Tag: Windows 8

A Quick Personal Note

On By WinstonIn Loving Life, Personal, Uncategorized, Windows 8Leave a comment

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Those of you who follow this blog may recall I currently work at Fido selling cell phones. I recently had to spend an evening (on my day off) attending training for the launch of the new Windows 8 phones. Everyone gathered at a downtown hotel and attended presentations from Microsoft and various phone manufacturers.

I didn’t learn too much I couldn’t have picked up online, but it was a fun night out with the team. After the presentations were finished, we went upstairs to the lounge for drinks (our company wasn’t allowed to partake of the free alcohol) and socializing with people from other districts. Overall, it was a good time but I was thinking I might have preferred spending my night off at home with my family. Turns out I was wrong.

After the meeting, everyone at our company was invited to submit the top three tips we had picked up for selling the new phones. We were to submit them by email for a chance to win a new phone. I submitted my tips just to be “a team player”, then forgot about it. Until this morning.

I was doing some housework this morning when my phone buzzed. I checked it and saw a new email from work. The email listed the three winners of new phones, and much to my surprise, my name was on the list!

My new phone is on back-order, but that’s okay. It’s on its way, and that’s what counts. For the idly curious among you, it’s a Nokia Lumia 920 Windows 8 phone. VERY sweet!

Made for another bright spot in an already bright week. “The HOBBIT” last night, awesome new phone today… who knows what tomorrow might bring 😉
Cheers, Winston

Job Well Done Microsoft

On By WinstonIn Personal, Pop Culture, Technology, Uncategorized, Windows 8Leave a comment

So last month I got myself a new laptop. Nothing crazy, but a very nice mid-range AMD quad-core. It came with Windows 7 pre-installed. It also came with a voucher to get $25 off Windows 8. So I said what the heck, why not.

Now I’m just waiting for the install to complete. So far so good. The only thing it hates is my Bluetooth drivers so I’ll have to redo those when it finishes.

On a slightly peculiar side note, when it complained about the driver, and it did so in French. The rest of the installation is in English. Strange, but not any sort of disaster.

Now ten percent…… The wait continues.

Nearly an hour later, I’m now running Windows 8 on my laptop. YAY! I have to say, I like what I see so far. It’s a clever amalgam of Windows Phone OS with access to a more traditional PC desktop.

The Windows 8 interface consists of a set of large, colorful buttons/icons linking to a variety of pre-installed apps. That’s right, apps. Just like those things on everyone’s smart phones. So much like a smart phone in fact that additional ones can be had through Microsoft’s own app store.

In this lies the true innovation in this latest effort from the nice people at Redmond. They’ve beaten Apple to the punch by integrating their mobile and less mobile OS platforms to an unprecedented degree. iOS looks nothing like OSX Mountain Lion. I’ve yet to see a desktop Linux build that remotely resembles Android despite Google’s abortive Chrome desktop a few years back.

Microsoft took it the other way. Instead of trying to figure out how to strip down and shoehorn a desktop OS onto a phone, they built up their phone OS into something that could be useful on a notebook, net book or desktop. Along the way, achieved a couple of other really impressive feats. They lowered its hardware requirements and it’s base price.

It owes both of these achievements to its phone OS DNA. Phones have pretty wildly varied hardware specs. This means that your phone OS has to be able to work smoothly on as broad a hardware spectrum as possible. Hence Windows 8 minimum requirements of 1ghz processor, 2gb of ram and 20gbs of hard drive space. Pretty modest by today’s standards, or yesterday’s for that matter.

The other piece of phone DNA can be seen as either good news or bad depending on how you see it. That’s the idea of the app store. For years Windows has been jeeringly regarded as the epitome of bloatware. Packed with tons of useless items for which Microsoft demanded a ton of money whether you wanted them or not. Not so much anymore. You can still pay a ton of money (a little bit at a time) but now it’s up to you whether or not you get anything from their app store.

Personally I’m liking the new business model. Because I had recently purchased my laptop, I was able to do my upgrade to Windows 8 for a whopping $14.99 CDN. For those who haven’t bought new hardware, it’s much, much pricier…….. $39.99. Pretty outrageous eh?

The verdict so far…. I’m liking it. It’s innovative. It’s pretty. It’s a whole new direction from a company that’s been running in a straight line for years.

Congratulations Microsoft… Job well done.

Cheers, Winston