Folding Andromeda Device Could be Microsoft’s iPhone Moment

DooKey

DooKey

[H]F Junkie
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Microsoft has been rumored to have a folding phone in the works for some time and the latest patent of the device shows how it could be used and what it would display. It looks like a small hinged tablet and has displays on both sections. The keyboard appears to be a GUI and can disappear when not needed. Although it looks neat I'm not sure whether this is something I'd necessarily be interested in, but those that do a lot of surfing/reading might like the portability of the device. Of course there isn't a shipping product yet, but this might be a product that could put a dent in Apple's sales.

With two displays, it’s something of a spiritual successor to the canceled Microsoft Courier device. But it has more in common with modern smartphones than Courier-era tablets. This way, Microsoft is positioning itself to compete with the Apple iPhone and Google Pixel more than the iPad or PixelBook.
 
So like a pocket/smaller version of this...

The problems with devices like this will always be battery. If it has a decent battery i'd be interested.

 
So what you are saying I shouldn't go in on a Pixel2 right now, but keep my Lumia Icon for just a bit longer?

Always thought the MS Courier was a swell idea years ago.. still, sort of, think so now.
 
So lets see, it will be sort of a tablet when people are not buying tablets, it will be a phone but not a phone and definitely not run any google phone apps you would need while pretending its a phone, and it will probably sport some bastard customized screen folding variant of W10 on ARM so it wont run 64 bit software. But folding!!!
 
Remember the surface mini? Maybe this is another attempt at doing what they really hoped for a few years back.
 
So one of the screens would be used for keyboard? Might as well make a physical keyboard...
 
Its already dead. Without a good Android runtime or emulator, nothing can survive regardless of how fancy its hardware or OS. iOS may even have one in a dozen years if market share continues to shrink.
 
Whenever I see folding devices I worry if they are going to wind up being much too thick to be ideal, despite the fact that I have a pretty large tolerance for device thickness (If having to choose between more battery capacity, removable battery, sdcard slot, etc in a thicker device, or a thinner more sleek device, I'd always choose the thicker one.
 
MS has had this patent for a while, they even had a product a while ago (folding tablet that looked like a book) that was scrapped.
 
Folding Andromeda Device Could be Microsoft’s iPhone Moment
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50/50 that it could go the other way and be their Newton moment.

It's going to come down to the OS. If it's Microsoft Windows, it's already got an uphill battle with people looking for a smartphone and your potential market just shrunk tremendously. That leaves the business consumer that may be interested in it from a productivity workflow, however, most migrated from WinOS/RIM to Apple years ago, so that's all they know now.

So that leaves a small subsection of consumers that want a Windows tablet they can carry in their pocket. That's a very small market.

Again, that hinges on the OS. Microsoft makes a lot of contributions to the Linux OS space these days. If they steered into an MS fork of Android, they might pick up some of the edge market.
 
gunbust3r said:
it will probably sport some bastard customized screen folding variant of W10 on ARM so it wont run 64 bit software. But folding!!!
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Actually the latest version of Win10 on ARM does support 64-bit arch and true 64-bit ARM compile. So you can take you Win10 x86-64 app, recompile it to ARM64 and it will work without any emulation. No not WinStore app, A full fledged app running natively on ARM64 arch. Catch is, as of now it only works on their new Qualcomm 850 chips that they just released at Computex.
 
mtrupi said:
I forgot about the Courier. A very interesting concept, maybe it will come back. The Surface Mini was pulled from production at the last minute. The images in the article look like something about the size of the mini.
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The courier was something that a lot of people wanted, but sadly it became another product MS decided to scrap. I would of bought one easily, in fact if they did revive it as a surface device I would trade in my surface for one.

People didn’t find out about it until they canned it, I still think they should revive it but they don’t have much reason to, the surface line is doing super well.
 
Let me read a book on it with a page on each side and turn pages by flicking the screen with an animation... and make it cost 1200 dollars and also be a phone... wait I have a phone that I can read books on.. do I REALLY want two pages for that. I don't think so.
 
Grimlaking said:
Let me read a book on it with a page on each side and turn pages by flicking the screen with an animation... and make it cost 1200 dollars and also be a phone... wait I have a phone that I can read books on.. do I REALLY want two pages for that. I don't think so.
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I would. I read a lot of technical books that references graphs on separate pages and I hate that I have to flip to see them.

Basic novels, no problem.
 
pcgeekesq said:
As a named inventor on over 50 U.S. Patents issued to Intel, I can assure you that the issuance of a patent (years after the initial application) doesn't really say much about a company's product plans.
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Yep, Microsoft is squatting an old patent in the hopes that Samsung, Apple or someone else builds a device with a likeness to their patent so they can beg for a handout. That's it. Internally, Microsoft has already pivoted away from consumer products, hardware and even Windows. Terry Myerson out, windows division broken up and folded into other divisions. Nadella wants MS to join IBM in the retirement home with his myopic cloud-cloud-cloud focus.

Besides, even if the hardware was good, what would be the point? They continually pulled the rug out from customers and developers with the continual API changes and backward compat breaks through all the various WMobile versions, they abandoned Wmobile 10 without notice or even announcement and left the last Wphone clingers to rot, the apps would still be awful and the UI would still be a tiled mess that repels consumers.

Ironically, the biggest problem MS would face again with a hypothetical new mobile device would be software, not hardware. You would have thought a software company with all of their billions could have gotten a decent mobile OS together at some point. Never happened, never will happen, least not as long as Nadella's around.
 
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DPI said:
Ironically, the biggest problem MS would face again with a hypothetical new mobile device would be software, not hardware. You would have thought a software company with all of their billions could have gotten a decent mobile OS together at some point. Never happened, never will happen, least not as long as Nadella's around.
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I think part of the problem with MS may be their goal of homogenizing the desktop and mobile experiences and SW base: "Windows on everything" as it were.
I got news for them: what I typically do on my quad-core two-GPU five-monitor (24 megapixels) desktop machine is not what I want to do (or could do) on my 6" cell phone.
Furthermore, the interface paradigm I use on my desktop (KB+M) isn't the interface I want on my laptop (KB+TS) or my phone (TS): There's a reason why fighter jets don't use a steering wheel and race cars do.
 
zamardii12 said:
The problems with devices like this will always be battery. If it has a decent battery i'd be interested
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And tactile(less) buttons/keys. Using software kb with a phone one handed is one thing. Doing it on a heavy(er) workload machine -comparative to a phone- doesn't fly with me.
 
DPI said:
Yep, Microsoft is squatting an old patent in the hopes that Samsung, Apple or someone else builds a device with a likeness to their patent so they can beg for a handout. That's it. Internally, Microsoft has already pivoted away from consumer products, hardware and even Windows. Terry Myerson out, windows division broken up and folded into other divisions. Nadella wants MS to join IBM in the retirement home with his myopic cloud-cloud-cloud focus.

Besides, even if the hardware was good, what would be the point? They continually pulled the rug out from customers and developers with the continual API changes and backward compat breaks through all the various WMobile versions, they abandoned Wmobile 10 without notice or even announcement and left the last Wphone clingers to rot, the apps would still be awful and the UI would still be a tiled mess that repels consumers.

Ironically, the biggest problem MS would face again with a hypothetical new mobile device would be software, not hardware. You would have thought a software company with all of their billions could have gotten a decent mobile OS together at some point. Never happened, never will happen, least not as long as Nadella's around.
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The problem for Windows Phones had is pretty much the same problem desktop Linux has had for decades. Simply not enough users to get enough developers to create apps for the platform. A desktop Linux fan will argue how superior desktop Linux is and it doesn't really matter how true that is if the 3rd party hardware and software support isn't there. So blame tiles or whatever but without the apps it hardly mattered.

As for Microsoft pivoting away from consumer products, funny how a lot of folks thought Microsoft had one of the best presentations at the just concluded E3. Obviously Microsoft failed in the smartphone space which is clearly the largest consumer IT market these days. But outside of handset sector, Microsoft still has a considerable consumer presence. You walk into a Best Buy and there's a ton of PC tech, particularly around PC gaming. And the cloud, that's far from just the "IBM retirement" home. The cloud extends across all client devices these days.

Under Nadella Microsoft's stock price has nearly quadrupled. Yes there's Apple, Amazon and Google bigger but Microsoft is still making lots of cash and you'd really have a tough sell to say someone could do better than what Nadella has done the last four years. For a company that's about "to go bankrupt" like Microsoft is always about two seconds from according to some for decades, how the fuck is it worth $770 billion dollars?
 
When it comes to phones, Microsoft always had the hardware, never the software. I loved my Lumia 1520, it was a fantastic phone hardware wise, and I actually even loved Windows 10 mobile. It was fluid with beautiful animations. But the lack of apps killed it for me. And I gave it a really good try. It was that bad.
 
Definitely seeing a theme between MS and Apple, maybe some others I can't remember now, with display tech replacing old fashioned keyboards. Given more time it could work. I don't remember who but someone recently stated research on re-programmable display keys with customized haptic vibration/feedback so each key could still somehow feel different. Seems to be the way they're all going to head in eventually.
 
it says, "Folding Andromeda Device" so does that mean they'll drop support 2 months after it's released like EA did?
 
_l_ said:
it says, "Folding Andromeda Device" so does that mean they'll drop support 2 months after it's released like EA did?
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No they have lawyers that will ensure that after the two months and it flops they will give it the bare minimum support to meet contractual obligations and warranty. As a bonus you may get a too bad so sad tweet from Joe (using his iPhone) at 24 months.
 
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