WinHEC 2016 - Mixed Reality, Gaming & ARM
At its annual WinHEC conference - this year in Shenzhen, China - Microsoft focused on three major areas..
The first was Mixed Reality. From Hololens to new low cost VR/AR headsets from the likes of Dell, HP, Acer, Asus and others - MS is making a big push into this space. Expect to see $199 VR headsets become readily available by summer of 2017.
In the PC space - MS is clear leader in the AR/VR space and with an additional focus on 3D related apps from Paint to Print can provide an end-to-end experience. It is still to early to tell - but VR/AR may truly be the next killer app for the PC that will sustain it well into the future.
This dovetails into the gaming front - where the focus is on control, speed and 4K video. There where no killer announcements at WinHEC - but MS did spend some time with their major partner Intel regarding project EVO which is a multi-year efforts to improve CPU, GPU, Real Sense (i.e Windows Hello), etc.
The biggest announcement was a new partnership with Qualcomm supporting Windows 10 on ARM. This is not Windows 10 Mobile - but rather full Windows 10 running on Snapdragon 820+ SOCs. This includes an all important x86/32Bit App support (via emulation) to allow everything from Chrome to iTunes to Office run unaltered on ARM.
The huge advantage that ARM brings to the tablet is power consumption and battery life. Its completely possible to have small tablets that can run 12 hours or better and still provide a full Windows experience. This is something that Intel has not really been able to achieve even with ELV CPUs.
MS demonstrated an unnamed test device running full Windows 10 on ARM including gaming, Adobe Photo Shop and Office 2016. They also demonstrated eSIM capabilities for Cellular communications by being able to select a provider via the "Paid WiFi & Cellular" app and having it activate immediately and be charged to your Windows Account. And finally they showed domain joining capability which is huge for the enterprise market.
While I've never been a fan of emulation - thinking about MS's previous attempts of Win32 support on RISC - it's a start.
To me this announcement means the death of Windows 10 Mobile OS which may not survive past the Creators Update release this spring. And it truly now means one Windows 10 platform across the device portfolio.
This will be a huge cost savings for MS as they will no longer will need to support dual OS and the associated apps.
Since the minimum ante up will be Snapdragon 820+ the latest Lumia 950 devices will not support this OS. Today only the HP Elite X3 is capable of potentially running the OS and it will be interesting to see if HP/MS will support it.
The big question will be - will MS create a phone format device or rely on partners for that.
There are many studies out there that state that voice communication ranks 6th on smartphones as the app used. And while that may be true - it is the massive portability of the 6" or smaller form factor that have driven the smartphone market.
Only time will tell - but several industry observers state that most likely MS will create a Phablet or 8" tablet under the Surface brand - but may not do a "phone". Chances are the next wave of Windows "phones" will come from Huawei, Xaiomi or Levovo
Personally I welcome this change. As we all know one of the real problems that Windows 10 Mobile OS had was poor app support. Even apps like Office were better on iOS than they were on Windows 10 Mobile and the ability to run other key apps like Chrome, iTunes, etc is a welcome change.
The question now will be - how quickly will the Hardware developers adopt this. There is already deep industry capabilities around ARM based devices and so it completely possible that sometime after the Creators Update release - we will start to see these new devices and support during the Redstone 3 branch.
The first was Mixed Reality. From Hololens to new low cost VR/AR headsets from the likes of Dell, HP, Acer, Asus and others - MS is making a big push into this space. Expect to see $199 VR headsets become readily available by summer of 2017.
In the PC space - MS is clear leader in the AR/VR space and with an additional focus on 3D related apps from Paint to Print can provide an end-to-end experience. It is still to early to tell - but VR/AR may truly be the next killer app for the PC that will sustain it well into the future.
This dovetails into the gaming front - where the focus is on control, speed and 4K video. There where no killer announcements at WinHEC - but MS did spend some time with their major partner Intel regarding project EVO which is a multi-year efforts to improve CPU, GPU, Real Sense (i.e Windows Hello), etc.
The biggest announcement was a new partnership with Qualcomm supporting Windows 10 on ARM. This is not Windows 10 Mobile - but rather full Windows 10 running on Snapdragon 820+ SOCs. This includes an all important x86/32Bit App support (via emulation) to allow everything from Chrome to iTunes to Office run unaltered on ARM.
The huge advantage that ARM brings to the tablet is power consumption and battery life. Its completely possible to have small tablets that can run 12 hours or better and still provide a full Windows experience. This is something that Intel has not really been able to achieve even with ELV CPUs.
MS demonstrated an unnamed test device running full Windows 10 on ARM including gaming, Adobe Photo Shop and Office 2016. They also demonstrated eSIM capabilities for Cellular communications by being able to select a provider via the "Paid WiFi & Cellular" app and having it activate immediately and be charged to your Windows Account. And finally they showed domain joining capability which is huge for the enterprise market.
While I've never been a fan of emulation - thinking about MS's previous attempts of Win32 support on RISC - it's a start.
To me this announcement means the death of Windows 10 Mobile OS which may not survive past the Creators Update release this spring. And it truly now means one Windows 10 platform across the device portfolio.
This will be a huge cost savings for MS as they will no longer will need to support dual OS and the associated apps.
Since the minimum ante up will be Snapdragon 820+ the latest Lumia 950 devices will not support this OS. Today only the HP Elite X3 is capable of potentially running the OS and it will be interesting to see if HP/MS will support it.
The big question will be - will MS create a phone format device or rely on partners for that.
There are many studies out there that state that voice communication ranks 6th on smartphones as the app used. And while that may be true - it is the massive portability of the 6" or smaller form factor that have driven the smartphone market.
Only time will tell - but several industry observers state that most likely MS will create a Phablet or 8" tablet under the Surface brand - but may not do a "phone". Chances are the next wave of Windows "phones" will come from Huawei, Xaiomi or Levovo
Personally I welcome this change. As we all know one of the real problems that Windows 10 Mobile OS had was poor app support. Even apps like Office were better on iOS than they were on Windows 10 Mobile and the ability to run other key apps like Chrome, iTunes, etc is a welcome change.
The question now will be - how quickly will the Hardware developers adopt this. There is already deep industry capabilities around ARM based devices and so it completely possible that sometime after the Creators Update release - we will start to see these new devices and support during the Redstone 3 branch.
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