Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Office Applications on Mobile Devices

This is not an easy question. My brother thinks that Windows is going to be fading fast while Android and Apple continue to grow. I think Windows will be around the office for the rest of our working lives.

In the meantime, mobile devices and their apps will become essential business machines. Microsoft is having a hard time getting market share with mobile devices. They will be attempting to put Windows 8 on Windows phones, with light versions of Office soon after. I am not excited about any phone apps that try to compete with Microsoft Office.  I just downloaded an app that reads the documents.

AT&T and Verizon have the most phone choices. Sprint unlimited plans are more unlimited.
Here are some fault lines where earthquakes will appear. Intel/AMD processors in PCs use 10 times the energy of the Arm processors used in phones and tablets. Laptops need recharging after a couple of hours, smart phones may last all day, dumb cell phones a few days.

I have Windows 8 beta version on one of my computers. I had to retrain myself considerably to use it. I can do almost everything I can do with Windows 7, but some applications won’t install on it, most notably my Hewlett Packard scanner applications. For a mobile device, reviewers are being kind to Windows 8 as a way to access phone apps. For a desktop computer, I see no real advantage.

I also have a version of Linux on my Android phone. I had hopes that my phone would become my daily desktop. After a month fooling around with it, I have pretty much given up on it. The two major problems are that Bluetooth keyboard combinations like Ctrl-C don’t get through to it, and it cannot see anything coming from any device that wants to connect to it with a USB connection, like a flash key. The Arm processor is fast enough. The single gigabyte of high speed ram is more of a limitation.

There are tablets that have both Arm and Intel processors. They need to be charged often. Nobody likes them.


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