Download Facebook Per Windows Phone 8
Abele Beardsley
Live Tiles are the heart and soul of Windows Phone, and no other phone has them. People can arrange the iconic Start screen however they want by pinning their favorite people, apps, music, games, photos and more. Three sizes of Live Tiles and 20 bright color choices including cobalt, crimson and lime mean you can personalize your Start screen to be unmistakably yours.
The only phone with Live Apps. Live Apps bring information right to the Start screen, such as the Groupon deal of the day, flight information and news headlines. With Windows Phone 8, Live Apps such as Facebook can even deliver real-time information right to your lock screen with updated wallpaper.
Samsung. The Samsung ATIV S brings the biggest screen to Windows Phone, with a bright 4.8-inch touch screen and large battery for extended battery life. Wrapped in brushed aluminum, the ATIV S balances high-end materials and technology with a hairline design and light weight. The ATIV Odyssey was announced today as the latest Windows Phone from Samsung with more details to come.
Microsoft and Verizon Wireless have opened a new chapter in a long partnership. Verizon Wireless will carry the Windows Phone 8X by HTC for $199.99 with a two-year contract, and the Nokia Lumia 822, exclusive to Verizon, for $99.99 with a two-year contract. Both will be available by Thanksgiving. In addition the Samsung ATIV Odyssey, also exclusive to Verizon, will be available in December.
The Windows Phone blog has even more features details on Windows Phone 8 at www.windowsteamblog.com/windowsphone. The webcast of the press conference is available for replay at -us/news/presskits/windowsphone.
4 Compatible devices (Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and Xbox 360) and Internet access or data connection required; carrier fees apply. Xbox Music Pass (sold separately) required for music not purchased from the Xbox Music Store. On Xbox 360, content is streaming only and requires an Xbox LIVE Gold membership (sold separately). See xbox.com/music.
For the past week and a half I had spent most of my evenings trying to port an independent mobile OS called Sailfish onto my phone without any luck. As it turned out, Verizon had locked the bootloader on my phone model, which is so obscure that no one in the vibrant Android hacking community had dedicated much time to figuring out a workaround. If I wanted to use Sailfish, I was going to have to get a different phone.
My goal with going a month without the Big Five was to see if I could rely solely on open source or independent software without compromising what I was able to accomplish with proprietary code. Basically, could I live my normal life with open source alternatives?
Unfortunately, avoiding this kind of indirect support of Big Five through their back-end services will become even more difficult to avoid in the future. For example, Google is beginning to lay its own undersea internet cables, creating the infrastructure for totally networked homes, and developing self-driving car services. Microsoft is aggressively pursuing cloud computing platforms and recently acquired GitHub, a code repository I frequently use while teaching myself how to program. Amazon moved into the space data business and is also working on networking your home with devices like Alexa, and Facebook still controls how much of the world communicates through its website, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
Yet even if I did scrupulously avoid visiting sites hosted on Amazon Web Services, the experiment was designed to be temporary. This meant that rather than shutting down my work Gmail accounts, I had them forward my email to an alternative email provider that I would then use to send and receive emails. There were also inevitably important files that I neglected to transfer from my Google Drive to an alternative hosting service when I was preparing for the experiment, so I had to log in to my Google account to retrieve those files and move them over. Or there were times when I was attempting to change a YouTube link to a HookTube link and accidentally landed on YouTube.
Depending on how you look at it, Amazon is either the hardest or the easiest company to quit of the Big Five. On the one hand, its consumer-facing business is mostly predicated on the idea of convenience, as evidenced by products like the Dash button or Alexa. This should, in principle, make it easy to quit since it would only require going back to the old ways of buying things from an actual brick-and-mortar store or visiting websites that sell specific goods.
When I started my experiment, I had an Amazon Prime account, but really only used Amazon to regularly buy three things: Books, cat food, and cat litter. As someone who exclusively uses public transportation, these items are a pain to buy at a store and transfer to my house because they are large and heavy. Of course I could just order the cat products from another site, but Amazon Prime offers free shipping and the ability to set up recurring automatic orders.
Then one day I was making a recipe that called for pine nuts, only to discover that none of the three grocery stores in my neighborhood carried them. The only other grocery store remotely close to me was Whole Foods, which was recently acquired by Amazon and definitely carried pine nuts. So I caved, dear reader, and bought some overpriced seeds from an Amazon subsidiary.
Developed as an open source operating system by Linus Torvalds in the early 90s, Linux has grown from a nerdy curiosity to a defining feature of modern computer systems. Indeed, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook are all major donors to the Linux foundation, which underscores their reliance on the kernel. These days the Linux kernel powers around 75 percent of cloud platforms and is also found at the core of many consumer-facing devices, including every phone using Android, which is the most popular mobile OS in the world by a huge margin.
Prior to this experiment, my only experience with Linux was setting up a cryptocurrency mining rig that ran a custom operating system called EthOS specifically designed for mining. This familiarized me with some basic terminal commands, but really I was a total Linux noob.
On my home PC, I have two terabytes of hard drive space, so I had more than enough room to host two operating systems side by side and still have a decent amount of storage allocated to each OS. When partitioning a disk to run both Windows/MacOS and Linux on the same computer, you can choose how much of your hard drive you want to allocate to each OS. In my case I chose to split it evenly. Now, whenever I reboot that PC, it will automatically boot into Windows, but if I enter the boot menu after restarting the computer, I can also choose to boot into Linux instead.
The easiest Google product to ditch was Gmail because there are plenty of good alternative email providers out there. I opted to go with Protonmail, a Swiss email provider that encrypts every email sent through its service. The only downside I noticed was that I used up approximately half of my allotted 500 MB of free storage space in the month.
It is, of course, possible to do a paid subscription and upgrade to get more storage, but this costs significantly more than Gmail's storage upgrades, which also allows for file hosting through Google Drive. For the sake of comparison, 5 GB of storage on Protonmail costs a little over $5/month, whereas Google charges $2/month for 100 GB. This is the economics of scale at work.
Although I always had the option of moving my personal documents to a different hosting device or to a local hard drive, this always seemed to be more hassle than it was worth since half of my job takes place in Google Docs, which my editors and I use for collaborative editing. Google Drive was convenient because it allows for collaboration on documents and storage in the same spot.
I opted to try Piratepad, a fork of Etherpad that was created by the Swedish Pirate Party. Although I loved the spirit of Piratepad, its barebones format made editing articles difficult because it was harder to leave comments and make suggestions on articles. Instead, you had to make changes directly in the document.
Despite this, there are plenty of alternative map apps to choose from. The three best alternatives, Apple Maps and Waze were off-limits because they are owned by Apple and Google, respectively. (I was also under the impression that Here was still owned by Nokia (Microsoft), but have since learned that it was sold to a consortium of German automakers in 2015.) I remembered the days when MapQuest was still considered the go-to for navigation, so I opted to use its service, figuring it probably got better over the years. If it has, it was hard to tell.
When you buy a phone, the Android OS that comes with it also has a bunch of services grafted on top. These are the Google Mobile Services (GMS) that many users take to be defining features Android: Google search, Maps, Drive, Gmail, and so on. These services are definitely not open source.
Perhaps the best cautionary tale is Amazon Fire, which was launched in 2014 on a bare AOSP version of Android. The device was widely panned for lacking Gmail and other basic apps, and Amazon discontinued the device the following year after racking up $170 million in losses and a surplus of $83 million worth of unsold devices.
In recent months, Google has moved to further its grip on uncertified Android devices. Previously, it was possible to buy a bare AOSP phone and side-load Google Play to download other Google apps so you could use it like a normal Google-certified Android. In March, however, Google started to block all uncertified Android from accessing any Google services or apps. The vibrant Android modification community was shit-out-of-luck if it wanted to use any Google services or log into its Google accounts.
Initially, Jolla aspired to create an alternative phone that would pair with its open source, alternative operating system. Yet after years of setbacks and failed launches, it scaled back its ambitions to work exclusively on Sailfish.
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