- On this episode of Ask Dan we're gonna talk about
the state of mobile, what I think, which is
kind of fun, and what about Surface Go using LTE,
what's the deal with carriers?
Are they gonna be involved or not?
And can Intel and ARM ever actually run together?
All that an more, stay tuned.
(futuristic music)
What's your opinion on the state of mobile devices today?
Alright so that's a very vague question,
one I could spend probably an hour talking about,
in fact I often do with Zach Boden
on the Windows Central podcast, so you can listen to that
at mixer.com/windowscentral, little plug there,
but yeah, that'd be more appropriate for these long form
kind of questions but real short,
I mean, phones today are basically
plateaued, and that's okay, right?
Everything's gotten a little bit boring in my opinion,
even the latest One Plus 6, which I use
as my daily device, is nice, but I don't really
feel like it was a huge upgrade
over my One Plus 5, and that's kind of where
we are now with these devices.
We're seeing moderate improvement
over year over year, but there's nothing
really groundbreaking anymore.
The app ecosystems are stabilized,
we're not getting anymore really must have apps,
we're all kind of fell into the rut of using standard
Twitter, and Facebook, and Instagram, and Yelp,
and so all that is kind of normal,
and that's fine, I don't want to be
like this is a negative thing,
this is what always happens with technology.
I mean, if I went back in say 100 years ago
and showed them my refrigerator,
they'd be blown away by it, yet every day
we take for granted all the stuff that's around us,
and that's like exactly what's happening with the
smart phone industry right now.
Now, I do think that companies will start to
back out of Android devices over the next year,
I think LG, HTC, even Motorola, they start to have
a lot of problems, with trying to meet
demand and basically create their own identity
in this market, and instead we're gonna see things
like Samsung really dominate the high end,
One Plus and some Chinese manufacturers on the low end,
and of course, there'll be Apple as well.
Now, what I really think you're hinting at here
is what I think about Microsoft,
what they should be doing, obviously,
Andromeda plays a big role in this,
at least in theory, but yeah, in order
for a company to really sort of kickstart this,
we're gonna start thinking outside the box,
at what's coming next.
I always bring up this point, which is
what will cell phones and smart phones look like
in five to ten years?
I think it's such a weird question to ask
because the rate at which technology
is moving these days is kind of weird.
The idea that these phones are just gonna be
thinner and better displays in, say, ten years,
I think is being really disingenuous due to the amount of
technology innovation that's actually happening today.
I think there's gonna be a lot of changes
over the next five to ten to fifteen years,
and that's really going to dramatically change
the stuff, but it's okay, for right now,
we can fall into this rut of smart phones,
and we'll have to wait for someone else to kind of
come along and reinvent it.
I don't think simply making screens bigger
or adding five lenses to your device is gonna
necessarily radically change anything,
neither will facial recognition on your device as well.
But smart phones become so important to our daily lives,
it should be fun to follow over the next few years
and see what actually happens.
Fingers crossed, maybe Microsoft
will actually get on board too.
How do carriers handle LTE devices
like the budget Surface Go?
All right so flashing back a few years ago,
carriers were heavily involved with tablets.
That is, they would often get them exclusively,
sell them in stores, and you had to go in there
and sign a contract, a lot of that has changed,
and for the better.
So regarding Surface Go, this will be launching
later in 2018 with an LTE version.
Obviously if you're in United States you can get
non-LTE starting on August 2nd,
pay attention for that review for that one.
If you want the LTE version, you have to wait
a few months, that will be shipping with
a Snap Drag and 816 LTE modem,
that's the same modem found in the Surface Pro LTE,
and that's a really good modem, too.
I'm very excited as to what they're using.
They're gonna have very good reception with this device,
it's a global modem, meaning you can
throw in any kind of sim into it
and it'll work, and it should be
very good, and regarding carriers,
what's neat about this is it doesn't
really matter for carriers.
You can buy this device direct from Microsoft
and just throw in any sim into the device
and it'll start to work.
In fact, you could take your phone sim,
just pop it out, drop it in this device
and it'll use the data, you could swap
between them like that.
Now, obviously most people won't want to do that
because you'll miss your phone calls,
I'm just saying that's an option,
that's how flexible these devices are.
That means you can go and just do things
like on T Mobile and just do pay as you go plans,
which is really kind of a nice way to do it.
We should also see the rise of e-sim come online,
and this device should support it,
though I gotta verify.
e-sim will allow you to do things like re-up a plan
through the Microsoft store.
Actually it's through specific app,
and just pay as you go that way,
without actually even stepping foot
in a store of talking to another human,
which I really like the sound of.
The good news here is if you're interested
in Surface Go with LTE, wait a few more months,
and you'll be able to get it pretty much
on any carrier you want with LTE
including Version and Sprint.
Can Intel and ARM processors co-exist?
It's a really interesting question,
and I don't have a direct answer to it,
I can say theoretically, I suppose it's possible.
I don't see, though, Intel and Qualcomm
working together any time soon though,
to make this happen, but then again,
Intel and AMD are working closely together.
In fact, that laptop behind me is running
and Intel and AMD system, which is kind of
strange after, also, I guess it could technically happen,
but the real question is: will anyone
actually make that happen,
and what would be the benefit to it?
Now what dearwaleed is really implying here
is, will this somehow make up for the fact that
with ARM you run into issues when you run
classic apps, x86 apps, that are outside
of the Microsoft store, and could the system
flip over to an Intel one and take over
and do more heavy graphics work and all that
kind of stuff, which Qualcomm couldn't do right now?
That's an interesting proposal,
it's like asking can Qualcomm run Thunderbolt 3,
which is also an Intel technology,
it doesn't seem like it can at this time.
And when I talk to Qualcomm about this
and external GPUs and making things more powerful,
you know they said they weren't actually
interested in pursuing that market.
They're just in light computing
with always connected LTE systems,
and that's kind of what they're focusing on,
where Intel is really focusing sort of
on that mid-range, core i processors,
even their Pentium Celeron stuff
is not updated nearly as much.
So while this is technically, probably possible,
I think it's better just to wait
and see as Qualcomm and ARM improves
over the next few years, and hopefully
Intel will actually try to come down
to the lower end and compute with Qualcomm,
and I think that's gonna be the way this goes.
I think having two processors on the
same board is just gonna be super complicated.
All these technologies are not exactly the same,
you'd have to design a special board,
and these companies aren't willing
to work together, so probably,
I wouldn't hope for that, but rumor has it
Microsoft is working on their own chip
called an E2, that may be coming out around
2020, we'll have to see what actually happens
with that, so there may be a solution here after all.
All right, that does it for it this episode,
remember, if you have a question use hashtag AskDanWindows
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at askdan@windowscentral.com.
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