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Nostalgia is a powerful thing. He has been the main driving force behind all the major film and television releases in the last 10 years, as with Marvel and Star wars film franchises.
ZDNet parent company, CBS, is no exception. He made a lot of effort – taking advantage of this nostalgic trend by rebroadcasting familiar iconic characters on Star Trek: Discovery on CBS All-Access. In CBS prime time, the resumption of Hawaii Five-O is renewed for its 9th season. And now, likewise Magnum, P.I. as if he had come back from the dead, without Tom Selleck's mustache.
A little nostalgia
Technology is also generating interest in reviving old brands. Palm seems to think that people have the same attachment to technological legacies as Luke Skywalker and Mister Spock. But I'm misleading.
Most of the time, I feel that our love for the elderly comes from the frustration of the present and the complexities it often brings. We tend to look at old things, especially technology, with pink glasses.
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We observe it from a distance and tend to choose the aspects of these systems that we really liked, while ignoring many shortcomings that we will have to eliminate.
I've had a bit of nostalgia recently when Ben Rudolph, a terrific man and global leader in Microsoft retail services, tweeted about the fact that his father was still a Windows Phone user. He uses the HTC 8X, released at the end of 2012 on AT & T.
His tweet has over 300 mentions I love so far and that has made me think a lot about the unfortunate smartphone platform.
Microsoft Infanticide
I am now of growing opinion that Microsoft has committed infanticide on the mobile operating system. The latest Windows 10 Mobile phone, the Microsoft Lumia 950 XL, was launched in 2015. In 2017, Microsoft announced that it was ceasing to support Windows 10 Mobile, due to weak sales and sluggishness with which developers install.
There were indeed a number of things that Windows 10 Mobile had against. The resources were heavy and the material really could not keep up. Microsoft decided to stop the construction of devices, the interest of OEMs has evaporated and the operating system was subsequently euthanized.
But Windows 10 as a platform was relatively new, even in PC space, and it had not even reached a critical mass of desktop users, let alone mobile devices.
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When it was paused, it was using a brand new programming model, the Universal Windows Platform or UWP (also called modern Windows applications) fully running under modern Windows 10 UX.
While UWP finally brought consistent and consistent APIs between the Windows versions of Windows Mobile and Desktop, many legacy Windows applications had to be (largely) rewritten from scratch using .NET, and it was not necessary to use them. there really were not good porting tools for iOS and Android. filling the "void of the application" has turned out to be a very difficult exercise.
But there was a lot to love about Windows 10 Mobile. First of all, even if she was using a lot of resources, it worked very well and I would like to say that it was one of the most stable mobile operating systems I've ever used – even more stable iOS 12 or Android Pie.
Less is more
Rudolph's father is hardly unique as suspended Windows 10 Mobile and Windows Phone. Over the past year, I have met quite a few people, usually older people, who really love their devices and refuse to upgrade them to an Android or an iPhone. They live. Like the undead.
Why are they using them again? From my personal experience, I can at least tell you that as you approach the age of 50, you want things in your life to be simpler. It is not necessarily that we are unable to learn new things, but we begin to find a new appreciation in "less is more".
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Windows 10 Mobile is both a highly sophisticated operating system, with all the modern accessories that might be needed in terms of feature sets and security enhancements, but it also has an extremely easy-to-use UX. navigate, without "noise" or other distractions spreads its design philosophy to all the applications that are executed there.
It has a consistency between applications and an elegance that simply does not exist on other platforms, which mitigates the psychological context change that you may encounter between an application like Twitter and Facebook or an email application. like Outlook.
I currently own several Android devices, including the new Pixel 3, as well as the iPhone XS Max. I even find myself on a 6.5 inch screen and I read the text with swollen fonts at their largest size. My eyes have never been so beautiful, because I have to wear Progressive, but at 49, I fight. That's one of the reasons I'm looking forward to getting myself another 12.9-inch iPad Pro because I can not tolerate that to use such a small screen for so long. " hours per day.
However, on my aging Lumia 950 XL, that I sometimes go out of the bedside table drawer to use it as a late-night mail client, reading the display is as clear as possible because of the UX high contrast. And these 1080p screens have also been optimized for clear viewing from multiple angles.
Ahead of its time
Let's not forget that the Windows 10 desktop in the Insider versions has recently adopted a "Dark Mode" and that Mac OS X Mojave has made it a big deal as well. A number of Android and iOS applications are also beginning to offer it. But Windows 10 Mobile? It was always "Dark Mode". This was the default operation, with clear text and bright icons with high contrast on a black background. It was ahead of its time.
Also: Windows 10 Mobile? No new features but a new phone
There are many other technical arguments that explain why Windows 10 Mobile should come back. For starters, the hardware is much better now than when it came out of the 950XL: faster cores, faster memory and better displays, for example.
The Snapdragon 845, the Huawei Kirin 980 or even the current Samsung Exynos 9810 would use Windows 10 Mobile as a spaceship. Even the mid-range versions of these chips would perform extremely well the platform and its applications now. A Windows 10 Mobile device at 200 USD is quite feasible with the current components.
And Microsoft Edge, as a browser, has matured a lot over the past four years. This is a more stable and much faster browser than Chrome or Safari, and it makes traditional websites much better than when they first appeared.
These are all good technical reasons to bring Windows 10 Mobile back to life. We have not even started discussing other improvements to the Windows 10 codebase in the last three years that could make it a new version of the mobile operating system.
The challenges of the restoration of the juju developer
The application gap, which remains a challenge for Windows 10, is a much easier problem to solve. While the UWP model remains a valid programmatic model, Microsoft has shifted its focus to PWA, or Progressive Web Apps, using fast, cloud-based programming languages such as HTML5.
PWA as a global application programming strategy is also becoming more popular in Android and iOS. So, reducing the gap by using cross-platform development tools for PWA would make this effort easier.
Microsoft has also introduced much better cross-platform tools that would also allow native UWP applications to be created. Android and iOS now have fully modernized versions of .NET Standard and can now share UX elements in the overall design of their applications using XAML with Windows. It is therefore much simpler to maintain a code base using Visual Studio for all three platforms.
Aside from the improvements to the tools, Microsoft would have the work to convince developers to resume the development of applications for Windows Mobile 10 if he decided to bring the operating system back to life.
He would face these challenges even though he was doing a lot of name-shifting (for example, "Edge OS" or something like that to remove any negative association with his predecessor) or giving it a sufficiently aesthetic appearance to consumers do not do so immediately. recognize it.
And I'm not just talking about an operating system code base that has not seen the light of day or an active development team at Microsoft for probably three years. This would not be the hardest problem because Windows 10 now runs on modern ARM processors; all they have to do is reopen all the project files and rebuild it with the current Windows 10 source code.
Knowing what I know about Microsoft's internal build systems, I would be surprised if I have not been configured to do it already or if the iterations have not been stealthed for years.
In my opinion, the big problem is the overall trust of developers in Microsoft, and failing to better describe, good Mojo and jujuas voodoo practitioners say.
I would say that Microsoft's mojo / juju with developers is better than it has been for a long time. The latest batch of Surface hardware has been very well received and the new Microsoft, open source compliant, is now widely regarded as a more progressive company than Apple and more reliable than Google.
Windows now has a "cool factor", and it's important for any software platform if you want to develop for it.
That said, the costs remain high for developers, especially for those who were burned by the earliest incarnations of Windows on mobile devices.
PWA and UWP may be easier to develop at the moment, but that does not mean that it's free to do it or effortlessly – significant efforts are still needed to get the old burned .NET developers who are concentrating now their efforts on Android and iOS. Spending time, effort, and money to transfer their current code to Windows 10 Mobile will not be an easy task.
But even if Microsoft does not bring back Windows 10 Mobile to life, it has the same problems to face with Windows 10 on the desktop and UWP applications. Finally, the problem must be solved if he wants Windows 10 to be more than a system intended for running (mostly) legacy Win32 applications.
Also: here's how you can always get a free update of Windows 10
What about the drivers of the company?
I think we can argue in favor of a third powerful mobile platform because the two predominant platforms, Android and iOS, are becoming obsolete. They are sitting on their laurels and users are tired of it.
Behind the scenes, Google is trying to figure out what to do with the new generation of its mobile software with Fuchsia, while trying (badly) to introduce Android compatibility with Chrome OS in order to grab the screen of the tablet. real estate away from the iPad and Windows 10 on the desktop.
Apple is struggling to stop its cruel software from flying from one publication to the next and introducing new features to attract ever-tired users to the new iPhone hardware, for which they do not do not seem to want to spend a lot of money.
There is much to be said about the consistent UX of Windows 10 Mobile, its stability and its business security features compared to these platforms. You can also argue that this would be an ideal platform for a large number of vertical industries or for inexpensive and secure phones for fleets.
And let's not get into the "toxic hell" of Android, which causes a lot of fragmentation problems for developers and stability and security issues for end users and businesses that use this platform.
In addition: Windows 10 after three years: a greatly improved scorecard
Certainly, Microsoft is doing a lot to have a symbiotic relationship with iOS and Android. And it should continue to do so because it's a major revenue generator for Office 365 and its other cloud services. Overcoming these platforms is a smart strategy because Apple and Google are the leaders in the mobile phone market.
But, as mentioned earlier, Apple products are very expensive. This is a bad choice for the company that is only partially part of the BYOD and that has to equip some of its employees, if not all, of phones.
And Google will have more and more challenges in areas increasingly intolerant of its behavior as a monopolistic arm wrestling as the European Union. And for builders using Google software in the EU, this means an increase in costs because of the need to license this stack.
Windows 10 Mobile, however, in its latest version before the zombie dust is transmitted to it, does not result in any license fees for devices less than 9 inches. I would expect Microsoft, if it restores it, to extend the same conditions again.
Surface phone
I'm not saying that Microsoft should invest heavily in capital and publish "Surface Phone" tomorrow. But maybe it would take a few steps leaving the idea to Chinese device manufacturers, such as Huawei, Oppo and Xiaomi, and even to Korean companies like Samsung and LG, to have now a new operating system option for the EU and other markets where can offer secure, royalty-free and highly compelling devices at competitive prices and competitive price.
Is it time for Windows 10 Mobile to come back from the dead? Speak back and let me know.
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