Sense features that should be in stock Android

We're big fans of stock Android. There was a time when manufacturer overlays added much needed features, but with Android Marshmallow - and now Android Nougat - the OS has reached the point where it's slicker, more intuitive and better looking than any skin.

Having said that, right from the very beginning HTC Sense was always one of the best alternatives to stock, with a beautiful, refined look and minimal bloat - we remember the stunning performance of the HTC Hero with the 'new' way of dealing with Android really impressing.

These days we'd be inclined to give stock Android the edge in terms of sheer ease of use, but there are things that Sense has that we really wish Google would borrow. The following five things in particular would make for great additions to the stock Nexus interface - so come on Google, let's see them in Android O, yeah?

1. BlinkFeed

BlinkFeed is arguably the standout feature of HTC Sense. It takes up a whole home screen, but it fills it with the latest updates from news and entertainment sources of your choice, alongside your social media accounts. With BlinkFeed you can see at a glance everything that's going on in your world - and beyond.

It's beautifully presented and a great way to kill a few minutes. With over ten thousand possible sources it's easy to fill it up with stuff that you care about and being on a home screen it's always just a swipe away, which somehow seems a lot easier than launching an app.

It's also not forced on you, as HTC thankfully lets you disable it if you'd prefer. But as an option it's great and it's an option we'd love to see on stock Android - it's a good alternative to Apple's News too.

2. Theme Creator

Stock Android looks great, but without heading into Google Play to grab icon packs or scouring the web for new wallpaper it's also not very visually customisable. So we'd love to see something like HTC's Theme Creator added.

The Theme Creator built into HTC Sense is a slick, feature-packed way to customise the look and feel of your device out of the box.

You can change the colour scheme, icons, sound effects and fonts of your phone, or pick a wallpaper and have the colours automatically match up with it. Or if you're feeling less creative you can choose from a selection of pre-created themes, all of which really shine and feel cohesive throughout your handset.

There are enough options to make the phone your own and being able to tweak everything from one place makes it fast and easy. Android is all about customisation, so making it easy to customise the look should be a no brainer and is something we hope Google adds to the stock OS down the line.

3. Sense Home

Sense Home aims to display the most relevant apps for the place you're currently at, by changing the contents of a widget based on whether you're at home, at work or elsewhere.

You can set your home and work locations, or leave the widget to work them out itself, and it will learn what apps you tend to use most at these places, then make sure they're front and centre for you when you need them.

So if you tend to use Gmail a lot at work you'll find that in the Sense Home widget while you're at work and it might be swapped for Spotify when you're out and Facebook when you get home. It's not perfect at predicting what you'll need, but the more you use it the more accurate it gets - and we think Google could really make this stunning if it got a massive engineering department working on it.

It's a great idea, as it means less time spent swiping around your phone and more time in the apps you want to use. We could see it fitting in well with stock Android (just as long as it remains optional).

4. Gestures

HTC isn't the only company to include gesture controls on its handsets, but it's something that stock Android doesn't offer and Sense does quite well.

There are motion gestures for one, which allow you to answer a call by placing the phone to your ear, or mute a call by flipping the phone face down.

But you can also wake up and unlock the handset without ever touching the power button with certain HTC phones, such as the HTC 10.

A double tap of the screen will wake it up, while a swipe up will bypass the lock screen entirely if you don't have any security enabled. There are also other shortcuts, such as jumping straight to BlinkFeed if you swipe in from the left.

All of these are varying degrees of useful, especially being able to wake up the phone without touching a button. It's a feature that's found on a range of other handsets from the likes of LG and Nokia too and it's about time it was baked right in to stock Android.

5. Power saving

Android Nougat has some battery saving tools built in, from Doze, which automatically puts your phone to sleep when it's idle (and is now smarter at keeping specific apps in check when the phone's in your pocket), to battery saver, which limits vibration, location services and background data, as well as reducing your handset's performance.

But there are two ways in which HTC Sense does battery saving better. The first is that with its similar power saver mode it lets you pick which aspects you do and don't want to limit, while the Marshmallow battery saver gives you no options.

The second is Extreme Power Saving mode, which goes far beyond anything offered by stock Android.

It limits you to using basic apps and services like the phone, messages, email, calendar and, oddly, the calculator. Essentially it turns your smartphone into a very, very dumb one, but in the process it also eliminates many of the things that guzzle down juice for those times when you really can't afford a flat battery.

It's not something you'll use much, but it's great knowing it's there, as it gets rid of the battery anxiety you can suffer from on stock.

Samsung is actually probably doing this a touch better at the moment, as with the Galaxy Note 7 it's got a range of options for even the 'extreme' mode - but both brands are getting rather good at making sure you can keep your precious battery safe when the percentage levels get a bit dicey.

• It's not just Sense that's got something to offer: here are 5 Samsung TouchWiz features we want to see

5 TouchWiz features we want in stock Android

TouchWiz is Samsung's custom take on Android. For years it was something you just had to live with: packed full of features but a total mess.

But you know what? These days it's actually pretty good. It's among the best-looking Android interfaces outside of a stock Marshmallow install, and by paring back some of the extras only 0.1 per cent of people used, Samsung has actually managed to come up with some bonus bits we really like.

2016 is a good year for TouchWiz, and some its features are brand new, not seen before the Samsung Galaxy S7 and Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge arrived. Here are the TouchWiz features we'd like to see Google bung into Android Nougat - or whatever Android O is called.

1. Always-on display

The latest version of TouchWiz has an always-on display mode. And it's pretty neat.

You want to keep your phone on all the time? Won't that mean the battery will be dead before you've even had a chance to complain about your train home being cancelled on Twitter? It actually only has a minimal effect on stamina.

TouchWiz's always-on screen is here to give you a time read-out even when you haven't used the phone in a couple of hours. This isn't the first time a phone company has glued a feature like this onto Android... far from it.

Motorola has used it a bunch of times in its Moto phones, and even before then Nokia made great use of it in Windows phones.

It's probably not something that'll be the deal breaker when you're going to buy a phone, but every time we end up using one of these always-on troopers, they make a much better desk buddy than a regular old phone. This is one of TouchWiz's newest features too, having only arrived with the S7 family and now used on the Samsung Galaxy Note 7.

All it does is to display the time, date, battery life and an icon or two if you have any notifications, in white on a black background. This is a Samsung feature, so it's no surprise you can customise it pretty thoroughly too - and with the Note 7, this includes some pretty fancy space constellation pictures.

The only complication is that unless you have an OLED screen or a seriously efficient LCD one, it may eat a chunk out of the phone's run-time. As OLEDs have emissive pixels, only a tiny part of the display has to be powered - but we reckon Google could make this work.

2. Recording of your super-sweet gaming victories

The new TouchWiz feature all the nerds are talking about is Game Launcher. Our general opinion on even good third-party software extras is usually "yep it's fine, but I'd still trade it for vanilla Android", but Game Launcher has had a good stab at changing that.

It's Samsung's nod to the idea that the one thing just about everyone seems to do on their phone is use Facebook and play casual games. Far more people we know do that than make calls these days.

This smart feature puts all the games you install into one neat folder, and lets you do all sorts of clever stuff while you're playing. The one that grabs attention was recording of your mobile game footage. You're probably no YouTube star, but this is a feature that could open up a whole new generation of 'Let's Play' mobile game channels.

Whether that's a good thing or not is up for debate. If you're not an online video obsessive, this is where someone plays through and commentates on a game, often with hilarious results.

Other more practical features of Game Launcher include being able to manually select the game resolution and refresh rate to save battery, and locking your soft keys so you don't boot yourself out of a game in a frantic moment of screen-tapping.

3. Camera app

Perhaps the single weakest part of the vanilla Android experience is the camera app. It's fine but nothing more, when the rest of the OS is flat-out great at this point.

Samsung's Galaxy S7 camera app is a lot better. Right out of the gate, it just gives you a very simple and clear Auto interface. Just snap away and you'll be able to get some great shots with no effort.

There are several layers to this appy onion, though. More advanced settings are put at your thumb-tips and the further you dig the more modes and settings you'll find.

Samsung's camera app used to be a bit of a frustrating mess of extra modes that were given way too much of the spotlight. But after a few years of people like us and you complaining, Samsung sorted its game out.

Now it has one of the best Android camera apps out there. As well as being fast and offering super-effective HDR shots, there's manual control and RAW capture. This offers data-rich photos before the phone's processing has put its mark on them, giving you total control - whether that could be baked into all phones though remains to be seen.

4. Disabling of apps

Android Nougat does its best to simplify the basics of its interface. However, that means you don't get an awful lot of control over how it looks.

One thing TouchWiz lets you do that a lot of other interfaces don't is to effectively uninstall any app on the phone, even ones in the core Google line-up you're not usually allowed to touch. It does this by blasting them from the apps menu without actually removing the app data. It's a cunning 'loophole' of sorts.

Previously Samsung used to let you both hide and 'disable' apps, but in the latest version of TouchWiz you can only do the latter.

You might argue that we should be able to fully uninstall any app we like, but then preinstalled apps are generally pretty diddy little things memory-wise anyway. What disabling apps lets you do is really cut back all that app bloat without going to the time-consuming, potentially warranty-voiding, effort of installing a custom ROM on your phone.

The key difference here is that while you've been able to disable apps from Android for a while, hiding them away has always been a bit trickier - so let's make it as simple as TouchWiz.

5. Switching the apps grid layout

Android looks and feels good, which is why so many people hanker for its simplicity. It's almost been a decade since Android was born, and only now has it really nailed down totally accessible visuals with a snappy-but-smooth feel. With that has come complete rigidity in its layout, though.

Conversely, TouchWiz lets you choose between having four rows of apps on the screen and five, letting you cram in more visual information than a Nexus device. You could achieve the same thing on your stock Android device now if you install a launcher - a skin that sits upon the system and allows you to tweak all manner of things - but for those that like to keep it simple, we'd like to see this by default.

This comes in particularly handy on phones with 5.5-inch screens or larger, where a 4-icon width style just means a lot of wasted space. And app icons that wouldn't look out of place on a tablet designed for kids.

Most phones above £200/US$300/AU$400 easily have enough pixels to squeeze in those extra elements without leaving slightly smaller icons looking remotely blocky.

Update: We've made some changes to outline what kind of disabling of apps we mean, and pointed out the options of stock launchers if you want some of these features right now. Thanks to our commenters for adding in their thoughts - let us know if you want to see anything too!

• There's a lot to like in iOS 10 as well

Apple released a patch today to fix an exploit that allowed malware to be installed on an iPhone with a single tap.

A report from Vice reveals the details of the exploit used to target human rights activist Ahmed Mansoor. Mansoor received a suspicious text that read, "New secrets about torture of Emiratis in state prisons" and included a link. Instead of clicking on the link, Mansoor forwarded the message to Citizen Lab, a Toronto-based digital rights watchdog.

The text, it turns out, was malware that allowed an iPhone to be jailbroken in one tap. The malware, codenamed Pegasus, allowed an attacker to steal and intercept all data on an iPhone. Calls could be intercepted, contacts lists exposed and text messages stolen.

Citizen Lab collaborated with cyber security company Lookout to dissect the malware and discovered its origins. The malware was created and distributed by a company called NSO Group, known for selling its spyware to governments. "[They're] basically a cyber arms dealer," says Lookout vice president of research Mike Murray speaking to Vice.

NSO responded to Vice, saying the company's malware is designed to "help make the world a safer place by providing authorized governments with technology that helps them combat terror and crime." But for journalists and activists living under a corrupt government, this inspires little confidence.

Update your phone now

Today's iOS 9.3.5 update patches the exploits used by NSO. Apple recommends all iPhone users update as soon as possible to avoid being a victim of this type of malware.

It pays to keep your phone's security up to date and to use common sense when receiving dubious links. Although news of Pegasus is alarming, iOS is still one of the most secure mobile operating systems for consumers, according to Dan Guido, CEO of cybersecurity firm Trail Of Bits speaking to Vice.

Android's security has often lagged as a result of outdated software running on a majority of handsets. Android 6.0 Marshmallow still only makes up 15.2% of all Android handsets as of August 2016. Note that Android 6.0 is already one version behind Android 7.0 Nougat, which is only available on select Nexus phones right now.

While Pegasus may be patched today, it's a constant race between cyber arms dealers like NSO and companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft. It'll be up to software makers to stay one step ahead of their enemies.

Surprisingly, the new Nexus phones, currently known as the Nexus Sailfish and Nexus Marlin, won't be the first handsets to launch with Android Nougat, as that honor will instead fall on the LG V20.

But there's growing evidence that Android 7.1 will be launching soon and - if it does - there's a good chance that the new Nexus handsets will be the first phones to run that.

For one thing, a mention of Android 7.1 was spotted in the crash report section of Google's developer console and, as Phone Arena reports, a Reddit thread also points to Android 7.1 being used to install apps and visit websites.

Strangely, Android O is also listed as being used to install one redditor's app 4 times, which seems unlikely and was probably faked, but the Android 7.1 listing is believable, especially coupled with its presence on Google's developer console.

Daydreaming about 7.1

This all suggests Android 7.1 is well underway, but it's a tweet by David Ruddock (managing editor of Android Police) that really points to the update landing with the new Nexus phones, as he says as much, while also stating that Nougat's first maintenance release is 'confirmed' to be Android 7.1.

Google has already confirmed that it plans to launch a developer preview of the first Android Nougat maintenance release sometime this fall, so the timing could work.

Usually a maintenance release wouldn't give Android a big version number jump (since usually they're about maintenance rather than major changes), but we are still waiting for Google's Daydream VR service to launch, and that would easily be enough justification for a 0.1 number jump.

• iOS 10 is coming soon too

We were big fans of both the Nexus 5 and new Nexus 7, and as Nexus devices one of the best things about them was speedy Android updates. But not anymore... Google has now confirmed the end of updates for the devices.

A Google support page includes a schedule for when Android updates can no longer be guaranteed for Nexus devices, and for the Nexus 5 and new Nexus 7 that support guarantee ended in 2015. We've known for a while this day is coming, but some held out hope that Google might have found a way through with Nougat.

Of course, just because there's no guarantee it doesn't absolutely mean there won't be an update, but it's looking very unlikely, especially as these two devices haven't been included in Google's list of Nexus devices that will be getting Android Nougat in the coming weeks.

Safety guaranteed

But if you own a Nexus 5 or new Nexus 7 it's not all bad news, as Google is guaranteeing security patches for three years (rather than the two year guarantee for version updates), so they should remain safe to use for the foreseeable future.

The update schedule, spotted by Phandroid, also shows that unsurprisingly the Nexus 6 and Nexus 9 will be next to stop getting Android updates. They're both guaranteed support until October 2016, so don't expect to see Android O on them.

Owners of the Nexus 6P and Nexus 5X will be safe until September 2017, so should get one more big Android update after Nougat.

• Two new Nexus phones are coming soon

The next "budget" Google Nexus phone won't feel budget at all. According to a new report, both upcoming Nexus 2016 devices will be made entirely out of metal and glass.

This is great news for people who weren't enamored with the plastic build of the Nexus 5X, especially compared to the beautifully built all-metal Nexus 6P. In fact, the Nexus 6P was Google's first all-metal phone, so if the leak proves true, the upcoming Nexuses will continue the all-metal trend.

To quickly recap, there will be two Nexus phones launching this year; one model with a 5" display and a model with a slightly larger 5.5" display. Both phones will be built by HTC, a company that has a great track record of producing high-quality phones like the all-metal HTC 10.

According to a new report from Android Police, both upcoming Google Nexus phones will share the same industrial design and materials. The two phones will look identical in every way except for size.

From the leaked image, we can see that the phone is indeed made entirely of metal, with the exception of the glass section that makes up the top third of the phone which houses the rear-mounted fingerprint reader. There's also a single antenna line at the bottom of the phone.

Choose your size

Android Police says it's 100% confident that the leaked images they received are of the Nexus "Sailfish," which is the 5.5" model. Still, this is a leak so take this report with a grain of salt.

The only design element we expect to be added is the addition of "G" logo, ditching the iconic "Nexus" branding of previous phones. Here's what the phone will look like in the wild, according to a leaked image from Twitter user usbfl.

The report continues, saying both devices will share identical specifications, aside from screen size, resolution and battery capacity. This is big news for Nexus fans, as there has always been a "budget" Nexus phone with slightly lower specs. It seems that this year, Nexus buyers will only have to decide between the screen size they want.

If the leaked benchmarks are to believed, we expect to see a Snapdragon 820 processor, 4GB of RAM, a 12MP rear camera and an 8MP front camera. Both phones will launch with Android Nougat installed, which split-screen multitasking, better notifications, and much more.

A sweet upgrade

We've been testing out the Android Nougat beta and found some neat tips and tricks to look forward to. Nougat should be arriving on Nexus phones by "late-summer," but non-Nexus handsets will likely have to wait much longer for the update.

If you've been patiently waiting to see what the new Nexus devices have to offer, you won't have to wait much longer. The devices are expected to release some time in September or October, falling in line with last year's release of the Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P.

Apple is joining Google in adding support for emojis that reflect gender equality. The new emojis will launch with iOS 10 this fall.

Google announced two weeks ago that it would begin supporting the new gender equal emojis. The new emojis aim to better represent men and women in the workforce, as seen below.

Both Google and Apple's new emojis were created in collaboration with the Unicode Consortium, the organization that's in charge of adding new emojis. Unicode support means the emojis will show up properly between different devices, but will still feature the unique look and feel of each operating system.

Coming this fall

Apple's new emojis include updates for existing emojis, including options to choose between a male and female athletes. There's also a brand new rainbow flag and more family options like single-parent families.

You'll still have to wait a bit before seeing the over 100 new emoji options, as vendors are still designing the emojis. The Unicode Consortium expects the new emojis to be deployed by the end of this year.

Google says 90% of the world's online population use emojis and giving people more options to express themselves is a good thing.

MeeGo, Sailfish and BlackBerry 10

It's 2016, and the mobile world is two things: iOS and Android. The former, run by the world's most profitable company, began the smartphone boom. The latter, owned and administered by the world's foremost data-mining firm, expanded that boom to the farthest reaches of the globe.

Today, their dominance is so complete that it is almost impossible to imagine any alternate situation, for Android and iOS success is an inevitability, guaranteed and impossible to escape.

And yet this was not always the case. Since 2008 many firms, keen to get in on the lucrative smartphone game, have entered the fray with home-grown mobile operating systems. Some were beautiful, some were game-changing, some were just awful.

Sailfish OS, MeeGo, Firefox OS, BlackBerry 10, Windows Phone 7/8, WebOS: the past is littered with the detritus of many once great titans and smaller upstarts. Read on for a glimpse of what has passed, and what could have been.

MeeGo

Though the name 'Nokia' has not always been synonymous with smartphones, for many the first phone they owned came from the Finnish firm.

Indeed, in 2010 Nokia was the biggest phone manufacturer in the world, commanding over 40% of the total market at the time, a share that dwarfs that of any handset maker in the present. However, not all was well in Espoo HQ, despite the then healthy sales figures.

As with many companies that experience staggering success, Nokia got fat and complacent. Its internal structure grew bloated and incapable of reacting to quick changes. The firm subsequently failed to pay enough attention to the rise of Android and iOS, at least until 2011. It was then that the Nokia N9 was released, the first and only device to come bearing the MeeGo operating system.

Forged from code created at both Intel and Nokia, MeeGo was something slightly revolutionary. Boasting slim system requirements, an intuitive touch interface, message hubs and multitasking, the emphasis was on creating a flow through the user experience. The hope was it was something the opposition at the time simply couldn't match.

Ultimately, this system was a victim of the internal politics that would slowly claim Nokia's soul. Unconvinced by the potential of the system, and perhaps swayed by generous subsidies from Microsoft, CEO Stephen Elop published the famous 'burning platform' memo, burying MeeGo and the N9 in favor of Windows Phone.

Today the project exists only as a reminder of what could have been, and the tragic fall of Nokia into relative nothingness.

Sailfish OS

Created by a group of former Nokia engineers (with seed funding from the firm itself), Sailfish OS is heavily based on the code used in MeeGo. The only real difference is in the user interface, which had to be altered from the original 'Harmattan' version as Nokia retained the rights to this.

Instead, the user interacts with Sailfish through an innovative series of gestures, with minimal button inputs, again with the emphasis on flow. Apps are kept open, running in the background and can be pinned, as with MeeGo.

Jolla is the company behind the operating system (the name meaning "raft" in Finnish, and intended as a riposte to the 'burning platform' memo), and the life span of its products has been characterized by grand ambitions and neutered realities.

Offering the OS as a community project, Jolla has developed a small but devoted cult following around its product, but devices bearing the operating system, other than its own in-house effort, have been scant, even occasionally turning into vaporware.

2016 marked the birth of the first OEM device to come bearing Sailfish OS, the Intex Aqua Fish, intended solely for the Indian market. Jolla itself has since ceased production of its sole handset (the Jolla Phone), and the arrival of its first tablet has been somewhat botched as a result of a mismanaged Indiegogo campaign.

Now focusing solely on the production and refinement of its software offerings, things are still looking dicey for the firm, which recently had to accept a bailout following a difficult financial period.

BlackBerry 10

Another operating system spawned from a former giant, as the name might infer, this was the brainchild of BlackBerry (formerly Research In Motion [RIM]).

In the period spanning 2002 - 2010, RIM enjoyed something of a meteoric rise, especially among businesses. Arguably the first company to get mobile email 'right', its handsets enjoyed enormous success, with particular fondness being reserved for their ever-improving physical keyboards.

Yet, as with Nokia, BlackBerry failed to pay significant attention to the rise and rise of Android and iOS. Over time, as its consumer base began to crumble quickly, it doubled down on business, and believed that it had something of an ace in BlackBerry 10.

Sharing much of the same design DNA as MeeGo and Sailfish, BlackBerry 10 is built around gestures, allowing users to swipe right and left, as well as from all four corners of the screen, while background apps are 'pinned' to the home screen, running slightly like widgets in the background.

Innovative as it was, by the time the software was released Blackberry had missed the boat completely. Launching to little fanfare, adoption was muted, leading to a series of internal power struggles and strife at BlackBerry, which saw enormous job losses and a complete change in priorities.

With the firm now shifting its attentions to the greener pastures of Android, testing the water with the likes of 2015's excellent BlackBerry Priv and the 2016 BlackBerry DTEK50, the future of Blackberry 10 is one of interminable decline. It still remains committed to the platform, but the likelihood of new BB 10 hardware remains bleak.

Firefox OS, Palm OS/WebOS and Windows Phone

Firefox OS

Mozilla is well-known for its popular web browser, Firefox, and yet the non-profit firm has also branched out into a number of different areas, some of them quite surprising.

On the surface, the drive towards creating an in-house, open-source operating system was to counter the decline of the open web, something that tech die-hards have been concerned about for some time. With the rise of apps and walled garden approaches to software, Mozilla decided to act.

The result was Firefox OS, focusing on the mobile web, HTML5 and a very low entry price. Indeed, though it proved to be non-existent in the end, much of the early conversation was dominated by Mozilla's promise of the first (usable) $25 smartphone, running Firefox OS.

As time went by Mozilla achieved some success, managing to sell a small number of devices in Columbia and Venezuela, among other countries, but nothing like the quantities needed either to break even or to gain any market share.

The result was obsolescence and as the media train moved on interest in Firefox OS waned. Mozilla itself, lacking the resources of a Google or an Apple, proved to be seemingly only half-interested in its offering and eventually closed the mobile OS for good in the latter quarter of 2015.

Much like Palm OS (another entry on this list) though, the software lives on - in televisions. Panasonic now employs an altered version in many of its units, giving it an afterlife as part of the 'Internet of Things' (widely regarded as one of the worst tech newspeak terms since 'phablet' came into existence).

Palm OS/WebOS

Before Nokia and BlackBerry got into the touchscreen smartphone game, before Android began to explode and when the Apple iPhone was still a hobbled little thing there was Palm and WebOS.

Sporting a much imitated gesture interface, card-based multitasking (which has been aped by everyone since) and many other futuristic features, WebOS was arguably the first operating system that introduced the concept of "smart" to smartphones.

First found on the Palm Pre in June 2009, such was the potential behind WebOS that HP bought Palm outright in 2010 for $1.2 billion.

Soon, the tide began to turn. Apple brought out the iconic iPhone 4 while Android advanced its appeal considerably through the likes of the HTC Desire. Interest in WebOS began to wane, not helped by HP's seeming inability to find a vision for its new product.

Shortly following the abortive launch of the HP TouchPad in 2011 (49 days to be precise), HP abandoned WebOS and all devices running the software.

This marked the end of WebOS on smartphones, however the operating system has since found new life through LG, with the firm including it - to significant acclaim - in its smart televisions.

Windows Phone 7 and 8

And now to the granddaddy of them all, at least in terms of money and effort spent. Windows Phone was Microsoft's answer to the Android/iOS duopoly, intended to have the strengths of both and the weaknesses of neither.

Sporting a bold new design and a daring interface utilizing 'live tiles', Windows Phone had a focus on simplicity and usability over unnecessary features and frippery.

Exercising total control over specifications and updates, Microsoft was able to keep the software experience tight and focused, leaving manufacturers to be inventive with their hardware, rather than over-complicating the user interface.

First debuting at MWC in 2010, Windows Phone 7 was a breath of fresh air, and enjoyed some not insignificant hardware support from PC OEMs – such as Dell, HP and Acer - looking to get in on the smartphone boom.

Initial enthusiasm led to a quick drop off in support, and soon Windows Phone 7 began to drift. Sensing the lack of momentum, Microsoft rebooted (knowing its way around a blue screen or six) with Windows Phone 8.

Sporting more functionality, and eventually the popular voice assistant Cortana, Windows Phone 8 nonetheless still failed to ignite the global market with a poorly stocked app store at the heart of the issues.

Now, the picture is grim. Microsoft has rebooted once again, this time with Windows 10 Mobile, another rejiggering of its mobile dream. However, with a lack of investment, in both funds and willpower, the platform is beginning to wilt badly, with the paucity of apps becoming even more problematic with several first party developers pulling out entirely (even Amazon is reported to be leaving the game).

Microsoft's mobile vision looks to be grinding to a halt, and it might take a true miracle to save it.

• For an operating system that isn't likely to fail check out iOS 10

MeeGo, Sailfish and BlackBerry 10

It's 2016, and the mobile world is two things: iOS and Android. The former, run by the world's most profitable company, began the smartphone boom. The latter, owned and administered by the world's foremost data-mining firm, expanded that boom to the farthest reaches of the globe.

Today, their dominance is so complete that it is almost impossible to imagine any alternate situation, for Android and iOS success is an inevitability, guaranteed and impossible to escape.

And yet this was not always the case. Since 2008 many firms, keen to get in on the lucrative smartphone game, have entered the fray with home-grown mobile operating systems. Some were beautiful, some were game-changing, some were just awful.

Sailfish OS, MeeGo, Firefox OS, BlackBerry 10, Windows Phone 7/8, WebOS: the past is littered with the detritus of many once great titans and smaller upstarts. Read on for a glimpse of what has passed, and what could have been.

MeeGo

Though the name 'Nokia' has not always been synonymous with smartphones, for many the first phone they owned came from the Finnish firm.

Indeed, in 2010 Nokia was the biggest phone manufacturer in the world, commanding over 40% of the total market at the time, a share that dwarfs that of any handset maker in the present. However, not all was well in Espoo HQ, despite the then healthy sales figures.

As with many companies that experience staggering success, Nokia got fat and complacent. Its internal structure grew bloated and incapable of reacting to quick changes. The firm subsequently failed to pay enough attention to the rise of Android and iOS, at least until 2011. It was then that the Nokia N9 was released, the first and only device to come bearing the MeeGo operating system.

Forged from code created at both Intel and Nokia, MeeGo was something slightly revolutionary. Boasting slim system requirements, an intuitive touch interface, message hubs and multitasking, the emphasis was on creating a flow through the user experience. The hope was it was something the opposition at the time simply couldn't match.

Ultimately, this system was a victim of the internal politics that would slowly claim Nokia's soul. Unconvinced by the potential of the system, and perhaps swayed by generous subsidies from Microsoft, CEO Stephen Elop published the famous 'burning platform' memo, burying MeeGo and the N9 in favor of Windows Phone.

Today the project exists only as a reminder of what could have been, and the tragic fall of Nokia into relative nothingness.

Sailfish OS

Created by a group of former Nokia engineers (with seed funding from the firm itself), Sailfish OS is heavily based on the code used in MeeGo. The only real difference is in the user interface, which had to be altered from the original 'Harmattan' version as Nokia retained the rights to this.

Instead, the user interacts with Sailfish through an innovative series of gestures, with minimal button inputs, again with the emphasis on flow. Apps are kept open, running in the background and can be pinned, as with MeeGo.

Jolla is the company behind the operating system (the name meaning "raft" in Finnish, and intended as a riposte to the 'burning platform' memo), and the life span of its products has been characterized by grand ambitions and neutered realities.

Offering the OS as a community project, Jolla has developed a small but devoted cult following around its product, but devices bearing the operating system, other than its own in-house effort, have been scant, even occasionally turning into vaporware.

2016 marked the birth of the first OEM device to come bearing Sailfish OS, the Intex Aqua Fish, intended solely for the Indian market. Jolla itself has since ceased production of its sole handset (the Jolla Phone), and the arrival of its first tablet has been somewhat botched as a result of a mismanaged Indiegogo campaign.

Now focusing solely on the production and refinement of its software offerings, things are still looking dicey for the firm, which recently had to accept a bailout following a difficult financial period.

BlackBerry 10

Another operating system spawned from a former giant, as the name might infer, this was the brainchild of BlackBerry (formerly Research In Motion [RIM]).

In the period spanning 2002 - 2010, RIM enjoyed something of a meteoric rise, especially among businesses. Arguably the first company to get mobile email 'right', its handsets enjoyed enormous success, with particular fondness being reserved for their ever-improving physical keyboards.

Yet, as with Nokia, BlackBerry failed to pay significant attention to the rise and rise of Android and iOS. Over time, as its consumer base began to crumble quickly, it doubled down on business, and believed that it had something of an ace in BlackBerry 10.

Sharing much of the same design DNA as MeeGo and Sailfish, BlackBerry 10 is built around gestures, allowing users to swipe right and left, as well as from all four corners of the screen, while background apps are 'pinned' to the home screen, running slightly like widgets in the background.

Innovative as it was, by the time the software was released Blackberry had missed the boat completely. Launching to little fanfare, adoption was muted, leading to a series of internal power struggles and strife at BlackBerry, which saw enormous job losses and a complete change in priorities.

With the firm now shifting its attentions to the greener pastures of Android, testing the water with the likes of 2015's excellent BlackBerry Priv and the 2016 BlackBerry DTEK50, the future of Blackberry 10 is one of interminable decline. It still remains committed to the platform, but the likelihood of new BB 10 hardware remains bleak.

Firefox OS, Palm OS/WebOS and Windows Phone

Firefox OS

Mozilla is well-known for its popular web browser, Firefox, and yet the non-profit firm has also branched out into a number of different areas, some of them quite surprising.

On the surface, the drive towards creating an in-house, open-source operating system was to counter the decline of the open web, something that tech die-hards have been concerned about for some time. With the rise of apps and walled garden approaches to software, Mozilla decided to act.

The result was Firefox OS, focusing on the mobile web, HTML5 and a very low entry price. Indeed, though it proved to be non-existent in the end, much of the early conversation was dominated by Mozilla's promise of the first (usable) $25 smartphone, running Firefox OS.

As time went by Mozilla achieved some success, managing to sell a small number of devices in Columbia and Venezuela, among other countries, but nothing like the quantities needed either to break even or to gain any market share.

The result was obsolescence and as the media train moved on interest in Firefox OS waned. Mozilla itself, lacking the resources of a Google or an Apple, proved to be seemingly only half-interested in its offering and eventually closed the mobile OS for good in the latter quarter of 2015.

Much like Palm OS (another entry on this list) though, the software lives on - in televisions. Panasonic now employs an altered version in many of its units, giving it an afterlife as part of the 'Internet of Things' (widely regarded as one of the worst tech newspeak terms since 'phablet' came into existence).

Palm OS/WebOS

Before Nokia and BlackBerry got into the touchscreen smartphone game, before Android began to explode and when the Apple iPhone was still a hobbled little thing there was Palm and WebOS.

Sporting a much imitated gesture interface, card-based multitasking (which has been aped by everyone since) and many other futuristic features, WebOS was arguably the first operating system that introduced the concept of "smart" to smartphones.

First found on the Palm Pre in June 2009, such was the potential behind WebOS that HP bought Palm outright in 2010 for $1.2 billion.

Soon, the tide began to turn. Apple brought out the iconic iPhone 4 while Android advanced its appeal considerably through the likes of the HTC Desire. Interest in WebOS began to wane, not helped by HP's seeming inability to find a vision for its new product.

Shortly following the abortive launch of the HP TouchPad in 2011 (49 days to be precise), HP abandoned WebOS and all devices running the software.

This marked the end of WebOS on smartphones, however the operating system has since found new life through LG, with the firm including it - to significant acclaim - in its smart televisions.

Windows Phone 7 and 8

And now to the granddaddy of them all, at least in terms of money and effort spent. Windows Phone was Microsoft's answer to the Android/iOS duopoly, intended to have the strengths of both and the weaknesses of neither.

Sporting a bold new design and a daring interface utilizing 'live tiles', Windows Phone had a focus on simplicity and usability over unnecessary features and frippery.

Exercising total control over specifications and updates, Microsoft was able to keep the software experience tight and focused, leaving manufacturers to be inventive with their hardware, rather than over-complicating the user interface.

First debuting at MWC in 2010, Windows Phone 7 was a breath of fresh air, and enjoyed some not insignificant hardware support from PC OEMs – such as Dell, HP and Acer - looking to get in on the smartphone boom.

Initial enthusiasm led to a quick drop off in support, and soon Windows Phone 7 began to drift. Sensing the lack of momentum, Microsoft rebooted (knowing its way around a blue screen or six) with Windows Phone 8.

Sporting more functionality, and eventually the popular voice assistant Cortana, Windows Phone 8 nonetheless still failed to ignite the global market with a poorly stocked app store at the heart of the issues.

Now, the picture is grim. Microsoft has rebooted once again, this time with Windows 10 Mobile, another rejiggering of its mobile dream. However, with a lack of investment, in both funds and willpower, the platform is beginning to wilt badly, with the paucity of apps becoming even more problematic with several first party developers pulling out entirely (even Amazon is reported to be leaving the game).

Microsoft's mobile vision looks to be grinding to a halt, and it might take a true miracle to save it.

• For an operating system that isn't likely to fail check out iOS 10

Introduction and Continuum advantage

Microsoft has never had much success with its mobile phone business, and buying Nokia for $7.2 billion (around £5.5 billion, AU$9.7 billion) back in 2013 didn't help Redmond claw its way to relevancy, either.

Revenues from its phone business, which includes Lumia-branded handsets, dropped over 70% in the three months leading up to July, on top of a 50% decline in the quarter before that, and a similar drop in the previous quarter.

Research firms, such as Gartner and IDC, peg the market share of Windows 10 Mobile at somewhere between zero and 1%, a figure that could also be described as a rounding error equivalent to BlackBerry's share of the market.

Billion blunder

The company hasn't been releasing many new handsets of late and recently revised its stated goal of getting Windows 10 onto one billion devices by 2018 because of "the focusing of our phone hardware business."

The "focusing" in question is, by and large, a mystery. Microsoft declined to show off any new Windows 10 Mobile details earlier this year at its Build conference, and after this was picked up on by the media, Redmond was subsequently forced to release a statement clarifying its commitment.

The platform the company built with Windows 10 has been growing and now has 350 million active users across a range of devices, including Xbox, PCs, tablets, and (some) smartphones. But the downward revision of the big billion goal – and its reasoning – is embarrassing for Microsoft and signals just how far its mobile ambitions have fallen.

There is, however, a way to turn this around.

Deep and meaningful relationships

Microsoft has always had the best, by which we mean the deepest, relationships with big enterprise customers who run Windows, use Office, and most likely have some kind of Azure setup humming in the background.

While Amazon has snapped up growing startups with its Amazon Web Services platform, Microsoft has retained many big clients, which are defined as companies with over 100,000 employees, $10 billion (around £7.5 billion, AU$13.5 billion) in revenue per year, or both.

According to Gartner, Microsoft software and services are used in these kinds of companies the majority of the time, and the dominance only starts to fade as the organisations become smaller than 250 employees or generate less than $50 million (around £38 million, AU$67 million) in revenue.

As you'd expect, the bigger the company the more money Microsoft generates from it. Office 365, the cloud version of its productivity software, is used by over 23 million people, many of which are employees of big firms.

These relationships – which are likely years old – could be used to sell Windows-based smartphones.

Advantage Microsoft

"In the enterprise segment, Microsoft has a chance," said Francisco Jeronimo, a senior researcher at IDC, in an interview earlier this year. "They are looking at selling a bundle of products and services, rather than just the operating system, and when they go to a client and offer a device that comes with Continuum, the docking station, and Windows 10, it can be quite interesting."

The features that Microsoft has developed for its mobile operating system are some of the best-in-class. Continuum, for example, uses a $99 (around £75, AU$133) dock – called the Display Dock – which attaches to a mouse and keyboard to turn a Lumia smartphone into a fully-fledged computer running Windows 10.

Demos of a smartphone turning – literally – into a computer are really impressive and, more importantly, represent something only Microsoft is doing currently. Apple, which makes the iPhone, chooses to keep its desktop and smartphone operating systems separate, and Google, which develops Android, has chosen never to merge Chrome OS and Android in any meaningful way.

So, either by design or by accident, Microsoft has a huge, marketable advantage that would be uniquely beneficial to enterprise customers.

Avoiding phone pain

Android agony

The other advantage that Microsoft has is a realisation by big businesses that letting every employee carry their own smartphone is a pain. iPhones are okay because there are a finite number of versions, but Android is open to anyone who wants to make a handset which means there are a host of different screen sizes, features, OS versions, and so on.

"Companies have realised it costs a lot more to manage very different versions of phone OSes, hardware, etc, and it's easier just to roll out corporate phones on one platform," said Jeronimo. "Many companies are going back and giving employees the phone they want, or allowing them to choose between a set."

This change, which is happening over time and will likely continue in the future, is of huge benefit to Microsoft. The relationships it has so carefully nurtured with companies who will feel the pain of BYOD can be leveraged to sell handsets of a specific type, design, and software version.

Microsoft can go to a company which is frustrated by the process of supporting 30 different types of Android phone, or five types of iPhone, and say: "We have two handset types across the low- and high-ends which run Windows 10."

That, Microsoft should be hoping, is a compelling proposition, especially as company computers will soon be upgraded to Windows 10 and are running Office.

Universal solution

There is, of course, a lack of native apps on Windows 10 Mobile – including ones like Snapchat – but the Universal Windows Platform alleviates many of these problems.

Essentially, Microsoft managed to get Windows 10 fully unified across devices which means that apps developed for a PC, running Windows 10, work on a smartphone, tablet, or Xbox. Basically, any device that runs Windows 10.

This has meant that some big developers, like Uber, have produced a single Windows 10 app that is then available across multiple platforms, and Microsoft hopes others will do the same.

For enterprise, however, the number of popular apps is irrelevant (and fewer is most likely a good thing). What is relevant is that the company's software team can use one version of its software – and that's it. From here, it will run on a smartphone, PC, tablet, and so on.

Winning enterprise

Apple has also been pushing the iPhone into the workplace by partnering with IBM, Box, and others but its solution – beautifully designed enterprise apps – still requires hard work on the part of each individual company to bring its app onto iOS, not to mention that similar versions also have to be made for Android.

It's unlikely that 'winning' enterprise will yield the same kind of profits that selling phones to consumers does – as Apple discovered – but it will be some repayment for the time, money, and energy that Microsoft has consistently dedicated to Windows on smartphones over the years.

Selling the complete package – an operating system, productivity software, hardware (including the Surface), and infrastructure – is a very compelling offering, and Microsoft is uniquely positioned to do just that. The company best take full advantage of this fact.

• Also check out how Satya Nadella just fixed a massive problem at Microsoft

It's been a couple of years since Samsung overhauled its custom Android skin, TouchWiz, but a new video shows off a massively overhauled version of the software that might debut with the Samsung Galaxy Note 7.

Italian tech blog HDblog.it posted a walk-through video of the new interface detailing every change in the new TouchWiz interface.

Overall, Samsung's design language has matured with less cartoony colors and slick customization options that were previously only available from third-party launchers.

The notifications pull down has also been massively overhauled, and you'll now have a drop down menu to quickly access settings. For example, you'll be able to switch Wi-Fi networks from just the notification shade without hopping into the settings app. This could previously be done in the expanded notification shade, but the new interface allows drop down menus from the non-expanded shade, requiring one less swipe.

More TouchWiz changes

On the home screen, you'll be able to swipe up from an app icon to bring up a menu of options without going into the app itself. I can see this feature utilizing a pressure sensitive screen, like Apple's 3D Touch, that's rumored to be coming to the Galaxy Note 7.

Taking a note from Apple's iOS, the new TouchWiz UI will feature tons of blurring of the background when tapping on a folder. Apps within the folder take over the center of the screen and blur out the background, just like in iOS.

Samsung's Gallery app has also been updated to look and feel more like Google Photos. You can still pinch to zoom in and out to see more or fewer photos at once, but the app's layout no longer buries view options in the menu.

There's a lot more changes detailed in the video so check it out, even if you don't understand Italian.

Keep in mind that these TouchWiz changes are still in beta, so there will probably be more made before it rolls out with the Galaxy Note 7, which is expected to arrive early August.

Image credit: HDblog.it

Microsoft finally has its own tap to pay solution for some Windows 10 Mobile users. Microsoft Wallet will allow Lumia users to add their credit, debit and loyalty cards to use at stores that support near field communications (NFC) payments.

This isn’t the first NFC payment solution available on Windows 10 Mobile. Softcard supported NFC payments on Windows Mobile, but the service was discontinued in March 2015 after Google purchased the company.

Since tap to pay is a standardized feature, Microsoft Wallet should work everywhere Apple Pay and Android Pay are available. This is different from Samsung’s Magnetic Secure Transmission technology, which allows Samsung Pay to work with older terminals without NFC.

In addition to checking out at physical stores, Microsoft Wallet will allow users to pay in Microsoft’s digital stores as well. This means you can purchase things in the Xbox, Office or Microsoft Stores using your mobile wallet.

Microsoft Wallet is available now but only in the US for the Lumia 950, 950XL and 650. An additional caveat is that it’s still being tested, so it’s only available to Windows 10 Mobile users who’ve signed up for the experimental updates. It’s unclear when Microsoft Wallet will become available to all Windows 10 Mobile users, but it’s likely to come with Windows 10’s huge Anniversary Update which is expected to arrive late this summer.

Although Microsoft Wallet is a neat feature, it likely won’t stop the freefall of Windows Phone sales.

Microsoft is to cull 1,850 jobs as it massively cuts down on its smartphone hardware business.

It's no secret that Microsoft is struggling to compete against iOS and Android. In fact, in the first quarter of 2016 Windows Phone's market share dropped below 1%.

That news in itself was no surprise, having followed weak quarterly results and the sale of its feature phone business.

Now, in an internal memo obtained by The Verge, Terry Myerson, Microsoft's head of Windows and devices, confirmed that the company would be cutting up to 1850 jobs worldwide, 1350 of which would be in Finland and likely mostly made up of those who worked for Nokia Devices.

It's starting to sound like Microsoft could be preparing for a complete exit of the mobile space, but Myerson suggests it's not quite dead yet.

In the memo he says that the company is "streamlining" its smartphone hardware business, but that it will continue to "develop great new devices".

Down but maybe not out

He doesn't get too specific, but notably he says that "I used the words 'be more focused' above. This in fact describes what we are doing (we're scaling back, but we're not out!)"

That's at odds with claims from an unnamed source speaking to Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, who according to Reuters said that Microsoft will stop designing and manufacturing mobile phones altogether.

With it being the one major company currently invested in the Windows Phone platform, that would surely leave Windows 10 Mobile with little to no future.

But if we believe the memo, and we're inclined to when the alternative is an anonymous source, Microsoft isn't giving up on the smartphone game just yet.

It sounds like we may see fewer devices, but with exciting ones like the Surface Phone on the horizon there's still some small hope for the platform.

• It might be struggling, but Windows 10 Mobile is a solid operating system

Among the many Android N features revealed at Google IO was the promise of seamless updates, allowing your device to install updates in the background without rendering it temporarily unusable, but this is one feature that isn't likely to arrive on any current hardware.

Speaking to Google, Android Police learned that while it would technically be possible to achieve on some current handsets, such as the Nexus 5X or Nexus 6P, it would mean repartitioning the entire phone, so that there were two partitions live at once - one to download and install updates onto and the other to continue using the phone from.

But repartitioning isn't easy - it would require hooking your handset up to a computer and, more worryingly, risks breaking your phone or losing data - so it's both hassle and, frankly, not worth the risk from Google's perspective.

New phone needed

It's possible that some enterprising users will develop tools to make it work, but if so they will likely be entirely unofficial and used entirely at your own risk. Otherwise, if you really can't bear to look at another "Android is updating" screen, you'll to have to buy a phone that runs Android N or above out of the box, the first of which will likely be the new Nexus devices we're expecting later this year.

Everyone else will just have to continue finding ways to fill that phoneless time. We'd suggest using it to learn something new, but without our Duolingo and Skillshare apps we'd probably just end up staring into the abyss until our phone works again.

• There've been some big announcements at Google IO 2016

Android N may not have a final name yet, but many of the features have been revealed through the developer previews, from multi-window support to an improved Doze mode.

The latest revelation is that Android N might support pressure-sensitive displays, allowing users to interact with the screen in much the same way as 3D Touch allows on the iPhone 6S.

We say might, because at the moment it comes down to the wording of a launcher shortcuts API, which talks about 'dynamic shortcuts'.

Under pressure

The text was spotted by Phandroid, and following the discovery Nova Launcher developer Kevin Barry tried to test it out. He failed, but confirmed that the shortcuts do appear to be gesture based, suggesting that 3D Touch-like gestures may well be supported in the final version of Android N.

It would make a certain amount of sense for Google to get on board the pressure sensing train. Inevitable accusations of copying aside it's one of the few big iOS features that you can't currently get on Android and it's got a lot of potential.

Of course even if Android N does support pressure-sensitive interactions on the software side you'll still need hardware that can make use of it, which counts out most current phones, other than perhaps the Huawei Mate S, which already has a similar Force Touch feature.

But future phones could support it and if Google's working on it there's a good chance its next Nexus handset will be the first.

• The notifications bar is changing for Android N

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