Description:

Says nothing about disabling the ability of apps to track or store your past activities

'Linux' b.k.a. Android is one of the winners in the tablet and phone space - you do not need the capability to run Windows Phone apps on it. That's the Linux that Microsoft is developing Outlook for. On a desktop, Linux is nowhere near being a winner, and once Windows 10 is out, may never be, unless Microsoft gets another Ballmer like CEO who creates a longer living Windows 8. Or unless a whole bunch of hybrid devices based on ARM, rather than x64 CPUs, and running Android instead of Windows come into the market

Android is a Linux distribution according to the Linux Foundation,[131] Google's open-source chief Chris DiBona,[132] and several journalists.[133][134] Others, such as Google engineer Patrick Brady, say that Android is not Linux in the traditional Unix-like Linux distribution sense; Android does not include the GNU C Library and some of other components typically found in Linux distributions.

You're cooked if they do open that, but if the recipient is logged on to Outlook at the time that the mail gets to him, but hasn't seen or opened it, then the recall works, the mail gets deleted at the recipient's end, and no damage is done. As for content, sometimes messages may have been badly written or missed something critical: it doesn't imply that it was a secret waiting to be discovered.

So China asking for backdoors to banks operating within the People's Republic is b'cos of the NSA! Reason that the Chinese government distrusts everybody is b'cos they are a Communist government. Yeah, they've made the economy itself not just capitalistic, but feudal, but at the government level, it's one that just can't let go of its iron grip on power.

Precisely!!! The Microsofts, Apples & Oracles - they could remain profitable in the rest of the world, and just not report the sort of growth daytraders want. Leave out China, and let them decide what software their banks should use.

Funny thing here - all the tinfoil posts about Snowden & NSA and big government getting our private data and being able to access our bank accounts - all of that here is actually true about China, which nobody can boycott

The biggest one for me - the ability to RECALL mails!!! I've done that a few times at work

Didn't get you. I too carry 2 phones. One of them - my employer doesn't get to know about, much less access: it's only for family. The other is something I freely use for work, provided the employer doesn't supply a phone. So far, I haven't been in the BYOD situation, but if I were, that'd be the phone that would be used. If the company apps don't work w/ it (it being the Lumia), they'd have to provide a phone.

Well, when people talk of Linux, they typically mean the Linux distros run on PCs or laptops - Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, blah blah blah. If they're talking about Google's custom made Linux for tablets or phones, they call it Android.

It does make a difference, given that apps that one may normally run on, say Mint, such as LibreOffice, won't run on Android, unless specifically ported to that platform. Like a sibling post mentioned above, Android has its own userspace that's not compatible w/ GNU. Similarly, or rather more importantly, apps written for Android, such as in this case Outlook, won't run on your laptop w/ Mint on it. The only Linux that may run it is Google's own ChromeOS. It's just like one can't run OS-X apps on PCBSD.

Also on my Lumia, the built-in mail does Exchange really well. And Outlook doesn't come as a part of Office here. So, from the Outlook features that one would find useful at work:

Meetings/Appointments - the Calendar app in WP8 does that really well

Tasks/Notes - handled adequately w/ OneNote

Mail - current mail in WP8 good for Exchange, Outlook.com, Yahoo! Mail, GMail, IBM Notes Traveller, iCloud, and other accounts

Only thing - if one is in the habit in Outlook of following Franklin Covey methods of copying email to other functional folders like tasks or appointments, that's the only place where WP's mail falls short. Not otherwise.

One great thing about Outlook is the ability to recall mails. Will that be available in the tablet versions?

I agree w/ you, and the same argument goes for software. RMS and the FSF supporters tell us that we need the source code for the 4 GNU freedoms. Well, even hardware - particularly at chip level - has hardware description languages, or HDL code that defines it, both in a structural level and behavioral level. Yet, the same people argue that they are circuits, since they cannot be changed. Why not? Just get the HDL code, put it on an FPGA, and recode it whenever needed.

For the record, I agree w/ the Open Source guys - focus on the advantages of FOSS code, and accommodate the business modifications needed to the licenses. That's the pragmatic approach, as opposed to the Copyleft cult of the FSF. And I have no problems w/ binary blobs, or closed drivers, or exceptions to the FOSS rule.

What's the state of Replicant? The FSF version of Android?

Fully second this!!!

I typically don't close browser tabs when the newer pages I open have something interesting that I may want to reference in future. So sometimes, I have something like 20 or more tabs running. So I wouldn't sneer at having more memory - usage, as opposed to the capability of apps, do tend to fill it up. And that's w/o even using the VMs