[KingCrimson]

Windows Phone 8 on beastly hardware is not coming until July/August 2012. Can you wait until then, or you absolutely must have the WP7 experience even though that locks you in to substandard hardware for at least 12 months?

[foosball]

Depends. I'm sporting a 3.6 inch screen on the Arrive that gets smaller every day. After looking at the Focus S and other newly released Samsung phones touting 4.3 and 4.5 inch screens my phone doesn't cut it anymore. I'm dumping it the day the Titan is released.

So the better your original hardware the less you'll be inclined to upgrade.

Sent from my HTC Arrive using Board Express

[rluka]

Not so keen on other OS, need smartphone, doesn't really feel anything lacking as of yet from the OS itself (apps is another story, but the devs are to blame).

Why not ?
The sub-standard hardware still served well enough.

[theefman]

Now its substandard hardware thats the next complaint about WP7? At one point what was more important was the smooth, stable OS that was different, had great integration with various services and just worked due to being highly optimized, now everything associated with it is substandard just because it doesnt have the latest tech? Have your phones suddenly started rebooting by themselves, or started lagging and crying out for try-cores and portable holodecks? Might as well just go for a smartphone based purely on the technical specifications and upgrade each time better hardware is released. Personally, my substandard DVP is just as good as it was on the day I bought it and works just fine and performance wise I bet can go toe to toe with the best of them.

[desmonium]

iPhone 4S for now. sigh.

i really care about the overall quality of a handset

unfortunately the hardware of many WP devices is subpar.

[jimski]

For me, my Surround is the best built sub-standard phone I have ever owned. And when I do decide to replace it, won't be because I think it's sub standard. Just need something new and shiny every 15 months or so.

Guess that why the OEMs are releasing these lower end, so called sub-standard, phones. Specs are just numbers and words. It's all about user experience.

Sent from my HTC Surround using Board Express

[Dark Mirage]

I'm kinda iffy... I love the OS, but the hardware is definitely lagging a generation behind. I've only had my Focus for a year and I'll probably hang onto it for another. Had Mango not come out though, I would have ditched my phone a while ago.

At this point I don't want to run out and buy a new phone when quad-cores are so close... As well as the iPhone 5 next year and refined dual core sets. By that time Apollo will be here too, so who knows what I'll buy.

It just seems too soon to switch. While there are definitely superior devices out there, not enough makes use of them yet to make them worth buying. I think I'll survive for the time being. All I'm really missing out on are apps.

[baseballbert]

@jimski, how's the speaker on that Surround? Would it be good for listening to podcasts?

[KingCrimson]

The biggest factor of why I just can't make that dive into smartphones is wrapping my head around $90/month(incl taxes & fees). $90/month for what I anticipate as light usage, essentially a very expensive toy.

[rluka]

People really need to just stop complaining about the hardware and appreciate the actual user experience. Wp7 provides performance on par if not better than android devices on high end hardware

Actually, I wondered how much the idea and arguments about dual core is planted by Neowin's recent editorial
More reasons as to why Windows Phone needs dual-cores - Neowin.net

If compared to PC, I also don't feel the need for latest biggest baddest video card, THE component that's always in Need For Speed mode for latest 3D games in desktop.

[cckgz4]

While I know technology only improves with feedback from the consumers, if it wasn't for Android, nobody would be this obsessed about hardware/specs tbh especially when it doesn't enhance nothing about the OS. Everything on the internet, from the blogs to the boards, are overly exaggerated in what people need in a phone. And especially in Android, it seems like the average online consumer is never satisfied with the current hardware and always wants something bigger and faster. Why? They just do. We could use more hardware than just Samsung and HTC in the states for the 2nd gen, we don't know what's coming up in the following months.

[CamiKitti]

I think when I'm able to renew my contract (next December) I'll save up to upgrade to wp8. I have a surround right now, (haha my pic), and I really like the speakers (I'm a big music junkie). Too bad it lacks HD recordings (720 p still is laggish and not smooth, audio recording is horrible). Since the surround has a 3.7 in screen, I'd probably get a 4.3 in screen phone next.

Sent from my HTC Surround using Board Express

[HeyCori]

While I know technology only improves with feedback from the consumers, if it wasn't for Android, nobody would be this obsessed about hardware/specs tbh especially when it doesn't enhance nothing about the OS. Everything on the internet, from the blogs to the boards, are overly exaggerated in what people need in a phone. And especially in Android, it seems like the average online consumer is never satisfied with the current hardware and always wants something bigger and faster. Why? They just do. We could use more hardware than just Samsung and HTC in the states for the 2nd gen, we don't know what's coming up in the following months.

I'd go so far as to say that phone subsidies has made people ignorant of the true value of their devices. Why do people buy $600 dollar PCs? Because they can't afford $1300 PCs (and probably because they need a computer, lol) and I bet they still love it even though it's not top of the line. What I'm saying is that people buy what they can afford and learn to cherish their items more when they have a significant financial investment in them. Not so when it comes to smartphones.

The best phone on the market may retail for nearly 800 bucks, but thanks to subsidies you can get the best, fastest, most advanced phone on the market for only $200. That's nothing. A lot of people can spare 200 dollars even if they're living from pay check to pay check. Value matters less when price isn't an option. Specs is the only thing that matters for some people because there's no reason to pay the same price for an inferior phone.

Imagine if subsidies weren't so massive. Say that with subsidies the best phone on the market was still going to cost about $500. Now lets say a person only has $200 bucks to spend and that's only good enough for a mid range phone. Just like that $600 PC I'm guessing people would love their $200 dollar phone because they know they got the best phone they could afford thus giving it a lot more value.

And speaking of Android... I just read the other day that Android is poorly optimized for dual core (I noticed some lag even on the Galaxy SII). Now HTC is set to release some quad core Android devices? That's insane. Hardware is woefully outpacing Google's ability to update their software.

[palandri]

The biggest factor of why I just can't make that dive into smartphones is wrapping my head around $90/month(incl taxes & fees). $90/month for what I anticipate as light usage, essentially a very expensive toy.

Au revoir! Come back when you can afford one.

[Big Supes]

now its substandard hardware thats the next complaint about wp7? At one point what was more important was the smooth, stable os that was different, had great integration with various services and just worked due to being highly optimized, now everything associated with it is substandard just because it doesnt have the latest tech? Have your phones suddenly started rebooting by themselves, or started lagging and crying out for try-cores and portable holodecks? Might as well just go for a smartphone based purely on the technical specifications and upgrade each time better hardware is released. Personally, my substandard dvp is just as good as it was on the day i bought it and works just fine and performance wise i bet can go toe to toe with the best of them.

This^

[jimski]

@jimski, how's the speaker on that Surround? Would it be good for listening to podcasts?

Hey, its still a phone. But is sounds better than any other phone I have used. If something is recorded at too low a volume it lacks a bit. When recorded properly though, it could fill a room with music.

Sent from my HTC Surround using Board Express

[Pronk]

I'd say what's more a concern is how big the next jump up turns out to be, and as a consequence how dated it will make the current hardware look. It's all well and good to say that right now, WP7 works very well on comparatively underpowered hardware - it does, no argument there. But think of it this way: July 2012 is only 8 months away and most new phone contracts now are 18 months to 2 years. But even on a 12-month one you'd have a third of it left if you bought a new phone *right now*.

Say the new chassis spec brings dual core, qHD SAMOLED+ displays at a minimum of 4 inches, 32 and 64 GB storage options, memory card access as standard, FFC as standard, gyroscope as standard. All fairly reasonable things available now on high-end phones - but all things that will make all the WP7 phones available now look unavoidably limited and dated in comparison. Imagine, also, that with this new horsepower the xbox live market takes off and we start getting some games of the class of Infinity Blade and Shadowgun. Only all previous-gen single core handsets can't handle the heavy lifting needed to run them.

Now imagine tomorrow you're off to sign up for a 2-year contract or put down £400+ for an unlocked 800 or Focus S. In 8 months time - not long at all in the mobile world - you are going to be seriously annoyed that your top tier handset bought half a year ago is suddenly not much better with Gen 1 handsets a year older when it comes to what it can handle compared to the new models.

I think MS have a potential timebomb on their hands. They *have* to up the specs to keep up at some point soon, but because they didn't bump the specs more with Mango the new handsets available now are just too close to what came before. Which means they'll likely struggle to keep up with the big horsepower boost that the next-gen handsets get.

And there's only three solutions as far as I can see:

1. Offer recent upgraders (say, anyone 3 months in or less) some sort of trade in discount
2. Bite the bullet and tell consumers to pay to upgrade early/go sim-free or just make do until they can upgrade on contract
3. Deliberately hold back the chassis specs so that the upgrade is more modest and the 2nd gen handsets are therefore better able to cope

I reckon they'll go with 2, because 3 is just crippling new devices for the sake of it and 1 is very expensive. Which is why I won't be upgrading to a new WP7 handset until we get at least some clue about plans for the next 6 months.

[Big Supes]

If this platform is to survive, it has to move with the competition and that means the above specs will have to come, sooner or later. Of course it's upsetting for those who sign up for a two year contract prior to Apollo, but after they've spat the dummy from their pram, they'll realise that, one, they should have done their homework, and two (and more importantly), they'll still be getting good value for money; higher spec WPs will have to cost more.

[jeremyshaw]

If you look at it, up until after the iPhone 4 launch, apple played the he game more hardball than anyone else out there. Pretty GUI over hw specs indeed.

Now, the iPhone 4s has the fastest mobile gpu, hands down.
Sent from my MB860 using Tapatalk

[Judge_Daniel]

Apollo has me very worried about upgrading to a Windows Phone any time soon. Microsoft truly needs to come out and say whether the 7.5 devices will continue to receive updates after 8 is released. After all, I wouldn't buy a Windows 7 computer right now if I knew I couldn't upgrade it to Windows 8 when it comes out in less than a year. I'd even be willing to pay for the next upgrade, if it is significant enough. I believe that Microsoft either doesn't realize or isn't willing to cope with America's upgrading style. We, as general consumers, are stuck in two-year contracts. They need to assure us that what we're buying is going to last for that long. Having already outdated hardware and showing such grandeur on the horizon isn't the best way to make sales today.

[palandri]

Apollo has me very worried about upgrading to a Windows Phone any time soon. Microsoft truly needs to come out and say whether the 7.5 devices will continue to receive updates after 8 is released. After all, I wouldn't buy a Windows 7 computer right now if I knew I couldn't upgrade it to Windows 8 when it comes out in less than a year. I'd even be willing to pay for the next upgrade, if it is significant enough. I believe that Microsoft either doesn't realize or isn't willing to cope with America's upgrading style. We, as general consumers, are stuck in two-year contracts. They need to assure us that what we're buying is going to last for that long. Having already outdated hardware and showing such grandeur on the horizon isn't the best way to make sales today.

I will actually be surprised if we get Apollo on a 1st generation device. the name of the game is sales. If you don't have them you go under.

[theefman]

I'd say what's more a concern is how big the next jump up turns out to be, and as a consequence how dated it will make the current hardware look. It's all well and good to say that right now, WP7 works very well on comparatively underpowered hardware - it does, no argument there. But think of it this way: July 2012 is only 8 months away and most new phone contracts now are 18 months to 2 years. But even on a 12-month one you'd have a third of it left if you bought a new phone *right now*.

Say the new chassis spec brings dual core, qHD SAMOLED+ displays at a minimum of 4 inches, 32 and 64 GB storage options, memory card access as standard, FFC as standard, gyroscope as standard. All fairly reasonable things available now on high-end phones - but all things that will make all the WP7 phones available now look unavoidably limited and dated in comparison. Imagine, also, that with this new horsepower the xbox live market takes off and we start getting some games of the class of Infinity Blade and Shadowgun. Only all previous-gen single core handsets can't handle the heavy lifting needed to run them.

Now imagine tomorrow you're off to sign up for a 2-year contract or put down £400+ for an unlocked 800 or Focus S. In 8 months time - not long at all in the mobile world - you are going to be seriously annoyed that your top tier handset bought half a year ago is suddenly not much better with Gen 1 handsets a year older when it comes to what it can handle compared to the new models.

I think MS have a potential timebomb on their hands. They *have* to up the specs to keep up at some point soon, but because they didn't bump the specs more with Mango the new handsets available now are just too close to what came before. Which means they'll likely struggle to keep up with the big horsepower boost that the next-gen handsets get.

And there's only three solutions as far as I can see:

1. Offer recent upgraders (say, anyone 3 months in or less) some sort of trade in discount
2. Bite the bullet and tell consumers to pay to upgrade early/go sim-free or just make do until they can upgrade on contract
3. Deliberately hold back the chassis specs so that the upgrade is more modest and the 2nd gen handsets are therefore better able to cope

I reckon they'll go with 2, because 3 is just crippling new devices for the sake of it and 1 is very expensive. Which is why I won't be upgrading to a new WP7 handset until we get at least some clue about plans for the next 6 months.

There's nothing different here than with any other tech purchase - phones, TV's, dvd players, amps, speakers - practically anything you buy today will be outdated in record time. It looks like we will soon see a quad-core android device, should android owners all now start feeling they are on subpar hardware? Should they stop buying handsets based on what they think the next gen device could do? What anyone has to consider is what is the baseline performance you get, and if that provides an acceptable level of performance. So with even a 1st gen WP7 device it still runs smooth and plays games well. Upgrade to the latest and greatest WP7 and you get a better GPU, FFC, bigger, better screens and better batteries.

Later on down the line something better will come along but with WP7 you have 2 assurances IMO that make their approach better than the typical 3 month cycle we are seeing with android.

1) Whatever WP7 hardware you pick is highly optimsed and the performance you get is significantly better than what merely looking at the tech specs would suggest. So while there are technically better devices you really dont feel you are missing anything performance wise. Case in point, the 2nd gen devices with their FFC's seem to be handling video calling better than the single core androids did, and the better GPU seems to make the already smooth OS smoother still. So you get better performanc with a newer device but 1st gen devices still feel snappy and work with all applications.

2) The rate of change to the WP7 chassis spec is slower so you dont feel the hardware you just bought is obsolete a few weeks later, so by the time we see a big jump in minimum specs you dont feel as if you've just chucked money down the drain. This point actually is more relevant to android devices and I think by the time we see such a huge jump in performance that the earlier devices are not capable of keeping up most people will be looking to upgrade anyway.

I think we will see newer, faster hardware in 2012 but as with all things tech, what you buy now wont be as good. But in our case, even the comparatively outdated hardware provides a fantastic experience and is worthwhile in itself. There's always something newer, better round the corner, better to enjoy now than wait forever.

[Pronk]

Oh yeah, I agree that there's always something new around the corner. It's just in this case the corner is much closer than is sometimes the case. It's true there's always a new Android handset coming, but they're not jumping from e.g. everyone on single core to quad core - the spec creep is a fairly incremental process. But also a bad system as it's exactly that that leads to market fragmentation.

Which is part of my point. I thought with the chassis specs Microsoft were going with a sensible, more Apple-like model of set upgrade levels at a reasonable timeframe but with the benefit more hardware choice. But at the moment it seems the mango kit is much closer to a stop-gap than a genuine step up, which means the real step up coming with Apollo will be pretty much a two-year jump forward in technology compared to the first WP7 devices - but is that two-year jump going to run on the stop-gap mango hardware that's much closer to the 1st gen stuff than any Apollo-gen kit?

Course, it might be Apollo will be super-optimised and run well on all current WP7 kit (hardware allowing). But I can't help but be wary about buying anything new for months until we know more about what Apollo will need and what the spec jump will be - and I'm already a WP7 owner who likes it. If someone new thinking of taking the WP7 plunge is doing their research, this could really put them off. And that'd be a shame.

[theefman]

I think Apollo will be available to all handsets but the Apollo-gen handsets will bring specific hardware advantages, like how Mango handsets have FFC's and gyros but probably nothing that will be a real deal breaker for those on current 2nd gen handsets.

It all comes down to the same thing anyway, if Apollo launches as expected in Fall 2012 it would present the same problem to 2nd gen device owners 1 year later as it would to 1st gen device owners if the hardware spec had jumped significantly with Mango, a year later. Either way, while I see your point I think it amounts to the same upgrade dilemma anyone who keeps up with tech deals with and while some will wait, others will go with whats available.

[power5]

Quad core android tablet has just been announced a couple days ago. Tegra 3 based Asus Transformer Prime. They should have called it "Asus Optimus Prime" :)

http://www.intomobile.com/2011/11/08...blet-official/