Path: news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Paul Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy,alt.comp.os.windows-11 Subject: Re: No More Windows/Xbox Franken-Handheld? Date: Tue, 3 Jun 2025 10:41:34 -0400 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 89 Message-ID: <101n1j0$2i31$1@dont-email.me> References: <101le70$3j9qp$2@dont-email.me> <101msbj$11ha$1@dont-email.me> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Date: Tue, 03 Jun 2025 16:41:37 +0200 (CEST) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="b1002a92ad0ea8b2cdeb52d6f38fdf60"; logging-data="84065"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1/zFoJNTHU/q7dTReSU1wLUHB7fWxaRhhw=" User-Agent: Ratcatcher/2.0.0.25 (Windows/20130802) Cancel-Lock: sha1:lFPSrQn4zAJDn8ca5PXPHFOG+QA= Content-Language: en-US In-Reply-To: <101msbj$11ha$1@dont-email.me> On Tue, 6/3/2025 9:12 AM, Daniel70 wrote: > Some time ago, don't MS produce a mobile-phone that ran some sort of Windows OS. > > Are they still about?? There has been more than one device type, for mobility. There was the Palm Pilot, and various other companies made "hand held devices that didn't make phone calls" :-) I don't know if any Wikipedia article will do the history justice. I certainly can't write this article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Mobile At one time, they bought a portion of Nokia, and a guy with a last name of "Elop" ran it, for maybe a year or so. This would be in addition to other mobile device types Microsoft made. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Nokia "Sale of mobile phone business to Microsoft On 25 April 2014, Nokia sold its mobile phone business to Microsoft for approximately €3.79bn. €1.65bn was paid by Microsoft for a ten-year license to Nokia's patents." Panos Panay may have taken the place of Elop, running the division. Panay quit last year, and someone else is running it now. Presumably these things happen, when the terms of being awarded a bonus, are too hard (impossible) for an executive to achieve. Hardware Division | | ... | ... | Former surface Other HW (No more Mice and Keyboards) Windows OS Tablets Division 7000 devs The thing was, for mobile devices like SmartPhones, some of the companies were just crushing by the others. Blackberry for example, had a loyal customer base, but the pressure from other companies helped tip it over. Even Microsoft could not save Windows Mobile. Nokia was also under pressure back then, it had loyal customers, but the loyal customers could not save it either. But I would not count Microsoft out. They dabble in things that are seemingly dead, so never say never. Other companies dabble, they get burned, they learn a lesson, they don't do it again. Canonical (Ubuntu) had hardware aspirations at one time, but the money drain from activities like that, serves as a reminder to not do that. You need deep deep pockets and a don't care attitude, to enter existing markets and bump other companies out of the way. You have to be prepared to lose a lot of money. Whereas Microsoft is likely to still have a giant pile of money, and continuing to experiment with Phones or Phone-Like devices could still be there. Remember that a small company made a "StarTrek Badge" for the shirt pocket. You press it and I think you would be in communications with an AI. That was their plan. For a company like Microsoft, they would immediately begin to salivate when seeing a "new device type" like that. You can see an example of the tinkering here. Things you assume they have made, but perhaps you don't know the history. I only assumed they made one, and before I saw this, I had no idea what it would look like. https://www.cnet.com/reviews/microsoft-band-2-review/ Microsoft made a computer table. It cost $10,000 each, and the table surface was a display (to give some idea of the size). I believe it might have been touch sensitive, so you could pinch and twist an item seen in the display and move it around. Or, you could draw on the table top, and your artwork would show on the display. Sometimes corporations buy toys like this, but I don't expect they sold very many. Microsoft is even dabbling in AI. The AI is not sufficiently breakthru material, to be guaranteed to succeed. While many large dollar figures are bandied about, and there is a lot of "gambling" going on, in the end it could still fail... because it's too expensive. It's almost like the High Tech industry has a death wish, to just implode and disappear, due to the amounts of money listed as being inbound. (Companies buying nuclear reactors, or one twit buying a rocket company because he thinks he is launching datacenters into space.) Paul