My brother did a bit of hacking to put Debian on a Psion. I was pretty proud of him at the time!

Debian on Psion

No mod points today, otherwise I'd have +1 Insightfulled you...

It may in the TFA (tl:dr) or the same data also reported elsewhere but these figures are only for smartphones. If you include 'feature phones' then Nokia still sold more than World+dog. 76 million I think was the number. Plus you have to include the fact that NOBODY is buying Nokia smartphones at the moment because the entire (niche) market is waiting for Monday to buy 820s and 920s. Nokia's Q4 will look a lot more positive. HTC, although it has put some effort into quite a nice design for the 8X and 8S is still predominantly an Android company and there may be some people holding out for their Winphones but their Android phones should be selling regardless. The trend for HTC seems to be inescapably downwards but Nokia might just pull it off.

I had an HTC Legend a while back. Beautiful little device, but as many have pointed out: No upgrades to the OS

I'm new to posting...

Nikolai Tillmann's Blog

I don't think it's true to say that web apps didn't catch on, but the better ones are simulacra of native apps like the MS office web apps or Apple iCloud/iWork apps. You can use them if you have to but you sure as hell fire up a native app if it's available instead.

Now if ChromeOS could run IE6, then all those hideous web apps used in company intranets would work and they'd have a product!

There are apps for Dropbox and Google Search on Windows Phone.

MS want a nice fat revenue stream just like Apple's. Who wouldn't?

Yeah, the 15 rating thing is stupid but that's lawyer crap and nothing to do with the tech. Maybe it'll change in future? Who knows :-(

Game development for RT isn't impossible though (it says here...):

http://blogs.nvidia.com/2012/08/nvidia-brings-unreal-engine-3-to-windows-8-and-windows-rt/

As for the other stuff, sandboxing comes with a price, but surely the security and stability improvement is worth it? I don't even play games let alone develop them so you'll have to explain why I would need IPC (You get basic IPC to the MS built-in apps I think) and plugins and scripting are just one means to an end aren't they? You don't need to use them?

All that said, I'd quite like one of these Surface thingies, but I'll wait for the i5 one because I want to be able to run Python on it on the train.

RT is what MS want Windows to become. The desktop is legacy and at some point it will be dropped (admitedly, likely to be many years in the future). Dropping legacy support is one of Apple's strengths so why shouldn't MS try the same approach? Sure, on Oct 26th the RT tablets are going to be a bit of a dissapointment, but that will change. RT is a powerful framework:

From http://www.winsupersite.com/blog/supersite-blog-39/windows8/winrt-replacing-win32-140605

"...And in the same vein of blowing past peoples' expectations, virtually no app could not be written as a WinRT app. Many are imagining very simple, HTML-like apps, and while I'm sure there will be plenty of those, you need to reset your expectations up. WinRT is amazingly full-featured and not constrained to goofy utilities and simple games. The next "Call of Duty" could be a WinRT app, complete with support for Edge UIs and Charms..."

It is the x86 tablets that are the stop-gap

Really? How is this possibly useful? So I can't use this thing to work on trains or planes, just on my home wifi, on the 3G portable hotspot I would need to buy (so long as I'm in a city) or at Starbucks? I would get better value from a pen a calculator and 40 pads of quad-ruled A4...

Something else that I never see on Slashdot is an understanding of the concept of fashion. Every slashdotter knows exactly why and when they would want to use a Mac or a PC running Linux, Windows, BSD whatever. He (/she) would pick the right tool for the job based on a technical understanding of what he needed to accomplish. But we are in a minority, dear friends!

My job involves a lot of air travel. In the airport lounge all I see these days are shiny corporate types, or tastefully scruffy creative types with MacBooks and iPads. Not a single one of them has a clue why this is a good idea (other than a hazy concept of 'fewer viruses'), they just want them because they look cool and expensive. The point about fashion is that it inevitably changes; as soon as a few of these Surfaces show up, the suits and artists will think they are cooler than iPads and will buy them in droves.

Microsoft have understood that there are a great many people who just want to have the 'best' thing. Apple's computers are far more beautiful than any PC out there and the iPad likewise amongst tablets. What Microsoft have done is to create a beautiful piece of hardware that stands comparison with the iPad and that is all they needed to do.