Nokia is expected to announce its Q1 2013 earnings on April 18. The handset maker has come a long way since last year when its Symbian smartphone sales were falling fast and Windows Phone was relatively slow to pick up the slack. Last year’s Q4 marked a turnaround of sorts as a successful launch of WP8 and new Lumia models together with strong holiday demand, finally saw WP outselling Symbian by a ratio of 2:1.
So we have come to the next logical step. I have to say I called it as soon as I seen the implementation of the phone in Qt/QML. Merging touch and Unity on the desktop was the obvious thing because now we can have pretty much the 1 interface across all platforms. And I have to complement the team who made touch, it looks exactly what I thought the future of Unity to be. So im very happy obviously that im going to be using it on my desktop in the not to distant future.
So that aside I thought id give my views about things like the good old days 2 years ago when I was blogging a lot more frequently.
Mir: sounds interesting, I read down though the plan and some made sense others didn’t but I have never been a man for people talking graphics although I should probably at least understand what’s going on eventually. I can see why they would go for a new system rather than bending to wayland or sticking with X which is older than I am (its from 1984 and im from 1988). The thing that jumped out at me was the focus on security which I find very interesting how they plan on making things both lightweight and secure to the extent where they aren’t sacrificing one for the other. The other thing that I immediately thought about was about driver interaction and application interaction. For hardware:
With our X-integration in place, you can run Mir on your desktop machine if your system runs a GPU that supports the free driver stack. For the closed-source desktop drivers: We are in active conversations with GPU vendors to enable Mir on those drivers/GPUs, too. More to this, we are working towards a more unified driver model sitting on top of EGL.
So it looks like it doesn’t work with non-free drivers yet. So hopefully they will fix that soon or hopefully the free drivers get better. Interesting side note, the free drivers run at 100fps on my system and the non free ones at 70fps its just the free drivers don’t play games and have some strange artefacts on the screen sometimes which is a pain. On windows its 100fps solid so that is obviously what my card can do its just for what ever reason the non free drivers just are 30% slower exactly on Linux :-/
Rolling release model: I had pretty strong opinions about rolling release models for a while and I think they can work well if the model is right. I think the one proposed is safe but I don’t think its right. How would I do it?
Well this idea is actually 2 or 3 years old and I had it written down somewhere (maybe it got lost when I switched from WP to Drupal). So what I suggest is having Ubuntu and a Ubuntu+1 or next or what ever …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet Ubuntu
Nokia’s faith in Windows Phone seems to be paying off for now. Not long after Nokia announced a strong set of Q4 results last month, we have AdDuplex’s February issue of Windows Phone usage stats show that Nokia continues to dominate the WP market. According to the report, Nokia has a 78% share of the market, compared to HTC’s 14% and Samsung’s 6%. What is reassuring for the company is that in the past three months, Nokia has managed to gain a couple of percentage points in market share at the expense of Samsung, as has HTC. Considering that Samsung and HTC are heavily invested in Android, we believe this to be an accurate representation of the amount of commitment that each of these handset makers have towards the Windows Phone platform. …read more
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest
WP: Google Inc.’s Android software, the most widely used smartphone operating system, is making the leap to rice cookers and refrigerators.
Source: FULL ARTICLE at Linux Today
