This is a new thread at the very start of the Android/Chrome/Fuchsia vs Windows/Polaris match up.

Right now Win 10 is just now barely finally starting to act good enough for prime time, and Google Android has just been announced to be planning to become out with a full OS product.

We have two products out there right now for the Android side, Rockchip's Light Work OS http://liliputing.com/2015/08/rockchips-light-work-os-is-android-with-a-start... and Jide's Remix OS  http://liliputing.com/2016/01/install-remix-os-on-any-pc-to-run-android-as-a-....    Google's formal mainstream entry is still a year out, anticipated to be included inside the Android N or O versions.

Google supports free standing companies who are run by ex-Google employees who have gone off to be entrepreneurs with ideas developed during their 25% time while working at Google.

Jide is one of these companies.  So, in your mind consider Jide as a scout ranger way out in advance of the main troops, operating without uniform or credentials and mainly trying not to get shot down and working very hard at simply surviving.

..... but every once in a while, finding something tasty and slapping some C-4 up against it and making a large BOOM noise.

I think I just heard a BOOM coming from the small vendor pavilion over at the big CES computer show .....        


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"Jide’s Remix OS is a custom version of Android designed to make Google’s mobile operating system feel like a desktop OS. And it pretty much works.

The developers of Remix OS have released two devices that ship with the software, a tablet and a mini desktop computer, and they’ve also made the software available to Chinese device makers such as Cube.

Now Jide wants to make it easy for anyone to install Remix OS on an existing computer. Starting January 12th you’ll be able to download an alpha version of Remix OS for PCs and install it on just about any system with an Intel or AMD chip.




Jide worked with the developers behind the Android-x86 project to bring Remix OS to desktops.

The current build is a version of Remix OS 2.0 which is based on Android 5.0 Lollipop. It includes access to the Google Play Store, allowing you to install and run thousands of apps and games. But unlike most versions of Android, Remix OS includes a taskbar, support for viewing multiple apps at once in resizable windows, and memory management tweaks that keep you from losing data when switching between apps if your device is running low on memory.

You’ll be able to run Remix OS 2.0 on a PC by downloading it to a USB drive and then booting from that drive.

While you don’t need a powerful computer to run the operating system (the $70 Remix Mini PC has just 2GB of RAM and a low-power ARM-based processor), Jide says a computer with a Core i7-4590 processor performs almost three times better in some benchmarks than a Samsung Galaxy S6 smartphone."


What does this mean?   You now have a third alternative to the Windows 10 or Linux debate, with Jide OS being able to run on anything that has a BIOS that will recognize and boot off of a USB drive.

Now the feature wars will begin, with Android starting out way behind Windows, but swinging the entire PlayStore worth of free and low cost APP softwares which you are currently used to using on your phone.

Android (with Jide windowing and bottom bar and start menu) running on any old x86 trash piece of stuff you got laying around that will USB boot an alternate OS product.

My gut says that Android Jide will soon be able to crank up a Crouton'd Linux as well (if it can't at the moment it will come fairly soon).  
And that means Steam games .....

Suddenly, Win 10 just grew a real competitor in addition to Apple --  and one that runs well on simple older hardware.

A collaboration between Jide, Android-X86, Crouton and Google .....  with the bits and pieces eventually drifting into the LENARO store to be labeled and stocked on the FOSS shelves for anybody to use.

Merry Christmas, Microsoft.  



Never say we didn't give you something really good to ring in your New Year with .......

http://liliputing.com/2016/01/jide-talks-plans-for-2016-remix-os-for-any-pc-c...



https://youtu.be/E4XV7A_cl3U       This is a noisy CES interview with with co-founder David Ko at CEO which gives a sneak peek at some of the things that are on the way.

Brad Linder, who gets samples of all this sort of stuff and writes the reviews on them says that "Remix OS does a better job of making Android feel like a desktop OS than any other software I’ve tried.

That shouldn’t be a huge surprise, since Jide was founded by former Google employees and Ko tells me about 20 percent of the company’s developers were hired from Google as well.

Remix OS for PC

The big news this week is Remix OS for PC. Jide partnered with the developers at Android-x86 to make it simple to boot Remix OS on a wide range of computers. Just insert the USB stick, go to you computer’s settings, and boot from the USB drive. You’ll get the best performance if you use a USB 3.0 drive with support for 20MB/s or faster read and write speeds.

You can also install Remix OS to a partition of your hard drive or SSD if you’d like to create a dual boot setup."

I gathered three bits of information from the interview and the write up --

1)    Jide was founded by former Google employees and Ko tells me about 20 percent of the company’s developers were hired from Google as well.

2)     The operating system will always be free.   Jide won’t start charging users after a few years once they’re hooked.   But eventually the company might find ways to integrate value-added services such as cloud backup for paying customers.    Or Jide could partner with third-party app developers in some way. Those are just examples though.    Ko says the company hasn’t really worried much about a revenue source yet, but he assured me there are no plans to charge for the operating system or to insert ads into it in the future.

3)     In addition to working with the developers of Android-x86 to get Remix OS running on a wide range of hardware, Jide is also contributing its own code to the open source Android-x86 Project.    Jide and Android-x86 clearly have a better working relationship with the FOSS group than some other developers who are taking Android-x86 code and trying to commercialize it for $$$$.

Sounds like perhaps Google is a silent partner in this, using their 25% employee workshare program to encourage some of their people to support the Jide programming efforts.   Google could supply data farm support and cloud services to this when it is ready, but will be careful to allow the offshoot entrepreneurs to control what they have created.

So, I kinda feel that Jide is a Google employee offshoot that is going out and pilot fishing the concept of turning Android into a full productivity tool (a direct MS competitor) without damaging the existing Android ecosystem or Google's relationships with their major Android phone and tablet builders and the big carriers.

By befriending and sharing code with the existing people in this area and starting out small, they are befriending the existing FOSS players and helping them become more successful, not threatening them or buying them out as MS would do.

Google is being Google --- creating organic self-growing Android all over again, but this time as a productivity tool with all the work features of the older slower bulkier OS systems on a small lighter faster framework.

Jide is not cloud based like Chrome OS, it is "local to the machine" type stuff that is a "productivity magnification of the phone tablet experience".    Microsoft's Pawn Star guys might have to say it is a real OS by their somewhat wacky definition.

   

Minor news .....

Blackberry will only make Android phones from now on, Blackberry OS is dead developmentally.

Sailfish OS is back from the dead and is in motion again, but just barely after laying off over half their people.    

Firefox OS is still dead, except where supported by major refrigeration vendors who are still using in their fridge controllers and displays.   There is no development in Firefox OS apart from the fridge folks.

..... and that's it folks.   You got lots of Android forks out there (Amazon, Jide, Cyanogen, etc) but they are all basically custom shells stuck on top of stock open source Android.



The major types of Mobile OS products that are currently fully alive and kicking are Android, IOS, Microsoft, Ubuntu Linux    3-4 billion market share and rapidly growing

The major types of Desktop OS products that are currently fully alive and kicking are Microsoft,  OSx,  Linux distros,  ChromeOS,  Android   1 billion market share, shrinking 6-10% per year

I think "It's the APPS, stupid" is a correct way of looking at the whole thing right now.

MS wins right now on big business desktop business apps, but loses badly everywhere else.

MS has also shown that if there is a strong OS contender, they will put Office out for it (and Office for Android is already out there, as well as Office On-line).


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I think OS in general is going to wind up becoming a so-so thing and the APPS will rule the ecosystems.

I also think MS is aware of this, and that's why if you look at any OS out there, you already have an expensive copy of Office 360 already written for it.

Where MS is stumbling with Win 10 is they are doing what they have always done, trying to lock people into MS products by any means they can come up with.

And yes, you could have a complete life locked into MS products, just being a little bit poorer in the pocketbook as you do so.

http://www.businessinsider.com/decoding-smartphone-industry-jargon-2013-11



Looking at these predictive trends it seems folks are beginning to get smarter about the tech jargon they are using to report things -- it is becoming more "non-PC centric" now as folks realize PC is a really a very small part of the overall world of computing.

The red zone on this chart does show signs of growing, but this does not mean Windows 10 PC is growing as this chart does include Chromebooks and Apple and Linux and the new Android Laptops and PCs in the predictive PC/Laptop classification shown in red.

Remember, good ol' MS was still shrinking 6-10% year on year on year last time anybody looked ..... so far Win 10 has not changed that trend so far any at all.

If you look at the left scale and add in the other 3 zeros you get "billions" which says "Win 10 for free" has only a population of 1 billion devices to go after while phone has multiples of that already right now and is still growing quickly.  

Windows however was shrinking at a steady rate according to all of last year's data -- and since MS isn't crowing about any great Christmas sales numbers right now it is OK to consider that trend is likely ongoing still.    

While MS is keeping all their Christmas sales results secret, Intel is putting out processor sales numbers that show the same sorts of decline numbers as seen all during the rest of 2015.

http://www.trefis.com/stock/intc/articles/331015/will-intels-dependence-on-th...

Will Intel’s Dependence On The PC Market Continue As Intel PC Sales Continue To Decline?

January 8th, 2016 data and projections by Trefis Team




Please look at the first line under Notebook Processors, the Global Notebook Sales where Trefis is showing the notebook marketplace GROWING by 5% but the number of Intel supplied chipsets strongly declining in all the figures below that line.


Can you say "ARM processors in Google Chromebooks" will take an additional 5% of Intel's old market share, measured by Intel's predicted numbers?  

Because if you look along that same line notebooks were 188 million in 2012 and were 171 million in 2015 which means Intel lost 10% of its notebook market share due to the rise of the Chromebook in the 2012-2015 time frame, and 15% if you also run the Desktop numbers from the same time frame, all of which jives pretty much with numbers reported from other sources during that time period.

Plus, there were a bunch of Intel equipped Chromebooks, so Chromebooks may have indeed been closer to the 21% market share that others have reported.


     

..... and also please note that the 10-21% of the entire PC pie Chromebook slice is still invisible on any chart ordered up by Microsoft or from any MS lovin' chart maker anywhere done at any time in the last few years.

http://liliputing.com/2016/01/phoenix-os-is-another-android-as-a-desktop.html

Phoenix OS is (another) Android-as-a-desktop



One of the most successful has been Remix OS, which gives Android a taskbar, start menu, and an excellent window management system. The Remix OS team has also generated a lot of buzz over the past year, and this week the operating system gained a lot of new alpha testers thanks to a downloadable version of Remix OS that you can run on many recent desktop or notebook computers.

But Remix OS isn’t the only game in town. Phoenix OS is another Android-as-desktop operating system, and while it’s still pretty rough around the edges, there are a few features that could make it a better option for some testers.


Some background

I first discovered Phoenix OS from a post in the Remix OS Google Group, although I’ve also found mentions of the operating system at the xda-developers forum, and from the makers of the UP single-board computer with an Intel Cherry Trail chip.

Phoenix OS is available as a downloadable custom ROM that you can install on a Google Nexus 9 or Nexus 10 tablet. But you can also download an x86 version that can be loaded on a USB flash drive and run on a computer.

Initial verdict

I don’t know that much about Phoenix OS. It sure looks a lot like Remix OS, but there are a few key differences in settings manager, default file browser, and the way window management works.

At this point it seems to support a wider range of hardware than Remix OS, works with a 4GB USB flash drive (Remix recommends 8GB), and doesn’t seem to have problems running on devices with USB 2.0 ports (Remix recommends USB 3.0).
..... this bit is important, it shows Phoenix OS is tuned to fit older existing PC hardware much better than Jide, which seems tuned for newer hardware (USB 3.0 etc.).





OK, coming from China you got Rockchip and Phoenix both putting out fairly complete windowing Android OS products, and from USA you got their somewhat Google supported forerunner group, Jide, doing the same things, with each group doing some things better than the others in some selected portions of the OS experience.   Each and all are making progress by leaps and bounds though, and since it is all FOSS they are borrowing freely from each other.

Remember, the Chinese guys are showing up best on their own language and on their own domestic crop of Chinese Android apps.  

BUT, as long as they put their tricks into the LENARO store, it all comes out in the wash.

Google is hanging back some, and is carefully integrating the best of the best as native central supported items into Android 7 and 8.  

Google is being careful to let organic PC Android grow at its own pace, just supporting the new BIOS calls and such into the main Android releases, giving the environment that is needed for these guys to really go and do it.

By carefully supporting an open standard that (unlike Chromebooks) is NOT hardware specific Google hopes desktop Android will grow and grow and grow, just like the phone Android did.

Which graph?   Click on it and it will yield the address and you can plunk it down again in your post then we can talk about it.

If it is this one, I got issues with it too since it purposefully uses Gartner's neutered numbers (MS neutered) which is why I posted it, to spoof at it some.   Notice how it treats some MS "convertible" tablets (tablets with keyboard accessories) as PCs and NEVER counts the Android tablets as PCs.    Too much MS bias is involved in tracking numbers when MS is paying to have them put together, you know.






If it is this one, this is a generic market size all added up prediction type graph which is intended to show that all the fitbits in the world are ADDING UP MASSIVELY right along with all the other stuff out there that isn't a traditional MS PC.   There are a LOT of fitbits, smart watches, etc. etc.    Smart TVs are the majority of TVs sold now, those that can get you on line using an ARM processor set up internal to the TV tuner board (but not necessarily Android based, can be LG or Samsung custom built software).

Plus you got a blue gazillion of those little Android sticks and PC sticks that go into the HDMI ports on the back of older TVs,  I think they are being counted as computing devices now too.    Most TVs now-a-days that don't have built in computers have some sort of computing device hooked up to them, even if it is just a Roku box (or else your Time Warner or Comcast equivalent channel box if you haven't cut your cable cord yet).  They are all computing devices, you know.

Watch out, you got smart refrigerators and stoves coming out now, swinging Firefox OS no less ......  got to be able to dial in from your phone and check on dinner.

Too much MS bias is involved in tracking numbers when MS is paying to have them put together, you know.

Old Rider, I think you are reading the graph wrong. The totals are cumulative. Each device total is only as much as it's color, and they all add up to the grand total. By themselves now smart phones have the largest use, then pc's, followed by tablets, smart tv's, then wearable's with the smallest numbers. There is a lot of overlap thou, I am writing this using my media center pc on my tv.