or not; that's what eventually happened when Google revealed the Nexus 1 (iirc) wouldn't be upgradable to 4.0. So far, though, this point is significantly distracting from the amazing improvements in '8 - note how the linked article mentions it in the first paragraph, and I've seen at least one mainstream article [0] focused entirely on it.

There must be a lesson about product launches in this. If Microsoft had a good answer for this from the start - by "good", I mean one that satisfied journalists and their readers, and/or made it hard for anyone to stoke outrage - the positive press coverage for WP8 wouldn't have been diluted by this.

[0] http://mashable.com/2012/06/20/no-upgrade-windows-phone-8/

untog7• 14 years ago

The issue is the timing of this. The Nexus One was introduced in Jan 2010, ICS was released in, what, March 2012? Over two years difference. I had a Nexus One at the time, and while I was disappointed, I'd got two years of use (key point here: two years is the typical cellphone contract length) out of my phone. Not so for people who bought a Lumia 900 when it was released in April of this year.

The issue from a PR perpsective is that MS don't seem to be controlling the story here. Will WP8 apps work on 7.8? Sources are totally conflicted. Will 7.8 do multitasking? No-one knows. MS should have been all over this out of the gate- explaining exactly what 7.8 users are getting. Instead everyone is resorting to rumour and assuming the worst.

redsymbol2• 14 years ago

Good point about the difference in timing! Who knows what info Microsoft has that we don't; but for brand-trust reasons, it seems important to update at least the Lumias to WP8, if at all technically possible.

jsnell• 14 years ago

Letting people assume the worst seems perfectly rational if that worst case is actually true, and 7.8 is just a minor cosmetic upgrade. At least it means there will be some apologists around muddying the waters by claiming that 7.8 will be more significant.

kpeel• 14 years ago

They should have done the upgrade like Apple. Everyone gets the upgrade, but not everyone gets all of the features of the upgrade (e.g. I got iOS 5, but not Siri).

It sounds like they're doing just this in spirit by backporting some features to Windows 7, but calling it Windows 7.8 instead of Windows 8. Marketing mistake?

mc322• 14 years ago

AFAIK it's a different codebase altogether. One's based on WinCE and the other on Windows8, so it would be misleading to imply that upgrade to 7.5 was based on Win8.

Gal3rielol• 14 years ago

No, it is different. The 3GS still can run the apps designed for iOS6 because the OS support the new APIs. It just lacks of some functions compared to the newer devices. However, the WP7 devices can no more run the apps designed for WP8 which means that the WP7 platform has been abandoned.

robomartin• 14 years ago

There might be a little pro-Apple bias in some of the way these things are reported. We now have millions of iPod touch devices that can't be upgraded to newer versions of iOS. This is also true of older iPhones (3 and below, I believe). Nobody is crying foul over that. Yet. As app developers start, out of necessity and force, dropping support for older versions of iOS things might change.

Retric• 14 years ago

It's important IMO to consider how long an iOS device can use the latest firmware. Once you cross the 2-3 year barrier most people are looking to upgrade anyway so they don't consider it a big deal vs. not being able to upgrade a 6 week old phone.

EX: iOS 6 comes out this fall and is backward compatible all the way to 3GS phones which came out June 19, 2009, but not 3G which came out July 11, 2008 which they stopped supporting with iOS 4.2.1 on November 22, 2010.

r00fus• 14 years ago

I have an off-contract 3GS that's working fine as a bulky iPod touch for my kid. The older 2G and iPod Touch from 2008 (ie, 4 years ago) won't support iOS6.

However, you can buy WP7 phones right now that will not be able to run the latest OS when WP8 comes out. If I were selling these things (or Nokia), I'd be pretty frustrated about that.

Why pre-announce? Osbourne effect FTL.

mtgx• 14 years ago

Nexus One came with Android 2.1. It got Android 2.2 and Android 2.3 - 2 pretty major versions of Android.

The Lumia 900 came with WP 7.5. And now it's not getting WP8, just some features from it. How is that the same?

barista2• 14 years ago

You forgot 7.8 that has a significant set of features.

huggyface4• 14 years ago

The real foundation for cross-platform code -- from mobile platform to mobile platform -- is whether WP 8 will support OpenGL ES 2.0. The explosion of quality Android games came courtesy of the NDK and ES 2.0, allowing for an almost direct migration of apps from iOS with only minimal I/O changes.

Given that the mobile GPUs are targeted to that, I have to think it will. Having portability between the desktop and mobile is less valuable, really, given that even the most impressive mobile GPU pales compares to a miserable desktop GPU. The limitations would render such an exercise much more prohibitive.

stuntmouse• 14 years ago

No OpenGL ES support. DirectX only.

huggyface4• 14 years ago

I have only heard them talk about DirectX, unsurprisingly, however have you seen an official comment on this?

taligent• 14 years ago

I have to disagree there.

DirectX is going to be much more compelling for developers IF Microsoft can unify Windows, Windows Phone and XBox Live Arcade together. The idea that I could write one game and sell to all of them would be huge.

huggyface4• 14 years ago

DirectX is going to be much more compelling for developers IF Microsoft can unify Windows, Windows Phone and XBox Live Arcade together.

Aside from the completely different experiences across all of them (both in capabilities of the platform, input methods, etc -- smartphone games tend to be quite unique), from a pure numerical perspective there are what, 55 million or so xboxes sold, and while there are countless PCs, the PC gaming contingent continues to shrink and favours an entirely different type of game.

There are 400 million+ Android devices out there, and 400 million+ iOS devices.

If you're developing a touch/sensor based smartphone app, being able to port it to other smartphones is dramatically more valuable than being able to port it to an entirely different platform.

jmonegro• 14 years ago

Suddenly, Microsoft's purchase of Skype makes a lot more sense.

laacz• 14 years ago

It is quite possible, that Microsoft move with releasing Windows Phone 7 was just an expensive way to make Nokia buy in. Nokia would not wait for Windows8, if there was no Windows7 Phone . Now they must. And Microsoft probably never looked at Windows Phone 7 as a long-term OS.

Windows Phone 8 vs. iOS vs. Android: One giant leap for Microsoft

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