Technology Ramblings

On April 28, MS released Build 16184 of Windows 10 to Fast Ring Insiders. The big news with the build actually wasn't around core OS features but two new apps. My People - this new app provides you the ability to pin frequent contacts to your task bar.  The My People app draws from Mail, Contacts and Skype to provide you a source for contacts you may want to pin.   To me though they are missing other key sources like LinkedIn or Teams or 3rd party apps like Slack, Box.    There is also an update to the Mail & Calendar app to improve Google Mail (Gmail) experience.   And yes there was a group of fixes - about 10 or so.   We're about 10 days away from the MS Build conference where I expect to see the major new announcements for the Redstone 3 branch and probably it official name.   The update installed fine across all my platforms.  And yes I still need to do the Cisco AnyConnect and Conexant Audio drivers dance on my laptop - but it's become old hat.   So we

Yesterday - IDC posted their preliminary Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker data for Q1 of 2017. Overall the market saw sales of 347.4M units a 4.3% growth over 2016.  Just to put that in context - I expect the PC market to sell about 250M units in all of 2017.  So Smartphones are outselling PCs at a 7:1 clip. The top 5 OEMs remain in the same order.   Samsung is #1 with 79.2M units sold which was actually a 1% dip on overall market share to 22.8% - sales were effectively flat year over year.   I expect to see a pretty dramatic jump in Q2 as the new Galaxy S8 numbers start to come in. Apple ranked #2 with 51.6M units sold - a 0.8% gain - and again a slight dip on overall market share to 14.9% versus 15.4 in 2016.. The reason for the share dips on the part of Samsung and Apple is the continuing rapid growth of the #3, 4 & 5 vendors - Huawei, oppo and vivo. These three Chinese brands saw unit sales of 34.2M (21.7% growth), 25.6M (29.8% growth) and 18.1M (23.6% growth)

On April 19 - just 3 business days from the previous release MS released Windows 10 build 16179 for PC and 15205 for Mobile. As I've mentioned in previous posts - I believe that Mobile is effectively in maintenance mode and won't see any major updates in this branch and after this note I will no longer report on any Windows 10 Mobile builds 16179 had a handful of fixes and re-introduced what MS is calling "Power Throttling" to attempt to increase battery life for laptops and tablets.  MS claims they can save up to 11%.   I'll see how this works in the coming builds and see if I can really notice any difference. Another new feature was some auto checkpointing capability for Hyper-V to help developers quickly revert to a known state.   The build installed somewhat slowly but correctly on my test devices.  I still have to go through the extra steps of manually uninstalling Cisco AnyConnect and then re-installing afterwards.   Similarly I now have to manually

MS recently made a shift in their mobile strategy by announcing a MS edition of the new Galaxy S8 that will be sold at MS Stores. The announcement seems to focus on Office, OneDrive, Skype and Cortana - but in reality MS has a pretty good sized portfolio of apps for Android and you can have a MS centric experience if you want on Android. For example - on my unlocked Galaxy S7 (which still hasn't gotten Nougat yet) - I run the following MS apps... Arrow Launcher Office Office Lens Outlook OneDrive Cortana Groove MSN News, Money and Sports I'm not a big Skype person - so no big loss there.  But the reality is that much of the same content and services I consume on Windows 10 is available. But even with the large portfolio of apps - MS is struggling to maintain relevance in the Mobile space and is not taking advantage of the some of the strengths they have. For example - I don't expect to see Windows Hello or Continuum support on a Galaxy S8. Cortana is an

On Thursday 4/14 - MS Released the 2nd PC build of the Windows 10 Redstone 3 branch to PCs - build 16176 and what appears to be a further rev on Mobile 15204 - but not sure we can call it Redstone 3 yet. Here is if official post explanation for the build number difference.. "We are also releasing Windows 10 Mobile Insider Preview Build 15204 to Insiders in the Fast ring. As we release new builds from our Development Branch for PC, we will also be doing the same for Windows 10 Mobile just like we have been in the past. However, Windows Insiders will likely notice some minor differences. The biggest difference being that the build number and branch won’t match the builds we will be releasing for PC. This is a result of more work we’re doing to converge code into OneCore – the heart of Windows across PC, tablet, phone, IoT, HoloLens, Xbox and more as we continue to develop new improvements for Windows 10 Mobile and our enterprise customers." So depending on how you want to

Yesterday the IDC posted their preliminary Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker data for Q1 2017. It shows the first market growth since Q1 of 2012 - albeit it was only 0.6%. While this reverses the trend that has seen PC sales drop over 30% in the last 5 years - In my opinion this is only a small respite. HP regained the #1 spot and along with Lenovo and Dell remain the top three players with market shares of 21.8%, 20.4% and 15.9% respectively.  All three saw year over year growth ranging from 1.7% (Lenovo) to a very healthly 13.1% (HP).   Apple and Acer round out the top five with nearly identical market shares of 7.0% and 6.8% and both also experienced growth in Q1. As has been the trend for the last several years the "Others" category which includes makers like Toshiba, ASUS, Samsung and Microsoft, etc and represents just over 28% of the market saw an 11.4% decline in sales.  This decline offset most of the gains the top 5 experienced and why the

On Friday April 7, less than three weeks after Insiders saw build 15063 also known as the Creators Update and before it became available to the general public - MS released build 16170 to Fast Ring Insiders.   The was a PC only build and marks the beginning of the Redstone 3 branch. According the the associated announcement of the release - little if anything changed in 16170 from 15063 - but there was a handful of fixes. As with the first few builds of Creators way back in August of 2016 - the focus initially will be on OneCore updates to build the foundation for upcoming features.    I expect we'll get a glimpse of the new features during the MS Build Conference coming in in early May.  Until then I don't expect the pace of builds to be overly heavy.   Also MS launched the Business Insider program that allows corporate users using Azure AD credentials to be receive insider builds of W10 Enterprise. From an install standpoint - the build installed cleanly on my desk