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Comment by 6thaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

I'm a Linux fanboy that hates desktop Windows with a passion.

However, both I and everyone I know that has ever used a Windows phone (there were several of us at work) absolutely loved the platform when compared to Android and iPhone. I'm running a top end Google phone and still missing my Nokia Lumia Windows Phone. That phone had a great OS and was Rock solid.

The problem was nobody wanted to give it a try. The hardware looked bad, but it honestly didn't need to be as good as Android as it wasn't as bloated. This is somewhat anecdotal, but dual core Windows Phone7 ran smoother than quad core Android at the time.

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I had to use Windows Phone for work whilst at the same time as having both an iPhone and Android phone. The Good:

The OS was absolutely rock solid

Battery life was amazing Office 365 worked great

The camera hardware was excellent

The Bad:

The handsets did not look sophisticated.

The UI was utter dog shit. Joe Belfiore should have been forcibly marched out the door for pushing that abomination.

The complete lack of variety of third party apps

When they were available they were almost always severely limited compared to the iPhone and Android versions.

The key internal apps like the Camera app were limited.

They didn’t come up with a free development solution that would entice Android devs to target both.

To sum it up they followed a mad man with mad ideas and then doubled down on the bad idea out of pride.

When they finally wised up they didn’t do even 10% of what was needed to recover.

I agree with everything you've said except for the UI being bad.

If this was desktop I would agree with you. Having a good start menu makes sense and the Unity (at least usable) and then Windows 8 (abomination) show that a UI like that doesn't always make sense outside phones and tablets.

The flip of this is true as well. For a phone, my uses are far less complex. I don't have a zillion folders, apps, programming environments, mapped drives...etc. I need internet, SMS, camera, email, office apps, and that is about it. With Windows Phone I had that on my fully customized home screen with all the icons sized just the way I wanted them. I also liked that searching for apps was just slide to the right and scroll by alphabetical order. With Android there is just so much crap going on that I don't use that gets in the way. Now I'm sure some people do use it, but I do not.

My wife had a Nokia Lumia Windows phone as well. She likes the fact that there is better support and apps on Android than what we had with Windows (especially at the end), but she really misses the Windows UI and she had Android for many years before going Windows.

Can confirm. My $40 windows phone from 3 years ago was faster than my pixel 2 is today.

Today I do backend work mainly in Linux environments and occasionally some Android, but I still remember my first internship doing Windows Phone development.

It was amazing. The lockstep integration with Visual Studio was head and shoulders above Android and iOS, even to this day. They did JavaScript for native dev via WinJS well before React Native was a thing. I found the tile-based UI refreshingly different and visually appealing. I'm not sure that the world would be better off with Microsoft as a major player in the smartphone space but they definitely created a great operating system.

I still use a windows phone. A Lumia 635. Cold dead hands.

Small nitpick: dual core devices were most certainly WP8 devices, since WP7 did not support multicore devices

Thanks. That sounds right...it has been many years to where the spirit of what I was trying to say still fit, but let me clear it up:

When Windows Phone7 came out, my friend had a budget WindowsPhone7 with a single core that outperformed dual-core Android at the time when it came to being a phone. The WP7 was a lot less laggy. Then when I got my first Windows Phone8 it was dual-core instead of the then Android quad-cores and it out performed those as well in anecdotal comparisons of mine.

Anyone used the HP TouchPad? I favor that OS more than iOS and Android.

I had a Palm Pre. When it finally died, switching to android was a major step backwards (FWIW, Android has caught up at this point). It was an amazing phone in its day, and reasonably easy to develop for. The OS very nearly got a second life with HP before the CEO got fired for sexual harassment.

WebOS. That was a good one. Came out of Palm if memory serves? I think LG TVs might still use what's left of this?

I know a few folks that bought backups and run them to this day.

> However, both I and everyone I know that has ever used a Windows phone (there were several of us at work) absolutely loved the platform when compared to Android and iPhone.

Rubbish. Their CE phones were awful, and lots of people hated Micrsofts Windows phones and their laggy tiles.

Windows Phone and CE were very different experiences. I agree, CE was something of a dumpster fire.

The laggy tiles were much much better than Android at the time, which was complete garbage till v4 or so.

Early devices (Windows Phone 7) were CE and .NET Compact based, but Windows Phone 8 was NT based and used an early form of CoreCLR (and WinRT)

In around 2012 we had a couple of smart phones at work for evaluation. The Windows phone made the most rounds because everyone was amazed at how bad it was. We would hand it to colleagues who hadn't seen it yet and watch them struggle and curse while trying to do even the most basic tasks. The platform was Windows 7, I think.

Now this I have trouble believing. What "basic" tasks did they struggle with?

It would be nice if we actually had data instead of just arguing over peoples opinions.

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