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Comment by manaskarekar | Hacker News Reader

Windows Phone 8.1 + Lumia 920 was by far the best phone I have ever used.

My friends look at me funny when I say that.

There were so many things they did right. Some random things off the top of my head:

- Internet Explorer had the address bar at the bottom of the screen. I don't get how nobody else does this.

- The tiles work really very well (big one). The usability of shortcuts + active information + dense layout on your homescreen.

- The back-button behavior was perfect. It made sense.

- Very snappy response throughout.

- Lots of pros on the hardware of the Lumia 920 itself but that's a different story.

- Best keyboard/swipe setup.

- Lots of thoughtful design elements.

There's all kinds of stuff that was a joy.

I tried Windows Phone 10.1 Dev release and that was horrible.

I do wish Windows Phone continued to live though.

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All of this applied to the Lumia 640 too, their bargain basement low end phone. Even the "snappy response" part. One of the best phones I've ever owned and it still travels the world with me as a backup (and has even been used to that effect when my wife dropped her Nexus 4 and broke the touchscreen on one trip).

Still using the 640 as my primary phone for the exact same reasons and really can't complain. Picked up a few of them when they were giving them away practically for free, simply because of the quality and sturdiness of the device - and the fact that I seem to rough or incapable of keeping nice and expensive device in proper operating condition. It has pretty much all the apps that I would need, with the one exceptions, as someone noted in another comment, some of the banking apps. Funny enough, for that problem I keep an old android phone around to use in wifi mode. I do get a bit of crap when someone notices it is a windows pone, but hey, it is a good conversation starter over a few pints.

Steve Wozniak apparently said he preferred the look and feel of Windows phone[1]. Honestly ignoring the esthetics, I do miss being able to upgrade and downgrade your phone no matter what phone you bought.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-wozniak-says-windows-ph...

There's a caveat at the bottom of the page:

> Despite his love for Windows Phone's design, Wozniak said he still uses his iPhone 4S as his primary phone. He says Windows Phones need a better app selection and utilities like Android's voice dictation and the iPhone's Siri.

It doesn't matter how good your execution is, if there's not a whole lot you can do with it.

My work gave me one last summer. The hardware itself was crazy... removable storage, removable battery, great screen, option for dual SIM. It was a modern-ish phone with all the things people have been complaining about modern phones not having.

Recently switched from a Lumia 925 to a 950, which I'm using to type this. This is my third Windows Phone and my first experience of WP10. There's a lot to like about it, but I do miss WP8.1. the keyboard is not as good on WP10 - it feels the same and looks the same but it doesn't predict the right words in swipe mode half as often as WP8 used to.

I'm torn between the eternal storage and incredible camera on the 950 and the better keyboard on the 925.

I wish there was something in between, like that Lumia 940 that never saw release

I bought the last big Lumia about a year ago on Ebay just for fun. Used it as my primary for about 6 weeks before moving to Android. I really liked the phone and would have probably stayed with Windows were it being developed on.

My only wish on the platform would have been that the rendering engine for IE was more like chrome. Don't want the chrome um.. chrome but I do like the rendering engine. I pretty much only use the browser on my phone anyway, I loved my Icon but IE just wasn't up to par on what I needed.

> - The back-button behavior was perfect. It made sense.

I only know the Android behaviour, what was the difference?

The back button is not locked to the current app but is based on interaction history. In fact if you use your phone and end up with a dozen open apps, pressing the back button a couple dozen times would be quite similar to navigating in exact reverse of how you got there.

I've only briefly used Windows Phone 8.1, and haven't seen WP 10.1 at all. What makes it significantly worse than its predecessor?

> address bar at the bottom of the screen

What's the advantage of this?

I would imagine it's something you want to access semi-frequently and would be easier to reach at the bottom (with you thumb) than at the top. Just a guess.

New mobile chrome has the controls on the bottom. It's dumb. I'm using Firefox now.

I searched for that a lot in the past.

I wonder if the placement is optional, people could select what they prefer.

Looks like that is being deprecated in favor of something else: https://www.xda-developers.com/google-deprecating-bottom-add...

It was an option, and they already reverted it because of backlash.

I'm curious, why would there be backlash against something that's optional?

They could leave the default as the least offensive option.

Because if the benefit of the code being there isn't worth the maintenance effort required to secure, maintain, and develop it further, then it's removed in chrome.

In general, that's the sane argument against feature bloat.

In this instance, is the effort required to maintain a layout option really that much more? I don't know the answer, it's a genuine question.

Also, was there no benefit? I didn't even realize the feature existed because I searched for it before it was introduced and moved to Firefox.

I know nothing about the history of this feature in Chrome, but from 10000 feet, this looks like a heavy handed move to remove a feature instead of making it optional, especially in the times of large + tall touchscreens.

Disclaimer: I don't know what I'm talking about, there may be, and probably are some good reasons for these.

It's clearly a "controversial" decision by the Chrome team, but IIRC they have a fairly strict rule about "options", so they seem to like to err on the side of "less options" in most cases.

But in terms of the "cost" of something like this. When you run at Chrome's scale, it can be quite a bit. From documentation, help articles, UI team costs (okay now we need to make sure all UI changes look good and work well in both configurations), development costs (when 1% of your users represent over 10 million people, there is a WIDE configuration of devices it runs on), and testing cost (either automated or manual, it scales VERY poorly with the number of options as possible permutations required to fully test it goes up at an insane rate).

At a certain scale, the better option (at least in my opinion) is to "choose" for the user if you are fairly confident that the extreme majority will be happy with it, doubly so if the default option doesn't "break" anything for most.

It wasn't an option. They turned it on without asking for many people and you had to disable it with a flag.

Only in Dev and Canary (and I believe Beta there for a little bit). And an option default-on is still an option.

I haven't used chrome with the controls on the bottom, but it sounds like a good idea to me. What's dumb about it?

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