[Shift Development] Caid444:
well...

Here's the thing about windows 7. It seems that almost all of the issues that people have, are somehow related to the way win7 handles the shift's video drivers. What this means is, there's a strong chance that anything which requires graphical resources may end up blue screening the shift. This doesn't happen with vista. I'm not sure about XP, but it's a glaring problem for windows 7.

I know windows 7 wasn't designed for the shift, however, it's a shame to have the added efficiency of windows 7 on the shift, with such a disabling exception. Frankly, all of these issues are most certainly related to how windows 7 tries to use the shift's video accelerator.

My logic is, if Vista can do it, Windows 7 should technically be able to as well, the only problem is, Microsoft isn't in charge of driver research for the shift, HTC is. And to HTC, this is of no urgency, for more than one reason.

The shift isn't meant to run Win7, is the first reason, secondly, all development into the Shift and it's drivers has been abandoned. Basically, I don't think enough people bought a shift, which caused HTC to take the "good enough" attitude towards it. They're not going to put anymore effort into improving a device that *while cool and all* is far inferior to most netbooks out today.

Sure, the Shift is a pretty cool device after you come to XDA and enable the phone options and such, but frankly, it's half as powerful as a comparitively priced netbook, and out of the box, not as versatile on account of it's poor processing power. It's been labelled as a tablet PC, and only to it's user base is it known as so much more than that.

The possibilities of the shift are very great, but the effort needed to reach those possibilities is more than what is available today.

Personally, I'd like to see the shift have a second chance, and it would be cool if HTC felt the same. But from what I've seen on behalf of HTC, this is a cold case file for them. I guess I'll have to see what I can get done on my own from China, tonnes of talented programmers here who should be able to churn out results. I'm even prepared to begin hiring a couple programmers who've been affected by the financial crisis, and see about solving some issues which could most certainly be worked out.

This driver issue, is one that by all means of reason, should be solvable, so long as there is no severe OS function which is fundamentally flawed between Vista and Win7, as far as the Shift is concerned.

I suppose the next question would be, if I did try to get a project like this going, what other ideas of improvements could be thought of to improve the shift experience? I know people would like to see BT, Wifi and SD cards on the winmo side, that unfortunately would be an ongoing effort whereas I'm more concerned with working on finishable projects during the resolution of greater issues like winmo's BTWiFiSD problem.

Any ideas, or support would be greatly appreciated.

My next step, and possibly the most difficult, will be convincing my wife that buying another shift (for the programmers to work on) is actually a worthwhile thing. She's not into tech, and doesn't much like my addiction ;)

Caid.

444.