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  • Author Author: Catwell
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What type of smartphone OS do you use?

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  • Lets just say, when I started ... Windows CE and Windows Mobile powered my first "smart" phone. But then I got given a Palm with a cellular attachment too ... nothing would be as efficient and bare-metal as it was back then. Oh the memories of losing everything when your battery went flat ... I'm glad we got rid of SRAM.

     

    In the meantime, I still find the new phone OSes to be somewhat bloated and inefficient. How could we do so much with so little before?!?!

  • in reply to Gough Lui

    I won't say android is bloated more full featured. I would agree that battery backed ram sucks, I recently lost all of the files on my z88 because i ran out of power and that was a lot of work down the drain. If you want a basic phone then i recommend you buy a cheap nokia i had one of those and it makes call receive texts and basically nothing else.

  • in reply to kidiccurus

    To some extent, that's true in regards to Android. But I remember when the Nexus 7 (2012) tablet with the quad-core 1.3Ghz Tegra 3 processor was ample back when it was released with ~4.0. Upgrading it to 5.0 makes it slow as molasses, to the point that I can't use it effectively as I haven't got the patience. There is slow and steady increase in performance requirements with each OS iteration, but the benefits are not immediately apparent. Most of them are small improvements one can live without to some extent. Others are security related, and worth having, but the burden seems to be significant.

     

    If old Windows Mobile could be ported to one of the modern devices, I'm sure it'd run like a rocketship. Instead of a ~600Mb image, the whole OS fits within 8-48Mb. Lacking the VM-containerization of programs, everything would be bare metal, thus avoiding any JIT compilation overhead. It might not be as pretty, but I used to stream (H.263) videos over Wi-Fi (802.11b) from my NAS using TCPMP on Windows Mobile 2003SE and that was miles ahead of anything of its time.

     

    Then again, I suppose I'm just being nostalgic after all ...

  • in reply to Gough Lui

    Saying anything positive about windows mobile is a surefire sign of either

    A: Nostalgia

    B: Being a Microsoft employee

     

    Still, I suppose it was OK for its time.

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  • in reply to kidiccurus

    Hah ... yeah, I used Palm as well, and at least the monochrome ones were pretty awesome in terms of battery life. But then again, so were 2kB/64kB "digital diary" or "organizers". More SRAM fun ... with a particular battery change time window else you risk losing it all.

     

    The colour LCD screens and 2-3h usage times, as well as twice-daily charge requirements of the WM PDA brethren weren't particularly convenient in comparison. But in exchange, you got your colour screen and many more apps to play with. The last one I owned was an iPaq hx4700 Intel PXA270 624Mhz CPU, 64Mb RAM, 640x480 screen, with Wi-Fi (802.11b), Bluetooth (1.2), Infrared, Trackpad, CF and SD slots. It was pretty fast and usable even with GPS navigation apps like iGO8 using BT GPS units. Of course, I didn't buy it "new" - the price on those was ridiculous!


    When WM5, 6 got around with the concept of the "Store" which got closed down, I really didn't like them ... suppose change is always hard to take.

     

    Nowadays, I still dabble with each and every OS. I even have a Blackberry Playbook (QNX-based), which I'm not that fond of, but does have some interesting features.

     

    - Gough

  • in reply to kidiccurus

    Oh, and for disclosure. I'm not, and never been a Microsoft employee. If I were, I might actually be rich now image.

     

    - Gough