I really want to move away from android, iOS, Windows mobile etc and just want a standard Windows desktop OS on my smartphone. So my question is, are there any smartphones with an x86/x64 CPU available at the moment? Would it be problematic to get a Windows desktop OS running on such a device?
And if they are not available for now, when do you think they will be and do you think it will be easy to install a Windows OS on these?
To the best of my knowledge that no there isn't. However I do think they are close. A few months ago I picked up an HP Stream 7 tablet. It was running Windows 8.1 and is now on 10. It's a full x86 PC, within the limits of the low end hardware there is no reason you couldn't run any 32bit Windows software. I ran Half life on it just fine, it chugged with Half Life 2.
So if they can build a Windows tablet now and sell it for under £100 my guess is that in a generation or two X86 phones will be a thing.
On a side note this is where I think MS is going with both Windows 10 and the Windows phones. They are getting their ducks in a row, getting everything all set up. The latest leaked Windows 10 build includes the phone dialer. They are touting Convergence on the phone where the phone becomes a desktop. This will leave Apple and Google sidelined for a bit. The Windows phone experience is way better than anyone gives it credit. So many techheads dismiss Windows Phone out of hand and just have not looked at it with fresh eyes. The MS 640 is more phone than 90% of people need and would surprise even the most tech savvy with quite how good it is in the real world day to day use case.
I want to have a proper look at Ubuntu Phone but I had my fingers burnt on an early Firefox phone so I'm going to give it a couple of generations before I jump in. I bought a secondhand Nexus 4 a month or two back with the intention of installing Ubuntu on it but I have become distracted by quite how good native Android is without the manufacturer/carrier BS pre-installed.
So in closing I think you will get your wish of a proper PC in your pocket, you just might have to wait a year or two. The closest right now is the Ubuntu phone that is capable of running anything that an Ubuntu desktop. The Windows phone once Windows 10 is released will also be very close. However I think that Microsoft is doing the groundwork now for Intel x86 based phones in a year or two.
The zenfone 2 has intel core Atom cpu. And you can run windose 7 desktop on it. But it runs in some kind of emulator and that drains the battery a lot. ZenFone 2
The only other thing would be a Ubuntu Phone or a Jolla ... for changing the OS ...
So if the ZenFone 2 has an x64 CPU, why can't you just install Windows on it directly? I mean installing Windows in a VM on a phone seems like an insane waste of resources and is probably even possible on ARM architectures.
I mean, the serious question is WHY?
It's a phone in your pocket. Why do you need desktop applications
There are 64 bit phones, yes. In fact there was one phone..... HTC HD 2 or something like that...... Whatever, that can run current android, old android, IOS, OSX, WIndows 7, anything. It was a phone that had laptop hardware in it for..... some reason? I don't really know why but it was an awesome phone. It was 64 bit, there are some Samsung Galaxy phones that are variant models that are 64 bit and stuff. Android L works on a few phones and it is 64 bit only.
I don't care about 64 bit smartphones, I care about smartphones carrying a CPU built on a x86 or x64 architecture.
And the "WHY" is pretty simple. Android, iOS and Windows Mobile SUCK. (compared to Windows).
And I could name a 100 reasons for that.
But the main point is that you don't rely on an app stores and other crap that is just constantly spying on you.
You have WAY more control over anything and it's all just two clicks away (regedit, powershell, ...) .
If you wanna get rid of telemetry and other MS spying crap, you can just go on github and get a nice PS script to do the job within seconds. On Android that's basically impossible. And Windows mobile just sucks because there are almost no applications for it available.
Developing programs for Windows and finding existing programs that are efficient, don't spy on you and simply do their job is a million times easier on Windows.
And then there is the simple fact that a Windows PC can communicate best with another Windows PC because of it's somewhat standardized samba protocol. Getting a wireless connection from Android to Windows is a pain in the ass against that and it's almost impossible to find an app that is not completely bloated and terribly written and spying on you etc etc to do whatever job you wanna get done.
Believe me I could go on all this for ever. I just want a Desktop Windows OS on my phone.
Probably because its firmware is locked down. Anyway Win 7 desktop is not suitable for smart-phones. Even if it was installed on bare-metal it would still kill the battery in few hours.
I agree with you on this. But sadly the only alternatives are Ubuntu touch, Blackberry's RIM and symbian which has discontinued i think.
The funny thing is that I wouldn't even care if the phone was 2 or 3 times as thick and heavy as my current smartphone... It just has to fit into my pocket and my hand..
The best thing I could find for now was a 7" tablet with an Intel Atom CPU and 2GB of RAM... and that's a) too large and b) not enough RAM for a Windows system..
...
reasons.
All I want is a sub 5 inch phone with a full qwerty slide out physical keyboard, open source hardware, great battery life (5000mah), 64bit cpu, 2gb swap+2gb ram, resistive touch screen, dual sd card slots and it's main os is a tiny encrypted linux distro that does nothing but work as a frame for virtual machines.
is that so hard?
if someone wants to help me build one, pm me. we'll be rich. or atleast I'll throw all my money at it.
I dunno MKBHD just showed one off on a stream once and it was cool :P
the asus zenfone 2
You won't be rich from something like that... Windows was never designed for a small interface, it has been build for a desktop environment and has a very immature touch screen interface. I current have a Winbook TW700, which is a really cheap and decent, but the touch screen interface is not as nice as it could be, as it was designed for mouse and keyboard, the "ported" for touch screen. It would only get worse the smaller it gets. The only time Windows really works well (imo) on touch is on the Surface Pros where you have a good stylus that uses a much more accurate sensor. It would only get worse the smaller it gets.
You'd be better off getting a Windows tablet or a dirt cheap Stream netbook and putting in a sim card in those.
I don't care how touch compatible Windows is, I could easily script it to be more touch friendly etc. I would redesign a lot of my and other peoples applications anyways.
First of all, I'm new here: I found this topic while looking for something else and I wanted to have my say.
@VXAce
Actually Windows is 100% compatible with a real touchscreen: what it is not well compatible with is the creepy "capacitive" kind of touchscreen macshittintosh introduced with their horrible worthless i-garbage, but, if you read again Stone's post, you'll see that he explicitly named a resistive touchscreen (as used in old Windows Mobile devices, as well as Nintendo DS, TomTom and many other devices, before i-garbage introduced the stupid piece of glass and android copied that stupid idea).
On 3 to 4" displays, the resistive touchscreen used to have a resolution of 4096X4096 (with the display being just 240X320), which was enough for making whatever you wanted with extreme ease.
As you said yourself, Windows, or any other desktop O.S., would and does work well with the Surface Stylus, which is, in short, as accurate but less usable that a resistive touchscreen is (i.e. you can accurately use a resistive touchscreen with just the tip of your fingernails)... probably the idiot at macshittintosh who decided to introduce the horrible "piece of glass" suffered from onychophagy (AKA "nail biting")... or, more likely, he wanted to feel fancy by reinventing the wheel making it square...
I've been using Windows Mobile devices for years, and every time I use android I feel like I'm trying to play a piano with boxing gloves... of course the bunch of dummies who had never used a real touchscreen before liked the horrible "rigid" piece of glass, but I hate it and I totally agree with Stone that a big step ahead would be to introduce back the resistive touchscreen: the touchscreens used on the Surface/Galaxy note, combined with their respective type of stylus, are as accurate as a resistive touchscreen, but you need to use the stylus (which was also included with resistive TSs, but it was just a piece of plastic), which is a little bit unpractical when you're on the go.
Necro