Windows Phone and Windows RT Merger Could Take 2 Years
There's a rumor that Microsoft has a plan to merge Windows Phone and Windows RT over the next several years.
Microsoft insider MSFTnerd claims that the new executive vice president of operating systems, Terry Myerson, has decided to slowly merge Windows RT and Windows Phone over the next two years. This will supposedly be accomplished by releasing three regular General Distribution Release (GDR) updates per year. Based on recent rumors, the move may actually begin this spring with the release of the new storefront merging Windows Phone with Windows 8.
Hints of a Windows Phone/RT merge appeared this time last month. A source named WZOR claimed that the company has mentioned this several times in the past, but didn't provide any additional details regarding merger plans. Instead, the source talked about Microsoft's supposed rollout plan of Windows 9 and Windows 10, with the latter being completely different than Windows 9 and the current release. Whether these OS releases are merely Windows 8.2 and 8.3 is unknown at this point.
Talk of the Phone/RT merge appeared again after a Microsoft financial analyst meeting with Terry Myserson, Julie Larson-Green, Kirill Tatarinov, Qi Lu and Satya Nadella. Myserson stated that phones would extend into tablets, hinting that the two ARM-based platforms would eventually become one. Later on, he also said the Windows team was shooting for one silicon interface, one set of APIs, one cloud service and one storefront, but individualized experiences for each form factor.
"Our team is now organized in this way," Myerson said. "We [have] a core team that will bring those silicon interfaces together, bring those developer platforms together, and approach delivery of apps to the customers in a common way. We have one team delivering the core services that will light up our devices. And then we have satellite teams each focused on each of the device categories, so each of them can be reflective of what the customer expects in that place."
Both Windows RT and Windows Phone are expected to receive a major update in the spring, AKA Spring 2014 GDR on the Windows RT front and GDR3 on the Windows Phone front. Also slated to arrive in this time period is the Surface Mini tablet, the Surface 2 LTE tablet, Modern UI apps for Office, and the new Windows Store. This will be the biggest Windows Phone 8 update since the platform rolled out in Fall 2012.
Having one platform for ARM architecture and one for x86, no matter the form factor, should help streamline the updating process for the OS team, and present a more unified experience across all Windows-based devices. Perhaps then Microsoft should stick with its current Surface scheme and go with Windows Pro for the x86-based systems, and with a generic Windows (Lite?) brand for ARM-based units. Or would that be too confusing?
As it stands, for many types of productivity, Windows RT blows Android - which I used for note-taking/paper writing/research for almost two years - and iOS out of the water. The more they refine the OS and the more form factors they get it into at reasonable prices, the happier I am. If they do take too long though, back to Android I go.
Win 8.1 GDR3 will come at the same time as WP8.1.
I liked MS's approach of appreciating that a tablet is more than a big phone.
Heh, I guess that's true. I'm using an almost two year old phone and I guess my head is still stuck in 1gb of RAM with a dual core processor. Need to pay more attention to phone specs.
Disk space is currently a problem for common SSD capacities, but, that's a problem that I suspect will diminish as time goes on, and not much time at that. Simply put, an SSD that was $500 a year ago is now going on sale for $200. This is likely to only improve and, as such, larger OS's like RT with a lot of stuff crammed into them will likely not be as big a problem as they have been with solid state drives getting larger and cheaper at a rapid pace. I'm also starting to see some companies cutting storage storage space price increases down from $100 to $50 per storage category - hopefully something that becomes more common.
I realize we look at things differently with you having a "device for every venue" mentality where I have a "one device to rule them all mentality," but frankly, keeping more of the goodies in RT is something I would like to do, rather than stripping the OS down to a relatively light phone OS. I want all of my device drivers, support for more large-display type programs, etc.
Give me VPN features on my phone and I'll actually be 100% happy.
As long as they don't put desktop mode on my phone, I won't mind too much about the merger...