No, he is very wrong

Right on his doorstep, Windows Phone has double digits already

Anyone who wants to see how far we've come in aircraft safety should read Ernest K Gann's autobiographical account of the early days of commercial flight. Each chapter begins with a long list of dead pilots. The bottom line is that until the NTSB issue a report detailing the causes of these incidents then no-one in the public domain has a f#cking clue what is going on and everything you read in the press is garbage. Aircraft are very complex systems and they are tested beyond reason before they are even allowed to be flown on test flights. The traditional tests cover the obvious limit and ultimate structural loads, fatigue and damage tolerance, system life and endurance. All factored for worst case statistical scatter of all properties. For the /. audience, software follows DO178B the testing of software can take years, I've seen it even on simple add-on systems.

The fact that these batteries are failing shows that something very, very strange is happening and there is no way that any corporation or government could sweep it under the carpet.

Touch is NOT necessarily the primary input. I'm running W8 on my X220 with just a mouse and trackpad. Sure, some of the Metro stuff would be a little bit more convenient with a touchscreen but all of the gestures are easily achieved with either the mouse or the trackpad. I found myself confused at work briefly on my XP box when I couldn't fast switch between applications by mousing into the top left corner.

There is an issue with syncing Google accounts WPCentral , which seems to be more an issue of Google changing their API rather than a bug as such with the phones.

From my own experience with an HTC 8X I had to reset the phone and reinstall apps (no biggy) I set Gmail to forward to Hotmail and copied over all the contacts and since then it has run flawlessly. Battery life with light use is up to three days

I remain to be convined that the Windows phone OS is dead. MSFT still has massive market presence and has a good chance of bulldozing Win 8 and all its siblings through to some sort of success. The big differentiator over previous MSFT moblile OSs is that it isn't rubbish. I have an HTC 8X and despite the very valid concerns over the app availability, the device itself is slick and gorgeous.

I suspect that HTC's strong involvement with MSFT did have a bearing on Apple settling with them; not because they think they're going to die but because they are taking themselves out of the frontline of Jobs' jihad

Each manufacturer has its own walled garden on the MSFT app store. This gives some differentiation between otherwise identical software. In the case of Nokia their exclusive apps are the turn by turn satnav app 'Drive', the public transport app 'Transport' and the AR app 'City Lens' (amongst several other less notable offerings). Any one of these would be a reason to go for Nokia over HTC, Samsung or even MSFT and this is the reason I am putting up with their stupid decision to go exclusive with EE and waiting until the new year to get a 920 off-contract.

So how does that make Nokia the bad guy?

Includes: "...One year of Windows Phone Developer Center membership. A $99 (USD) retail value..." It says here

So this makes Nokia a rip-off merchant how exactly? MSFT maybe but they're only charging the going rate

My ZX80 didn't have a hard drive. It had 1KB of RAM and a crappy cable to connect to an even crappier cassette deck!

Now ALL of you get the heck off MY lawn

AAWP reports the same story in a very different light. How is providing a package that includes the necessary membership of MSFT's dev program with a bunch of other possibly useful goodies, for the same price as joining MSFT's program alone "giving up on developers"

You don't mention the $99 needed to join Apple's iOS program

Windows Phone 8 uses the NT kernel, Windows Phone 7 uses the Win CE kernel.

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