Microsoft gave up the war here in the last 10%. They should have put their head down and persisted. Alas, now we just have two flavors of phone..
I bought a Windows Phone 7 device. Loved it. Still the best mobile UI I've experienced. It had a ton of smart ideas too, like integrating different messaging services into a central app - totally breaking up the app-centric model of iOS and Android.
...except they didn't provide any hooks for third party apps to integrate. Said it was coming. Along with multitasking and other stuff that was already common in other OSes. It never did. Instead they announced Windows Phone 8, and stated that almost all WP7 devices would be ineligible for an upgrade, thus burning their relationship with early adopters. I believe they did the same with some devices from WP8 to 10. Nowadays they've given up everything that made WP unique, so there's no need to use it.
Sad thing is, their initial timing was great. Google had dropped the ball on Android - developing an entire version specifically for tablets (3.0) while the phone OS floundered. Compared to Android 2.3, Windows Phone was a breath of fresh air. But by the time they'd decided my phone was EOL less than a year later, Android 4 was out. I switched back with no regrets. Don't get me wrong, it would have been an insane uphill climb for anyone, but MS, with their resources and XBox etc., if anyone could have entered the market, it could have been them.
Not true. Windows CE was a solid offering.
Every implementation of this I've seen has been a slow burn disaster. It's still deployed, and it still sucks.
I knew a few people that loved them, but they were not ordinary people.
I'm not saying it was totally useless, or that people didn't find it "fine" for some tasks, but it was like a crippled notebook that could barely do any of those things. The only advantage it had was size, and even then it still weighed vastly more than any of the phones from that era. They still cost a small fortune, maybe half the cost of a decent laptop, but since they weren't a laptop or a phone you still had to get one of those anyway.
Compare with two competitors from that time, Danger Hiptop and Sharp Zaurus, took a very different approach: Keyboard centric, good battery life, limited functionality but focusing on specific things rather than trying to do everything.
As I recall, the pen was fiddly but not necessary; the screen was pressure-sensitive, so you could use a fingertip just fine, or the eraser end of a pencil. Modern capacitative touchscreens are much more accurate, but I sometimes miss being able to use any object as a stylus. :)
I'm on my 2nd BB Classic, and will likely stock up a couple more to last me some years, as there's no better phone for email and ssh. And the few apps I do need that aren't supported I can still run using the Android runtime.
Like the GP, I also miss my Windows Phone, but Windows 8 killed the opportunity they had.
I had asked the MS community a few weeks back whether W10(mob) is anything like the 6, and surprise-surprise, it was not. No option for a "firewall with learning-mode", no ability to modify OS to my liking/specs. They tried to mimic iOS "close-ness" in the worse possible way. At least iOS has the JB community which works miracles (e.g. Firewall IP)
I think MS was better when they were licensing a very nice WM6 OS to O2, Qtek, and more. Now that ship has sailed.
ps: I think that W10 is more of an attempt to get a piece of the "all your bases are belong to us" (telemetry, snooping on everything, move every-bit-possible to THEIR cloud. I see the/their convenience into doing so, but that makes it a no-buy for me.
I find most games pointless battery life on all phones already sucks.
I have more free time because I'm on windows phone, and that's worth a lot
I can't believe how badly MS have handled Windows Phone. Splitting the market between WP 7/8/10 was insane given how small a user base they had.
I'm using one now and it's nothing short of excellent.
There is room for them to carve out a niche of Microsoft Phones earning them a couple of billion in revenue, and a couple of hundred million in profit. However for a big company like Microsoft that money is a drop in the ocean, and they want to own the market which at this point in time is unrealistic for them unless they can produce something truely groundbreaking.
Ah yes, the good old "even if we captured only 1% of this huge market we would make billions!" argument.
So even if you have a small following, those people eventually drop off too one by one over things like this.
Your friend could have easily gone from iPhone to android for the same reason.
People's discussions about Windows Phone -- the invariable commentators who talk about how great it is -- is the sort of thing I'm incredibly wary about, having been misled by it before in this field. The people professing love for Windows Phone almost invariably spent very little time with it (and haven't dealt with the enormous number of flaws and gaps), or have a profound bias to like it regardless.
As a developer across a number of platforms, and with no affinity or vow of loyalty to any of the makers, I think it was a terrible platform that had tiny nuggets of promise, but never a compelling enough reward profile.
I'll agree it has gaps and the settings is all over the place, wallpapers in personalise and not under display. I get it, its just not like any other mobiles os, even screen time out isn't in display its in lock screen.
It also has annoying links to faq at the bottom of every single page.
Eric Anderson, Song Lin, Duncan Simester, and Catherine Tucker (2015) Harbingers of Failure. Journal of Marketing Research: October 2015, Vol. 52, No. 5, pp. 580-592.
It was posted to HN in July 2015[0] and a PDF is at [1].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9839344
[1] http://www.bm.ust.hk/mark/staff/song_lin/song_lin-jmr-2015.p...
I'm still using my Nokia N9 and am pretty satisfied with it. Unfortunately, there won't be any updates (and, as far as I know, I can't hey a Jolla phone here in the US).
windows phone used pretty low end low power CPU which don't eat much
or you really think windows can manage resources better than Android?