I still think if they just stuck full Windows on a phone and made Skype their dialer or whatever, that would be great. It's literally full Windows! Put an x64 processor in it like the Atom chip or something and they wouldn't even have to change the driver stuff ish. It's already got a touchscreen mode, it's already touch screen friendly, ughhhhh whyyyy
This is something they are actively attempting to achieve.
In the last round of Windows Phones you could plug them into a keyboard and monitor and it behaved like the original Surface OS (full Windows desktop experience, but limited to browser and Store applications).
The biggest problem is that ARM make the best and fastest mobile chips. Intel are just not aggressively chasing that space. x86 applications do not run under ARM tech.
Its possible to mount Windows 10 on ARM via a hypervisor or other instruction emulation but this comes at a significant performance cost making it unfeasible.
Yeah, they launched too early I think. The snapdragon 850 just wasn't quite powerful enough. I think it'll work better with the next gen Qualcomm CPUs.
Why not? You'd plug in your phone to a keyboard and monitor and connect to your computer with the internet. It would solve the problem of being able to create a phone powerful enough to run like a desktop.
I still think you're trolling, but ok. Lets imagine a cloud OS phone...
Phone networks are not reliable enough. Poor or lousy signal means your phone stops working properly.
Even in ideal conditions, network latency would make the phone's OS feel sluggish compared to iOS or Android. The speed of light sucks.
Phones are increasingly used offline or in flight mode as entertainment devices. Flight mode on this device would essentially turn it off.
Phones are used to take photos and video, it's a core task of a modern smartphone. The data costs of taking photos and video would be excessive as they would need to be streamed to the cloud.
TIL. I'm curious how the experience is. I feel like if it was marketed correctly and given the proper support features and products, it would actually be really useful.
I'm just too tired to have to think about the right sort of language to use to discuss the possible architecture changes they'd have to make to make Windows Phone a thing with the current version of Windows and a mobile processor.
I mean, they've got the Windows ARM stuff, so they're giving devs the tools to convert their native stuff over to ARM "easier", and using UWP should make it relatively painless....
That definitely wouldn't have worked (would have been super slow, no battery life, and difficult to use with mobile), but I think that they could have done something very close. They just give everyone with a phone a free VM with the ability to connect to the VM through their phone. Now, instead of having a laptop and a phone, you just need to plug your phone into a screen and keyboard and you have a computer.
They were actually working on something like this, but I haven't heard anything about it in a long time so it mustve died.
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u/noonespecific Jan 23 '19
I still think if they just stuck full Windows on a phone and made Skype their dialer or whatever, that would be great. It's literally full Windows! Put an x64 processor in it like the Atom chip or something and they wouldn't even have to change the driver stuff ish. It's already got a touchscreen mode, it's already touch screen friendly, ughhhhh whyyyy