Dam, and I was just thinking about upgrading to windows 7!! And... I was thinking about getting an Ipad, then I read this:
http://www.theinquirer.ne...stronghold

Hmm. I wonder when they will have computers that you operate with your brain waves. I won't wait for that one.

There's got to be some kind of hibernation at work there.

It's part hibernation, part cold boot. Basically, the system is hibernated and everything else isn't. Which makes sense. It behaves like a cold boot, except is a lot faster. I'm suprised no one else thought of it earlier.

I'm very interested to see what people come away from the BUILD conference this week saying. I like the idea of a single OS with different UI's based on the form factor of the device because it fits my vision of the future of computing. I like to imagine that your cell phone will be the only computer you will need and you can dock it into whatever computer form factor that you want to use similar to Motorola's webtop functionality on some of their Android phones.

Imagine that you just sit down at a computer terminal (basically just keyboard, mouse, screen) and your phone connects wirelessly from you pocket and all your files, software, settings, etc are there. If you want a tablet you just buy a dumb screen with no real computing power and it connects to your phone which scales up the UI for use on a tablet. If you want a laptop you snap a keyboard onto your dumb tablet screen and the phone switches to a keyboard and mouse interface and you're using a laptop with your phone still providing the computing power. Walk into the living room and your TV connects to the phone to stream television/movies. Pick up your XBOX controller and play video games on the TV with the computing power and internet connection still coming from your phone. You don't need a PC, you don't need a cable box, you don't need a video game machine, you don't need a home internet connection or a cable subscription, it's all in your pocket. We're a ways away from mobile devices having that kind of computing power but I think it's obviously coming with quad-core tablets and phones on the horizon. Of course battery life is a bigger issue than processor power but I really don't think anything I said here is more than 5 years away if people focused on it.

It remains to be seen of course whether MS can pull it off and I'm sure there will be plenty of issues with Windows 8 but I see it as a step in the right direction.

Oh and Roger, don't decide against an iPad based on that article, that guy is an obvious Apple hater.

Interesting. I'm not sure how much of a "computer" you'll actually need in your pocket though. I guess that's what you're saying too. All you'll really need is something to prove your identity and provide access to "the cloud". Everything else just becomes a means.

I don't see modern gaming existing on a phone platform anytime soon. Powerful game consoles and 3d hardware are power hungry and hot. Forcing that into a phone platform would cause graphics performance to fall back at least a couple generations.

And enthusiasts aren't going to sit around and wait for phones to catch up to where their 5-year old 360 or PS3 already was.

Plus, the phone format really isn't very cost effective when it comes to processing power. We think of them as cheap because they're subsidized by Verizon. But you can get a ton more power out of a $600 desktop than you can in a $600 phone.

And once you start talking about having to have full size monitors keyboards and mice anyway, paying that portability price premium doesn't make as much sense.

Well you're talking near term vs. long term. Near term, classic computers aren't going anywhere. You have to have servers. People sitting in cubicles. Others banging on keyboards developing stuff. Etc. That's not going to change much from right now.

Consumer level stuff is already changing though. There's already less and less of a need for a classic computer.

My phone can already provide tv, movies, music, games, applications, internet access, etc. -- and it can interface with other phones, other computers, my tv, my car, my stereo, etc.

What Levi describes is kind of happening right now.

Here's a technical discussion of Windows 8 fast boot:

MSDN: Delivering fast boot times in Windows 8

Yeah, I see what you're saying. But the something the size of a phone is so restrictive vs something that can sit at a desk or in a cabinet. Phones will advance, but there will always be far more performance available in larger form factors.

Maybe for 75% of people it won't matter, since Angry Birds and facebook work just fine on a phone. But for the rest, I'm not so sure. It's already been hard for manufacturers to fit enough game performance even in a full-size notebook.

And with a desktop, if you want good gaming performance, you buy a graphics card. You don't have that kind of flexibility with phones.

I wonder how fast it is after HP, Dell, Toshibia,etc load all of their crapware on it. Also, will it stay that fast once there is some file fragmentation on the hard-drive.

It's not as bad as it used to be. But when I get a new machine I still do the wipe and clean install out of the box.

And anymore it seems like the more complex phones get, the more you hear the advice 'factory reset' getting thrown around. Seems like the good ol' wipe and reload isn't going anywhere.

I don't doubt that there will always be a few hard core gamers that want to push the envelope, but these days hardware processing power is not really the bottleneck to games that it used to be and powerful processors are getting smaller and smaller and drawing less and less power. XBOX level games are certainly doable on the level of processors that are in mobile devices now. The xbox has a 3-core processor which as you mentioned is 5 years old yet there is still not any talk of a successor for it. Phones can already output HD video via HDMI, something that the Nintendo Wii is not capable of. At BUILD next week they will demo a Samsung Tablet with a quad-core ARM processor running full-blown windows.

This computer:



has an i5 processor in it and still has room for a keyboard and an 11" screen. Maybe not a high end game machine, but it will run games with XBOX/PS3 level graphics easily and it will run any game although perhaps not at max settings. Feature size and voltage levels keep shrinking and with them processors will keep getting smaller and producing less heat.

As far as bang for your buck goes, if your phone can replace your desktop computer, iPod, GPS, set-top box, video game console, portable game machine, GPS, camera, calculator, and make-up mirror you can afford to pay quite a bit for it.

My XP machine boots in 20 seconds, from power button press to usable desktop. No SSD, 4GB RAM. Thats fast enough for me. Win. 7 will go faster when I upgrade. And of course I have to do a clean install. But an instant on PC will be commonplace soon.

Moore's law definitely still applies. But in video games, it always ends up offset by the push for more power. Pretty much every console and video card generation has consumed more power than the last. My 360 eats almost 200 watts (although I think the new redesign has it under 100). I'm guessing my first Nintendo used less than 20.

I'm not saying compromises for portability aren't made in cases where portability is useful. But for people looking for new capabilities and experiences, portability is a handicap, not a benefit. Sure, you can maybe get a $1200 Macbook Air to play games similar to what a $400 console designed 5 years ago could play. It might even be able to choke through current pc games at lowered resolution and quality.

On the other hand, you can put a $75 video card in a $400 desktop and blow the Macbook's gaming performance away. And then in a couple years, when games get more demanding, you can put in another $75 card and probably get another couple years on even newer games, while with the all-in-one solution like a Macbook, you start over and spend another $1200.

And none of that addresses the much bigger problem of fitting that performance in something like a phone. That's way too much heat to cram in that small of a space. You'd need an oven mitt to hold onto it. And probably the biggest problem would be battery power. When it comes to battery power, size is still king. You couldn't possibly design a cellphone sized battery that could power something like a Macbook for more than a few minutes (assuming it's possible at all)

The smaller you go, the more performance gets sacrificed. If your priority is gaming, the portability won't ever be worth the price you pay in performance.

A year old demo in French, but shows the Windows Phone 7 GPU and XNA in action ... rendering in real-time.

Here's another in English. It also shows scenes rendering in real-time in the phone. (The product they're promoting translates models from industry standard 3D design applications to XNA.)

Anyway, if you don't know what XNA is. It is Microsoft's game runtime. It is in the XBOX. And it is in Windows Phone 7. Right now.

And none of that addresses the much bigger problem of fitting that performance in something like a phone. That's way too much heat to cram in that small of a space. You'd need an oven mitt to hold onto it. And probably the biggest problem would be battery power. When it comes to battery power, size is still king. You couldn't possibly design a cellphone sized battery that could power something like a Macbook for more than a few minutes (assuming it's possible at all)

The smaller you go, the more performance gets sacrificed. If your priority is gaming, the portability won't ever be worth the price you pay in performance.

I spent 10 years of my life designing electronics and I'm here to tell you that you don't know what you're talking about.

Nvidia's Kal-El to kill off PS4, Xbox 720 and Wii U hopes

Snapdragon S4 will triumph over Xbox 360 and PS3

Xbox 720 and PS4 are worthless - Epic Games President



[This message has been edited by Levi Forman (9/14/2011)]

What Levi said. That Samsung phone in the Nova4Phone demo (as well as the LG phone sitting on my desk) both have older Snapdragon processors in them. S2 and S3 are available now. S4 is the next thing. This is why Microsoft has changed Windows to run on ARM processors. Nobody wants a power hungry phone or tablet or laptop or coffee table or whatever with a fan in it blowing hot air.

And none of that addresses the much bigger problem of fitting that performance in something like a phone. That's way too much heat to cram in that small of a space. You'd need an oven mitt to hold onto it. And probably the biggest problem would be battery power. When it comes to battery power, size is still king. You couldn't possibly design a cellphone sized battery that could power something like a Macbook for more than a few minutes (assuming it's possible at all)

The smaller you go, the more performance gets sacrificed. If your priority is gaming, the portability won't ever be worth the price you pay in performance.

I don't know about that. Seems like a very ignorant thing to say. My iPhone absolutely kicks ass on the MOTO banana phone I had 12 years ago. The battery in my iPhone is much smaller and has a much longer duration than the phones of yesteryear. Battery technology is changing and improving all the time. The notion that a smart-phone/computer that will be capable of high end graphics for things like gaming is only a matter of time.

With the reservation that you shouldn't really judge game appearance by their trailers... I'm shocked by those graphics being put out by a phone. I would've never guessed had I only seen the trailer that a phone would be capable of that. So I guess I was wrong on that front.

It's very good. But it's still not current generation console good. And it's definitely not anywhere near what a pc with a decent video card is capable of. Even Qualcomm describes it as PS2 or Wii equivalent, although I'd say the lighting effects are better than that.

But it still doesn't touch this.

Or... what I'm waiting for

720p highly recommended



Anyway, Richard, I think you're missing the point. Game machines aren't utilitarian like telephones. There is always a push for more power to deliver better gaming. And there always will be. The recession and maybe some other factors have led this console generation to be particularly long-lived. But if the day comes where a mobile chip that is so efficient it can run on a 5 watt-hour battery, yet still compete with the newest consoles... someone will take that chip and say, let's get 12 of those and put them in a new console.

At the end of the day, driving games for a 4" screen and driving games for a 50" screen are two different animals. One is built to give you the most power you can practically travel with. The other is focused on maximum entertainment value.

For that reason, consoles and/or Gaming computers won't be going anywhere. And they'll always be more powerful than phones.

[This message has been edited by Rick Kuchynka (9/14/2011)]

Whatever.

I agree with Levi's vision of a computer/phone that plus into a docking station that allows you to play games on a large screen. Such a device when it arrives will relegate your big box to the computer ash-heap of history.

And there always will be.

I don't really think this is true. Hardware has been outpacing software demands for years with the exception of games, and I think we will see a day in the not too distant future when processing power is not a limiting factor for game graphics either. Sure the desktop will always be able to be more powerful than a phone, but it's like deciding whether to use the pickup truck you already have or rent a tractor trailer to transport 10 sheets of plywood. Sure the semi is way larger and more powerful, but the pickup can do it effortlessly so the semi would be a waste.

Obviously we're not there yet, but if you look at where cell phones were when the xbox 360 came out and where they are today, they are catching up quickly and what they are doing these days with ARM processors is revolutionary with regard to power consumption. Also keep in mind that the game video I linked is running on an S3 when the S4 (which is still only a dual core processor) will be out by the end of the year. The quad core tegra chips should be an order of magnitude more powerful and the big game developers aren't optimizing games for mobile yet but that will change.

[This message has been edited by Levi Forman (9/14/2011)]

That's nice, Richard. But apparently Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo don't agree with you. They're all full speed ahead on a new generation of consoles.

I remember back in the day when I used to tease a guy I knew about putting 96mb of RAM in his computer when most machines were shipping with 16.

Now systems come standard with 40 times that amount of RAM.

Nobody could've imagined back then what you'd do with 4GB of Ram. Lucky for us, people are always coming up with new ideas.

Isn't there a phone out there right now that plugs into a docking station keybord/monitor combo? I remember seeing it somewhere. Maybe it was just a prototype. But I do believe the concept is being developed. I remember reading that the model I saw was nice, but it's speed was a bit slow or something.

Like Kyle Orton, I am not a gamer, but I could of sworn the latest Windows phone had xbox live on it. But I could be wrong.

[This message has been edited by Richard Bonine, Jr. (9/15/2011)]

Isn't there a phone out there right now that plugs into a docking station keybord/monitor combo? I remember seeing it somewhere. Maybe it was just a prototype. But I do believe the concept is being developed. I remember reading that the model I saw was nice, but it's speed was a bit slow or something.

Yes. The Motorola Atrix. From what I hear it's not super compelling and the accessories are ridiculously expensive but I still like the idea. I believe that the Motorola Droid Bionic which came out on Verizon last week also has this feature.

XBOX Live's friends list, chat, and maybe some mini games are available with Windows Phone 7. Processing power for gaming is on its way to becoming a thing of the past. I'd hope of the three big console makers at least one of them is producing a next-gen system that is nothing more than a gateway to the cloud. http://www.onlive.com already promises you can play new titles on a weak machine. After a little more research, it sounds like onlive will be Android friendly fairly soon, possibly already is Ipad friendly.

[This message has been edited by Buck Showalter (9/15/2011)]

Here are links to the phones Levi mentioned...

Motorola Atrix:
http://www.att.com/shop/w...-atrix.jsp
http://www.motorola.com/C...TRIX-US-EN

Motorola Droid Bionic:
http://www.verizonwireles...oneId=5716
http://www.motorola.com/C...ONIC-US-EN

From all I've seen from Windows 8 & Phone 7 they look incredibly good.

Sounds like a great time to finally upgrade from XP.

I have a Windows Phone 7 and I like it, even though I had to switch from Verizon to AT&T to get what I wanted. "Mango" (7.1) will be released any time now. "Windows 8" (or "Windows Next" or whatever Microsoft is going to call it) is still a year off.

Onlive is a pretty interesting idea. I see a market for it, but I don't think Onlive will be the company making it work. I think it'd make more sense for a software company or one of the console giants to do under some sort of online software license that bundles it in.

$15 a month seems steep though, considering you still have to buy the games. 3 years of that and you could've bought decent hardware for yourself. But I think their biggest hurdle will be software and console developers not wanting to hand over the keys to their product. I think if they like the technology, they'll just cut out the middleman.

And then it's still not going to work for everyone. If you're a hardcore type, the image quality downgrade probably won't be worth it. You'll need a ton of bandwidth just to make it look halfway decent.

Android support might be interesting, but I can't see 3G working very well for streaming games. It's rare I can watch a 360p youtube clip without interruption.

I was playing around with my friends Windows Phone7 phone and was very impressed by it. It's a big improvement over Windows Mobile. Microsoft got it right imo. It's rather sad that it's not getting much traction at the moment but I see that changing on the horizon.

I love my iPhone but Phone7 has me really impressed.

I played with a friend's WP7 device last spring and the UI is very nice. It's really hard to get traction with the app developers though. It's like you need a lot of users to get people to write apps for you and you need lots of apps to get users. It will be interesting to see what the first Nokia devices look like, they are an outstanding hardware manufacturer which could become a selling point for WP7. My next phone will definitely be another Android device but I am rooting for WP7 nonetheless because I like their approach to the overall ecosystem.

Speaking of Android & Microsoft I remember reading somewhere that Microsoft is making more money licencing parts of its tech portfolio to Android than they are in Phone7.

Rather amusing.

[This message has been edited by Kyle L. Varnell (9/16/2011)]

Rick Kuchynka wrote:

Android support might be interesting, but I can't see 3G working very well for streaming games. It's rare I can watch a 360p youtube clip without interruption.

I get about 1.5 Mbps download using AT&T 3G. A YouTube 360p stream is something like 0.5 Mbps. Your phone should be able to do that? If not, I suppose it will eventually get faster or you could use WiFi.

I didn't look to see how that service works, but it isn't necessary to brute force a video stream. Higher level commands (that the phone renders itself) could be sent at a fraction of the bandwidth instead.

Also, if a video stream is required, motion wavelet schemes and such are available that can compress down to extremely small sizes. I don't know what codec technology YouTube uses (never looked at it) but it's probably based upon availability and not state of the art.

I haven't read much about the compression technology. I don't imagine it can be too intensive because it has to be instant. But I remember reading a review awhile back that said 1.5mbps would yield "sd" quality and you'd need at least 5 to get anything resembling real hd- although still not like local hardware

Little demo of the metro UI on a tablet.



The thing I like about this is that it's full blown windows and not WP7 running there so you can presumably hook up a keyboard and mouse and be using a real computer. I'm hoping that the next version of Windows will run on phones as well and they can fully unify their phone/tablet/PC/xbox and have one OS for all of them. Xbox is also coming to Windows 8 so I'm guessing that if there is another XBOX in the pipe, it will essentially just be a PC running Windows 8.

Microsoft demos Xbox Live on Windows 8, promises cross-platform asynchronous multiplayer games

[This message has been edited by Levi Forman (9/16/2011)]

Rick Kuchynka wrote:

But I remember reading a review awhile back that said 1.5mbps would yield "sd" quality and you'd need at least 5 to get anything resembling real hd- although still not like local hardware

5 GB of DVD data streamed over 2 hours is about 5 Mbps. That would be raw data (stored in MPEG2 format, which is not a very good scheme).

MPEG4 and Motion JPEG2000 and crowd will produce much smaller streams.

How small, I don't know. I'm not that much into video. It would surprise me if you couldn't get it down to at least 1/5 (1.0 Mbps) or 1/10 (0.5 Mbps) while retaining the same quality as the original DVD though.

Levi Forman wrote:

I'm hoping that the next version of Windows will run on phones as well

It will. It's codenamed Apollo.

Theoretical speed and effective speed are rarely equal. My home internet connection is nominally 1.5 mbps and if I go to speedtest.net that's what it will say that it is, but I can't stream SD stuff from Netflix without 10 minutes of queuing for every 5 minutes of video. Even youtube can't typically keep up if it's in the evening. I wouldn't even attempt to stream an HD show on this connection, and if I did it would eat my bandwidth cap way too fast anyway.

I truly pity you.

So do I.

Levi are you on a satellite connection by chance?

Yup.

I don't know what the deal is (with 3g bandwidth). Don't know if it's just lack of capacity here in town or what. I'll have to pay more attention when I'm out of town to see if I notice it being any better. It seems to be getting worse lately, but maybe I'm just losing my patience.

Satellite connections are pretty atrocious when it comes to any form of streaming. There seems to be a latency issue caused by the lag between the actual rebound of the signal with it's trip from and back to earth. My guess is that basically no matter what your connection speed is with satellite, there's always going to be a buferring issue when streaming. At least that's what my experience with this type of ISP was.

Bumping this because my dream has gotten one step closer to reality:

Cool.

A bit of nastolga here, but I remember Rick playing a character in tradewars 2002 on Signal Butte BBS back in the late 80's or early 90's.

El Guapo. Them were they days, crappy graphics and turn base games. Long before Internet ever reached MC.