Wozniak Praises 'Beautiful' Windows Phone 362
judgecorp writes "Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has praised the user interface of Microsoft's Windows Phone, saying that aspects of its user interface are more 'beautiful' than comparable sides to the iPhone. The comments, in a New Domain, follow on from a comment by Forrester boss George Colony who blogged that Apple would decline in the post-Jobs era. Both pieces have kicked off the kind of online argument you would expect."
Re:Windows Phone 7 (Score:4, Insightful)
I played with a Lumia 900. It's well thought out but execution is lacking. The thing wouldn't get on the in store AT&T wifi. So I go to toggle it off and see what LTE is all about and the soft toggle for wifi on/off gets stuck in the middle. Err. What? It's a UI element! Really?
Windows phone 7 is full of interesting and good ideas with poor execution and little polish.
Re:Windows Phone 7 (Score:1, Insightful)
Yeah, and they've been paying clueless morons to rave about their shit on the internet too. Combined with subpar features and absolutely no interest from the public market, WP7 will make a fucking killing in Slashdot comment threads but nowhere else!
Re:Windows Phone 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, the hyper-coordination between articles praising the WinPhone and gushing first posts is getting annoying.... How about a 15 minute rule between article and first post? Or maybe restrict first post to accounts that have been around for more than 15 minutes?
Online argument? (Score:1, Insightful)
"Both pieces have kicked off the kind of online argument you would expect"... I expect the kind that has all the /. trolls and shills locked in I-wish-it-was-mortal combat for the next, say 12 hours.
Too bad they both suck, Maemo 4evah!!
/me's work here is done...
And.....? (Score:5, Insightful)
So what if Woz praised something a competitor produced? He's entitled to his own opinion, negative or positive, and it says nothing about the state of Apple. Is Apple going to decline without Jobs? Who know, but Woz having an opinion is hardly a sign one way or the other. The only thing it does is dispell any notion that he's an arrogant prat who couldn't possible even deign to glance at a competitor's product without vomiting.
Maybe this sort of thing gets to me too much, but I'm really fed up of this "you must be 100% for whichever brand-tribe you join!" guff. If he liked bits of another product then so what, that's competition for you.
Re:Windows Phone 7 (Score:1, Insightful)
Its not surprising that Wozniak stuck to tech (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Windows Phone 7 (Score:4, Insightful)
Or you should visit the Firehose more often.
Re:Windows Phone 7 (Score:2, Insightful)
I have a WP7 phone (HTC). I've never seen those issues. I'm guessing they are hardware/driver issues. I'm guessing the UI toggle is tied to the processing state of the action - it stalled in the middle, so it died.
And you can't blame the phone OS if the store can't make their WiFi and phones work together. I've used my phone on my WiFi at work and the Sprint store, and had no issues whatsoever.
WP7 has it's flaws, particularly with the 3rd party dev API, but the issues you mentioned seem more likely to be AT&T or the hardware manufacturer.
no surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Wozniak is a nerd's nerd. He isn't the general public, and what woz thinks is awesome is not likely to be what Joe average wants to use. That is not meant to be an insult by the way, the man is a genius. But he's a technical genius and not a genius with regards to what people want (that was Jobs).
I'd say that getting a glowing review by wozniak is just as likely to be the kiss of death as it is to be the harbinger of iphone doom...
Since 1984... (Score:5, Insightful)
George Colony who blogged that Apple would decline in the post-Jobs era.
Since day one of the Macintosh, or you might say day one of the IBM PC, people have been predicting the demise of Apple. With every new model and every new OS, legions of entrenched industry analysts stood up and said with certainty..."whoa, this may be the end of Apple".
I guess if they just keep saying that, one day it will be true and they can pat themselves on the back for being so prescient.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Windows Phone 7 (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, to be more fair, he almost certainly has a shitload more posts than that going back for quite a bit longer, just spread between a few dozen accounts.
That's one of the things I like about Woz (Score:5, Insightful)
--
The mill's closed. There's no more work. We're destitute. I've got no option but to sell you all for scientific experiments.
Re:Windows Phone 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
TechCar is the latest iteration of a large group of astroturfing accounts. There's a bunch of high UID accounts with similar style names (two random words smashed together) that shill pro-Microsoft and anti-Google positions. Unsurprisingly, he was born yesterday to post in Bonch's story claiming Google management knew about the wifi harvesting. He shows up to defend a well-established anti-Google (and pro-Apple) shill and has since posted a series of anti-Linux, anti-Google, and pro-Microsoft comments.
Assuming he follows the same pattern as the rest, mods will catch on in a week or two and his karma will plummet. The account will get put to sleep and a new one will be created.
Re:Since 1984... (Score:4, Insightful)
George Colony who blogged that Apple would decline in the post-Jobs era.
Since day one of the Macintosh, or you might say day one of the IBM PC, people have been predicting the demise of Apple. With every new model and every new OS, legions of entrenched industry analysts stood up and said with certainty..."whoa, this may be the end of Apple".
I guess if they just keep saying that, one day it will be true and they can pat themselves on the back for being so prescient.
Well, to be fair, the first post-Jobs era at Apple did almost sink the company. Microsoft, ironically enough, is a big part of the reason Apple made it out of the mid 90's in business. And if you talk to their shareholders now, most of them will tell you that, while the post-Jobs era now has been good from a stock value and revenue standpoint, its been pretty damn concerning from a mid-term to long-term innovation and investment standpoint. Look at the pace of "real" innovation that was happening at Apple for the ten years before Jobs' departure, and look at the pace now. That should have people worried. "Innovation" now is "hype up the technology developed by a company we're suing (Samsung's high-resolution panel)" and "we're in 150 markets". Software innovation is dried up -- they're rolling out largely features that came from Android and WP7, implemented in the jailbroken community, and absorbed much later by Apple.
Apple and MS have swapped roles now -- Apple is coasting on customer hype and its near monopoly, and Microsoft is the nimble innovator. And as someone who has a lot of stock in both, I have this lingering sense of dread that both companies are going to somehow screw this up.
Re:Windows Phone 7 (Score:1, Insightful)
How about growing up, and just ignoring things that bother you on the internet?
It's not like the 50th, 100th, 200th post is insightful. This is slashdot.
They now have a BI section. They think that has to do with nerds and technology.
It is the worst of "IT World", and the worst of fark. The trolls are the only thing I find enjoyable about the site anymore.
Re:Windows Phone 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
HTTP is not a replacement for every other protocol. I am sick of the brain dead thinking it is. We have other protocols for a reason.
As a simple example, http sure is not enough for an ftp client, ssh client, etc, etc, etc. 7.5 of course will let you do all these things.
Re:And.....? (Score:4, Insightful)
he's not a fanboi of any particular technology despite his Apple connections.
Which I think is something which appearss to be missing in large chunks of the general population these days (at least, the population who actually care about technology). If you take a glance down the comments sections of many sites it's a perpetual argument-to-the-death for their own personal preference. I even know people who are like that in person when it comes to tech, but why? Why are people so obsessed with insisting that what they have is the absolute best ever and don't you dare disagree with me? At which point did people stop being consumers and start being believers?
Would you have written something similar, or considered it non-newsworthy, if the subject was Dave Haynie, Richard Stallman, Chuck Peddle, or James Gosling?
That depends on the context. Stallman has heavily criticised Apple for their ethics, which is something I'd be interested in hearing about. Would I think it's shocking and newsworthy if Stallman picked up an iPhone and said "You know, I really like the aluminium body they give these things"? No.
If Wozniak thinks the Microsoft phone is beautiful then fine. If someone wants to report "comments from a guy who knows about these things on #upcomingtech" then fine. But trying to tie that in to an article about someone claiming that Apple is in decline as if the two are somehow linked and therefore Steve must be about to jump ship? Come on.
Re:And.....? (Score:4, Insightful)
I wonder what kind of phone he actually uses...
Re:Windows Phone 7 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Windows Phone 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
And you can't blame the phone OS if the store can't make their WiFi and phones work together
Umm.
Yes. You can. In almost all cases. If the store Wifi is working and everyone else can get on and that phone can not, What exactly is to blame?
Re:Windows Phone 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a reason, Woz has been an engineer and not a designer at Apple.
Yeah - he actually invented things instead of putting pretty packages and a neat UI on existing things and marketing the hell out of them. He had the audacity to put function over form.
Re:Its not surprising that Wozniak stuck to tech (Score:5, Insightful)
It's sad that Wozniak was always hindered by his inability to be a bullshit artist. It's just not in his nature to kiss ass or blow smoke. You ask his opinion and he gives it, without any regard as to whether or not it's what you want to hear.
Unfortunately this quality, which should be considered a virtue, is usually considered a handicap in the corporate world.
Re:Monumental failure. (Score:5, Insightful)
With just a little bit of glue and abstraction over input devices a game could probably share 90% of the code between iOS, Android and even the Blackberry Tablet OS / Blackberry 10. If you utilised some 3rd party gaming API it's probably even more again. Microsoft really need that native support and preferably OpenGL ES, even if its through gritted teeth.
Re:Windows Phone 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
You are assuming it is working with all of the others.
Also, you are assuming the issue isn't with the driver or hardware (which would be the manufacturer of the phone, and not the OS).
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Windows Phone 7 (Score:3, Insightful)
HTTP is not a replacement for every other protocol. I am sick of the brain dead thinking it is. We have other protocols for a reason
This didn't happen because people are idiots. Admins censored the other ports, and people routed around it. Of course there are network tools that can tell if you are trying to piggyback something else through port 80, so you might as well finagle your exchanges into legitimate HTTP traffic.
Re:Windows Phone 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Windows Phone 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
If users are going to have to fight with drivers on their Windows phones, then Microsoft has already lost the race. Nobody wants to muck with drivers on their friggin' phone. What the hell does that even mean? It's not like someone swapped out the network adapter or anything -- so if they wifi doesn't work out of the box, the entire phone is suspect and isn't ready for consumers.
Well, then maybe the OS+phone combo, but people kind of expect wi-fi to be a well solved problem. Find the network, enter the password, and go. It's not like it's new or anything.
If I was testing out a phone, and I couldn't get it to use the wifi in the store, I'd simply move onto the next phone. That's some serious warning signals the phone is going to be problematic.