Windows Phone
Zune
Zune
The photos app was amazing. Live tiles are amazing. The music player and it's live tile was amazing. The performance was the same whether on a low end budget phone or the top of the line model.
So many good ui and ux decisions like the lack of hamburger menus and placement of all menu items along the bottom of the screen with the extra items being hidden away in a drop-down using ellipsis. System wide light and dark themes jazzed up using an accent color that all of your apps respected.
The People hub (contacts app) was the central point for all social media. Facebook and Twitter were integrated. I didn't need fb messenger. Skype and fb messenger were integrated with the messaging app.
Damn, I wish we made it.
No Google app suite, which Google is absolutely allowed not to make. So Microsoft made the apps for free for Google, google said no, then Microsoft released their own brand clients (e.g. Microsoft YouTube client, Maps, etc) and Google shut it down with lawyers.
Can any platform survive without Google ecosystem support? If Windows Phone was the case study then likely not.
You forget, or I forgive you if you never knew, that google made really good apps on the old Windows Mobile. Google Maps was especially good on WinCE. Then Microsoft declared all Win32 apps dead in favor of a very half baked Silverlight runtime that didn't have such luxury features as sockets or scrolling that actually works. So if I were calling the shots on Google's end at that time, no way I am going to advocate for a massive rewrite onto a runtime that doesn't work well for a very small number of users.
Microsoft's own boneheaded actions killed Google's goodwill for its mobile platform.
Microsoft made the apps for Google, then when that failed released them themselves with no expectation of Google taking over/paying for support. So your point isn't at all relevant to what happened in the Windows Phone situation.
As I said right at the start of my post: Google is fully entitled to refuse to produce apps for Windows Phone. That isn't the problem here, Google effectively blocked their API on that specific platform and their strong market position strangled the platform to death.
The apps that MS made for third parties were rush jobs and poorly maintained over time, and because the Silverlight runtime was not up to the job, performed poorly. They did not well represent their respective brands. They were nowhere near the quality of Google Maps for WinCE circa 2009, to say nothing of how they stood against their contemporary equivalents on iOS and Android.
Would you really want a bad app, that cannot do what your real offerings do, out there representing you, with your name and logo?
The Google apps Microsoft produced worked extremely well right up until the day they got pulled due to legal threats. I'm not sure what this is a reference to.
> because the Silverlight runtime was not up to the job, performed poorly.
XNA ("Silverlight") was only one of the platforms Windows Phone supported. It also had support for Windows Phone App Studio and the Windows Runtime. The Windows Runtime never had poor performing characteristics and was the most popular platform after WP8's release.
> Would you really want a bad app, that cannot do what your real offerings do, out there representing you, with your name and logo?
No, but since that wasn't the reality I don't see the relevance of the question. It is largely a strawman situation where the apps were bad (they weren't), had bad performance (they didn't), and were developed using "Silverlight" (they weren't).
You say you post this information a lot on this site. It is unfortunately you didn't research before the first time you posted it.
iPhone 4 was released before WP7.
It’s a shame, my WP8 phone is still my favorite smart phone ever.
Store curation was also an issue with tons of garbage in there that shouldn’t have been allowed.
I guess the two API and forced hardware changes did most to cement its demise.
On the other hand, it would have gotten a -7 rating on the ifixit scale. The hard drive got jostled one too many times and stopped working properly. I've fixed a lot of phones, but the Zune turned out to be unopenable, if that's even a word.
Actually, that's a lie. It did ultimately open, but the casing cracked repeatedly.
- The default keyboard is great.
- Jump Lists: Alphabetical list navigation. (e.g. list of contacts, list of installed apps). For quickly getting to letter 'r', you tap one of the letters to bring up a grid with all the letters, then can easily tap which letter you want to get to. Whereas, iOS has a tiny list of letters on the side. Android sometimes has this tiny list of letters, too. I prefer "1 easy tap, 1 easy tap" is nicer to "1 fine/precise tap".
- Icon-buttons would have labelled text. To save space (I guess), the text was omitted but was still accessible by expanding the menu.
- IIRC, older WP models had a hardware camera button (on the side, for taking pictures or opening the camera app). Later on, the cheaper WP models dropped this.
That said, the lack of apps is what really kills it. :/ e.g. you might only need 2 or 3 apps which you can find on Android or iOS, but not on WP.