Since the stewardship of Microsoft switched from Steve Ballmer to Satya Nadalla last year, the company has focused on broadening availability for their apps and services. Office for tablets is now here, and Microsoft recently partnered with Samsung on the Galaxy S6/S6 Edge to supply Skype, OneDrive, and OneNote on the handsets. Today Microsoft has announced an expansion of this partnership, as well as partnerships with more manufacturers.
As well as Samsung, the new deal will see Microsoft apps, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, OneDrive and Skype installed on Samsung and Dell tablets, as well as devices from regional manufacturers such as TrekStor of Germany, JP Sa Couto of Portugal, Datamatic of Italy, DEXP of Russia, Hipstreet of Canada, QMobile of Pakistan, Tecno of Africa, and Casper of Turkey and OEM, Pegatron.
With this many manufacturers on-board we’ll see more Microsoft all over the place very soon. With their Windows Mobile or Windows 10 mobile OS as they’re now calling it seemingly failing with almost no market share, this is one way they can ensure the continued use of their apps.
Do you see value in Microsoft apps pre-installed on tablets or are they bloatware?
They wouldn’t be bloatware if MS actually made an effort to ensure the experience on the apps were good. I remember installing and trying to use OneNote on my Android phone a while back and it was so bad it looked like an unfinished university assignment by a student. It made Notepad on Windows feel like Photoshop. It was that basic and useless. There are certain MS apps that are useful. Obviously Excel and Word but also Skype (albeit that’s just a purchase, it wasn’t developed by MS). The utility of Excel and Word on a phone is fairly limited… Read more »
Since you ask… Just more bloatware. Worse than most because I have no interest in MS crap infesting my Android devices.
It doesn’t take a lot of effort to install the apps you want to a new device. Preinstalled apps rarely add any value for users. If a manufacturer gets some sort of special deal on a paid app, they can easily just make it available for download and let users decide if they want it.
(Potentially) battery draining bloat.
It’s not battery draining. They’re just apps sitting there dormant until you use them, just like any other app.
Unless they persistently run in the background and consume CPU/RAM resources, they aren’t batter draining.
Seems like a lot of people don’t understand what ‘bloat’ is.