Category: Windows Phone

Stephen Elop and the Trojan Horse that never was

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Some hopefully rational thinking by myself over on All About Windows Phone, given the news today of Microsoft’s purchase of Nokia’s Devices and Services division: The thinking goes something like this. As an entity, Microsoft calls Stephen Elop into a smokey room, asks him to leave the company to become CEO of Nokia, stop all the Finnish OS developments and switch the company to Windows Phone. Elop will then proceed to make a decent (but not profitable) line of handsets, drive the stock price down, and allow Microsoft to buy Nokia. At which point Elop will be brought back into

BlackBerry and the momentum of hesitation

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Morgan Stanley are ‘holding off’ on a move to BB10 (as a company they are heavy BB7 users). The reason of course is the long0term support of the platform, which is tied up in the long-term survival of BlackBerry as a company. Developers are hesitant to switch fully to BB10, relying on cross-platform tools such as Unity in the meantime; business clients are hesitant to sign up lengthy support contracts that will impact on their IT department for years; and the high street seems to be turning away from the physical keyboard on the Q10 and Q5. BlackBerry’s quarterly result

Windows Phone and the Unity engine

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Unity arrived on Windows Phone 8 in October last year, and I spoke to Tony Garcia about the project’s past, present, and future, for All About Windows Phone: Unity has ensured that the Unity environment for Windows Phone offers the same facilities, tools, and code, as iOS and Android. The hard work to ensure the ‘author once, deploy anywhere’ concept applies equally well to the mobile platforms (BlackBerry 10 is also supported). Of course, there are always wrinkles, for example deploying to the Windows Phone Store is not the same as to the Apple App Store or Google Play, but

Why do developers still need ‘Windows Phone 101’ at a Unity session?

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Windows Phone launched in October 2010. Windows Phone 8 launched in October 2012, arguably with a similar UI experience. Given those time-frames, I’m astonished that Microsoft felt the need to spend twenty minutes during their presentation the Unity 2013 Developer Conference explaining what live tiles are, the integration in the People hub, and using ‘Kids Corner’. Assuming that the audience has no experience at all of Windows Phone probably says the wrong thing about the platform to the audience.

Nokia needs Lumia to eat Asha as quickly as possible

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If Nokia’s feature phones are going to be cannibalized, the perfect company to do that is… Nokia. Nokia’s feature phone strength has always had an impact on its  financials, and the Asha range has continued that tradition. But with mobile phone volumes down 27% year on year (reported during the Q2 2013 results), the impact may be lessening… Which is why the rapidly dropping price of Nokia’s low-end Windows Phone handsets is worth noting. Nokia knows that sales of mobile handsets are flowing away from it – and if anyone is going to cannibalise Nokia’s mobile phone sales, I’m pretty