

Microsoft Strikes Back? - dageshi

Over the weekend I watched BBC Click and they had a section on the KT Spiderphone<p>http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006m9ry (10:35)<p>Not sure if people outside of the UK can watch that so here's another article about it.<p>http://www.pcworld.com/article/239631/unique_kt_spider_phone_transforms_into_a_tablet_laptop_or_handheld_gaming_device.html<p>Basically the tl:dr is that it's a smartphone that slots into a tablet which can then become the screen of a notebook.<p>Imagine being able to buy a bundle of hardware (phone+tablet+notebook) which costs under $1000, has permanent net access courtesy of the phones 3g and which you can really use for work (notebook), play (tablet) and communication (phone) and does all of these things <i>well</i>.<p>It seems to me this could very quickly make Microsoft a major player in the smartphone &#38; tablet space while retaining its existing desktop dominance.
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nextparadigms
Microsoft's WP7 is not Windows 8. They are 2 different OS's, so they'd have to
use both, on the phone's hardware. So far I haven't seen anything more
powerful than a single core WP7 phone. Plus, are you asking for an Atom-based
phone?

However, I do think docking a phone into different screens has potential. I
was thinking before how Google could do like 3 "UI add-ons" for the core
Android code. So you get your phone UI add-on by default on the phone itself,
then when you dock it to a PC screen, you see the Honeycomb UI, and when you
dock it to a TV, you see the Google TV UI.

I think different types of devices and form factors mandate a different UI.
You can't really shoe-horn a UI from a 3" screen to a 50" screen. But of
course, they could still be made so you transition painlessly from one to the
other, and have the same design style. But they should all be optimized for
the form factor, device type and screen size.

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dageshi
Your right, I confused the ability to run metro with the ability to run win8
on a smartphone. But according to the BBC clip the KT Spiderphone apparently
runs a dual core 1.5ghz processor although I assume that is arm and not atom.

So perhaps not seamless all in one package yet.

Although the phone and tablet could work together fine, the notebook would
need its own hardware but could still utilise the tablet for screen & graphics
card. I still think there's a compelling case for such a combination.

