I love Windows weekly and have listened for years, but I 'm not interested in phone

[G+_Gregory Benn]

I love Windows weekly and have listened for years, but I'm not interested in phone. I wish the podcast could be split... am I alone?

[G+_Dave Trautman]

Rob Lightbody, not in the least. You are not alone in thinking these discussions about phones are starting to contaminate the conversations. When I watch WW I use an Apple TV and I am constantly zipping things forward until they talk about Computers more.

 

I do recognize the idea of a separate 'computer' is becoming a serious question in many people's minds. Just as powerful laptops were challenging the notion of the workstation we now find the Surface Pro 3 and a number of other tablet hybrids starting to challenge the idea of a non-mobile operating system as a separate environment for getting things done.

 

I love discussions about whether the direction of Windows will try to harmonize all of these things into a flexible and adaptable structure which changes according to what we need at the time. I also love to hear about the challenges of dealing with enterprise adoption of Win8 along with the amazing new ideas for providing services in the cloud.

 

There are a few other TWiT netcasts which quickly devolve into comparisons of the features and drawbacks of the latest phones from whomever just announced. I get tired quickly about those discussions. Not just because I can only buy one phone at a time, but because these feature-focused discussions take us all away from the deeper matters of how this is going to affect the way we run our lives and how we will be producing value from our computerized work.

 

I do believe the phone may soon become the central device in our personal constellation of computing needs. The wired home and the connected car along with various cloud services are all going to make working at a desk nearly obsolete. But along the way I think it is important to separate what WIRED used to call "Techno Lust" from the serious conversations we need to be having about how this is all changing our lives.

 

Mary Jo and Paul have long since accepted there needs to be the occasional foray into the XBOX portion of the Microsoft carousel and Mary Jo is accepting of this reality. But I think sometimes there is far too much talk about Windows Phone and not enough about Windows 9 or their Office 360 service or any number of other Windows-related challenges.

 

We can all complain. That is the easy part. What is harder is to support TWiT by telling them what you do want to hear about and let them try and shift the discussion toward those things. There are some who have been complaining there is too much Samsung and Android talk during MacBreak Weekly. Although it is important to acknowledge what the competition is up to and speculate on how it might affect Apple's plans it can't suddenly turn into a handing around of various phones and talking about how great they are for this and that. This Week in Tech suffers from distractions like this much more than any of the other netcasts. But the chat room and our G+ communities need to put forward ideas about what we want to hear about instead. Lacking any other direction from the audience the hosts are going to spend time talking about phones mostly because there are new ones appearing each week.

 

You might be suggesting (I don't want to rephrase what you said) there is room in the schedule for a show which deals only with phones of every kind. Instead of iFive for the iPhone or iPad Today they might have a Tablets Today and a Phone Forum type of concept. I would endorse this reshaping of the conversation because I think people who would most benefit from these would be people needing a deeper conversation about the differences, drawbacks, benefits, and analysis of all the phones as a comparative group. It would be nice to think the All About Android show can take the hardware aspects and push them off to the new Phone Forum and the features and apps discussion can be incorporated into how they play on each Android derivative. This would allow discussion of software and systems to expand and go deeper into what is means for a changing computing landscape.

 

I'll stop here, but I think I was pleased to see you put this out there for discussion. I've been thinking much the same thing, but I always suspected I was not the only one.

 

[G+_Todd Poulson]

Phone is not my favorite segment. But, I understand that it often has the most news activity.

[G+_Rob Lightbody]

Dave Trautman thanks for your interesting reply.  In my case, I use an Android phone (Nexus 5) and am a fan of Google AND I use Microsoft products (Windows on my desktop PC and laptop, Onedrive, Xbox etc) which I am enthusiastic about.  My career involves using Windows on computers too.  I do have an interest in Windows phone, and I know its very good, but I don't need to know about it in depth.  Also the reality is, its a completely different OS (Despite the look and version numbering)  I think in-depth Windows phone discussions should be in a separate podcast.  Similar to the way TWIG doesn't talk too much about Android because there is All About Android for that.