Windows phone was actually legit, I was one of the few who loved it I guess. Those big tiles etc...
I absolutely loved my Windows phones. I had a couple of different Lumia phones, including the flagship Lumia 920 which had a pretty decent camera for the time, but my favorite was the Lumia 520. The Lumia 520 was only $60, and didn't need a case or screen protector or anything fancy like that. When it was dropped, the back popped off and the battery flew out which reduced the impact on the screen. It had offline maps, a web browser, and the battery easily lasted for 3 days. And if it was lost, it was just $60 to replace! I went through 3 of them before my bank removed their Windows Phone app, which meant that I couldn't do mobile check deposit. I "upgraded" to an android phone, which cost much more and was so much more complicated to use.
But... no apps. And then they pissed everyone off by announcing that Windows Phone 7 devices wouldn’t get an upgrade to 8. That was the point at which I realised MS didn’t really understand what they were doing and switched to iPhone. I still think there was potential there, but alas...
For example WP7s emphasis on big long lists made it very hard for me as a dyslexic to quickly scan for the one app I wanted in that list. My eyes would constantly jump about and the lack of other visual clues made it hard to anchor to the item I wanted. I don’t even have this problem menu bars because those have more visual clues that WP7 did.
Another issue was how the flat design made it impossible to distinguish between a button and a highlighted block. Also between a hyperlink and normal emphasised text (frankly, hyperlinks do not belong on UIs outside of document markups. There was one time my mum changed her WP7 language to Polish (she has Polish heritage) to see if she could read it. She couldn’t and that mistake was totally user error on her part. But she could read enough to get us to the language settings and it literally took both her and I more than 10 minutes to realise that there was a button that needed pressing after the language selection because the button blended in with all the text on that dialogue. If your only distinguishing feature of interactive elements is their caption then that’s simply bad UI design.
To give balance, I’ve used nearly every Windows device on phones or PDAs. While Windows Mobile (and CE before it) had its own issues they were still enjoyable devices in their own ways. But I hated WP7 because the UI constantly left me guessing. My mum hated it for the same reason so switched to Android. One of my friends, who is a reasonably technical Windows fanboy but doesn’t work in the IT industry, he hated it too and then switch to Android. It was not a well design UI at all. And while I’m sure there are pockets of engineers who will miss WP7, I’ve never met a single end user who liked it.
I was one over also by the UI, found it super easy to use.
The overall flat design was a big pain in the ass when you couldn’t tell what was clickable / editable.
The accessibility of putting the data first was awesome. Apps being tiles or a simple list of names was great. They started that with the Zune and it’s still a winning play on the Xbox. It worked great on the phone.
I want to try light phone and hope it doesn’t suck.