Re: The future of your Nokia Windows phone
 

What would be your best guess? ;)

Re: The future of your Nokia Windows phone
 

I know you know this, but how much more 'user friendly' in the mass market can *nixes become than iOS?

I will say it for not the last time:

iOS is UNIX

It was the year of UNIX on the desktop over 10 years ago, and now UNIX-based OSes own almost everything.

And Nokia decided to go with Microsoft. Awesome!

Re: The future of your Nokia Windows phone
 

According to the Wiki page for OS X, even less than you remember:

As of September 2010, Mac OS X is the second most active general-purpose client operating system in use on the World Wide Web, after Microsoft Windows, with an 8.3% usage share according to statistics compiled by W3Counter.

Then again, 8.3% of everybody using a computer on the web is a whole lot of people using Apple's flavor of Unix. And, since Apple's laptops and desktops have been selling like hotcakes, more and more people are learning how to use Unix every day...

(BTW, I just have to mention that I've never used anything but OS X or Linux on my PPC-based machines. I'm fairly sure that most Apple PPCs still out there today are running OS X.)

Re: The future of your Nokia Windows phone
 

You're right.

iOS + Android is now... what.. nearly half of the smartphone market?

But comparatively speaking, smartphones are still a very small portion of the whole mobilephone market... (right?)

Yeah, I agree. As an OSX & iOS user (and linux, bsd, opensolaris.. windows..), I've to say that I'm one of the victim too ;)

But we're talking in comparison of linux's numbers in super computing, which is in the 90%s. It doesn't have that kind of numbers in any other segments, afaik. (except for embedded network appliances? as I've also mentioned).

Re: The future of your Nokia Windows phone
 

Well.... I don't know about learning 'how' to use Unix. They are learning to use an interface that sits on top of Unix. It theoretically could sit on top of Windows as well.

Re: The future of your Nokia Windows phone
 

You're right, but the new feature-phone is quickly becoming the low-end smartphone. There are $99 android handsets hitting the market.

Symbian is about to have a whole lot more pressure to contend with. Nokia better hope that WP7 is a winning bet, as this Hail Mary may have to carry the company.

Re: The future of your Nokia Windows phone
 

Yes, my "UNIX-based OSes own almost everything" statement was wrong, but it felt good. And that's all that matters.

Re: The future of your Nokia Windows phone
 

I'm fairly certain that various flavors of Unix also dominate the market for servers, for workstations, and have become extremely popular on mainframes. (IBM officially supports Linux on their hardware today.) The personal computer market may not have adopted Unix whole-heartedly yet, but it sure seems like pretty much any other market that uses a CPU has. :)

Re: The future of your Nokia Windows phone
 

Uhm, I don't know what you are trying to say here. The "Windows" user interface sits on top of the Windows NT kernel, just as the OS X user interface sits on top of the Mach kernel, and the Ubuntu user interface sits on top of the Linux kernel.

Maybe you're trying to say that you need to understand how to use a command-line shell to truly "use" Unix? I seriously doubt that most Windows users today have ever learned how to use a CLI, even though every copy of Windows comes with one. Why should an OS X user have to?

Re: The future of your Nokia Windows phone
 

I think you misunderstood my post. I'm saying that interacting with the iOS UI is quite far removed from a POSIX compliant OS like Unix. Comparatively, something with heavy CLI requirement would be closer.

My point was simply that the UI is quite separate from the OS -- it almost always is, and in the case of iOS is much more so than, say, Ubuntu, and still more so than Slackware.