Live From Nokia’s Windows Phone 8 Press Conference | Hacker News Reader

Live From Nokia’s Windows Phone 8 Press Conference

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38 pointsvyrotek45 comments

I am the only one that finds Metro to be ugly (hate the color choices and block-y design) and cluttered? This does not strike me as something I want to see on my home screen:

http://d35lb3dl296zwu.cloudfront.net/uploads/photo/image/769...

Regardless, I'm wondering if the average consumer feels the same way as well. WP7 is not selling well, and WP8 (and the new Lumias) don't really differentiate themselves that much from the previous iteration in terms of what a consumer will see in the first few minutes of using the phone.

Also, this is DOA in the US if they are AT&T exclusive.

I was surprised to see a view like that being promoted. I love Metro, but I hate app makers that don't keep to the Metro aesthetic. When it's done right:

http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/nokia-...

I think it looks fantastic, and communicates more than the iPhone home screen without the mess of the Android one.

Even in those two screens, everything just blends together (especially with the white text on yellow tiles). Just seems like a usability nightmare imo.

Regardless, I don't find Android home screens messy at all (although there are a few widgets that are poorly made), and with the customization ability that's provided with custom ROMs, it can be as beautiful as you want it to be.

TBH it doesn't ever really look that messy. That's just a marketing photo. Most of the time, it's pretty clean looking and intuitive. A few applications abuse that but they are usually not worth keeping anyway.

You really have to use it for an hour or two to get a feel for how nice it really is.

For reference, WP7 devices are still selling like hot cakes in the UK at least. We've had around 50 people (33% of our workforce) switch to WP recently and I'm watching a lot of them appear in users' hands.

I think it might suck more in the US unfortunately.

I don't know, actually using the phones, it's very easy and quick to scan through the screens and actually use the interface. The screens are usually very simple and light. If you don't have the blocks you have a simple list, or a screen with very little chrome held together by typography and whitespace. So blockiness can be good. Web site usability books are always saying people scan sites, they don't read them.

I do think it is kind of ugly actually, but it's so damn usable I like it anyway. Before Windows 8 I'd always turn off all the special effects like Aero and have a dull gray bar that just worked snappy on my Desktop. Finally with Windows 8 I can tolerate the defaults.

And the scrolling is so buttery smooth, even on the phones since 7, that Android didn't catch up until JellyBean.

Yes, both WP8 and Windows 8 start screens look like walls of blinking Flash banners to me. I won't judge a GUI without having actually used it, but it sure doesn't give me a good first impression.

No, you are not the only one. Their choice of color is abysmal. Have you seen Server Manager in Server 2012? Awful, just awful.

At least the icons fit the home screen properly this time.

You do realise that you can change the colour?

Server Manager 2012 - agree. That's just horrible.

I felt the WP7 icons looked 'ok' until I saw/used them in person. The movement aspects of the tiles, personally, are important to the overall feel of the home screen. I really liked the tile interface after using it (so much so I switch to a WP).

WP8 is definitely more cluttered-looking than WP7 before it. But overall, it's just blocks of color, and in many (app) cases ugly colors.

Have you used WP beyond seeing screenshots? That homescreen is that way because they want to show the flexibility of tiles in Windows Phone 8.

Coloring Metro to be ugly based on that is almost like seeing a MySpace page and calling HTML/CSS ugly looking.

If you take the mini tile out of the equation, here's a video showcasing WP 7.5 (WP8 can be made to look like this).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=locNEna0of4&feature=plcp

What's ugly about that? People's tastes differ, of course, but a lot of people use it and seem to like it for the most part.

If you're really interested in the design philosophy instead of seeing a screenshot and knocking it down in a knee jerk comment(Well, this is HN with its biases, who am I kidding), here's some analysis of Metro's alternative approach.

http://www.riagenic.com/archives/487

http://www.riagenic.com/archives/493

http://www.riagenic.com/archives/526

>Also, this is DOA in the US if they are AT&T exclusive.

>Regardless, I'm wondering if the average consumer feels the same way as well. WP7 is not selling well, and WP8 (and the new Lumias) don't really differentiate themselves that much from the previous iteration in terms of what a consumer will see in the first few minutes of using the phone.

Even the Lumia 900 with the deprecated WP7 had decent sales and was second on AT&T after the iPhone and then beat the One X till the S3 came into the picture and WP8 was announced.

http://www.wpcentral.com/sites/wpcentral.com/files/postimage...

Edit:

Here's Woz calling it a no contest.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/28/2983312/steve-wozniak-wind...

And here's Scott Adams thoughts after trying WP:

http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/windows_phone_challenge_result...

USER INTERFACE

    Samsung/Windows: GREAT

    iPhone: GOOD

    HTC EVO 3D/Android: POOR

>The Windows phone has the best user interface experience, although the onscreen keyboard is problematic just as it is with the other phones I used. The Windows interface is intuitive, simple, and has a liveliness that I find appealing. Voice call quality was good, and battery life seemed good too. I declare it the winner compared to my iPhone 3GS with AT&T and my HTC EVO 3D with Android on the Sprint network.

Reading a lot of anti WP sentiment, and much of it directed at WP8 (surprising, because Microsft hasn't really revealed anything about it yet). That said, the Lumia 920 is without a doubt my next phone. Granted, I'm in a position where price means nothing to me, so the deciding factors are wireless charging, NFC, offline maps (not the pseudo-variety Google offers), PureView (even if it's only a 5Mp camera I'm betting it'll still outdo anything else in a smart phone).

I accept that no two people share the same view.

The 920 has an 8Mp camera. I got the same feeling from all the blogs covering the event. They all talked about it through a "doubtful" lens. I kept seeing expression like "I gotta admit it's actually nice" and "this might actually be worth owning" that clearly states their Apple/Android affiliation.

I used to be an Android fan but after using the Lumia 820 for a month (unlocking it for a friend), going back to a Galaxy left me a bit sad. After WP, Android seem childish and overly hard to keep uncluttered over time.

I just hope the 920 won't be too expensive otherwise I'm gonna have to deal with samsung for another 2 years :(

Nokia's new phones look fantastic. But their last ones looked fantastic, too.

PureView camera? Awesome. But all my friends share photos through Instagram. No Instagram on WP8 = me not being able to share photos with my friends. So right now, this former WP7 user is sticking with Android.

I really, really want to like Windows Phone- the UI is better than anything else out there. But it needs more support from third parties, and fast.

Nokia's new phones look fantastic. But their last ones looked fantastic, too.

I think this totally sums up Nokia (and Microsoft's) predicament. They're doing all the right things, and they still can't seem to catch a break.

Google's tactic of putting Android in the hands of companies who were being heavily burned by iPhone gave them ubiquity, and in America at least, the AT&T deal probably did more harm than good for Apple by forcing Verizon to push Android hard.

Now we have this two horse system: one that has all the apps and the cachet, one that has the rest of the handsets (and, with Jelly Bean, is really a strong offering against iOS) and there just isn't any room left for Nokia or WP8. I think Nokia is going to have to step into the Windows RT ring this holiday.

Microsoft thinks it knows how to play this game from its Xbox days: buy out developers until you get enough mass to make consumers stick. But the game is different when you have carriers screwing things up for you (no Nokia on Verizon this year, carriers blocking OTA patches) and a platform that is driven by app numbers rather than by hits in the same way the games industry is. It doesn't help that web startups are hitching their horse to iOS and then begrudgingly offer Android later (I'm looking at you Mint and Simple). Windows Phone just isn't in their roadmap anywhere.

My guess is the fate of Windows Phone and Nokia is probably tied to the success of Windows 8. If Windows 8 takes off, Windows Phone will get a halo effect and sales of that will follow. But even then, I think consumers are going to be weirded out by the fact that the stuff they have on their Windows 8 tablet doesn't appear on their Windows Phone 8 handset.

I think consumers are going to be weirded out by the fact that the stuff they have on their Windows 8 tablet doesn't appear on their Windows Phone 8 handset.

I'm not sure I followed this. Do you think people get weirded out by not having 'the stuff' on their iPad appear on their iPhone?

Most iPad apps have iPhone equivalents, or are built and distributed as a single app for both platforms.

Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 does not appear to have this functionality. There was rumors of WP8 apps being usable on Windows 8, but I highly doubt it'll go the other way.

Users should not be expected to see two devices, which have equal interfaces (just a smaller form factor) and realize they are different, especially seeing how iOS/Android has trained them to think they are the same.

I was under the impression that the whole reason Microsoft was pushing 'the style formally known as Metro' on Windows, Surface and Phones was so that it would be possible to easily port apps across everything. I'm a .Net developer so I'm genuinely interested in this topic. I figured it wouldn't be as easy as just changing the UI dimensions, but I thought the new architecture with WinRT and stuff would provide enough commonality API-wise.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Phone_8

Simplified porting of Windows 8 apps to Windows Phone 8 (compatibility with Windows 8 Metro apps)

On June 20, 2012, Microsoft unveiled Windows Phone 8, a new generation of the operating system for release later in 2012. Windows Phone 8 will replace its previously Windows CE-based architecture with one based off the Windows NT kernel with many components shared with Windows 8, allowing applications to be easily ported between the two platforms.

I think this is something we'll just have to wait and see on, AFAIK we don't know what the APIs and such on WP8 are yet.

Windows Phone 8 has a native 3rd party API and DirectX, in addition to the C#/SL/XNA stack on WP7, which will make porting applications from and sharing code with iOS and Android easier.

Oh, I know. And I really do hope it makes a difference. But given Microsoft's connection to Facebook, and Facebook's ownership of Instagram... I was hoping they twist some arms today and announce Instagram as a WP8 'lens' app. That would be awesome.

It'll come, I wouldn't worry too much about that

It seems Nokia's misleading "PureView" marketing has succeed as even tech savvy people can get confused into thinking this camera is the basically the same as the one in the PureView 808 smartphone.

It's absolutely 100% not. It doesn't have a high resolution for pixel binning to make those images ultra clear, and it doesn't have pixel binning at all. Also it doesn't have that super large sensor to capture much more light. It has a regular smartphone sensor. This is what made Pureview be Pureview. The new camera is nothing like it. It just adds some stabilization technology, but that's no reason to still call it PureView, other than to mislead people into thinking it's the same as the original.

I also think WP7 looked better than WP8. The small tiles make it look more cluttered.

Nokia has said that PureView is the new kind of optical image stabilization, not the megapixels on the sensor. It's not misleading, you're just not understanding it correctly. The high MP count was part of the 808 PureView, but it wasn't what defined it as a PureView. The optical image stabilization was. The 41-MP sensor was just Nokia showing off.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/5/3293041/nokia-lumia-920-pur...

The original paper presenting it earlier this year:

http://www.nokia.com/PRODUCT_METADATA_0/Products/Phones/8000...

"The Nokia PureView Pro imaging technology is the combination of a large, super high resolution 41Mpix with high performance Carl Zeiss optics. The large sensor enables pixel oversampling, which will be explained in detail in this paper but in a nutshell it means the combination of many pixels into one perfect pixel. PureView imaging technology is the result of many years of research and development and the tangible fruits of this work are amazing image quality, lossless zoom, and superior low light performance."

So yeah, PureView vs PureView Pro or something. Still feels more like widening a brandname used on something that got people excited.

Well it fits in with Surface and Surface Pro. Surface is a tightly designed and controlled tablet running Windows RT. Surface Pro is the same tablet, but running something a little more cumbersome but with the added bonus of being more powerful to use. PureView is a tightly designed lens. PureView Pro is the same lens with the addition of a gigantic sensor which makes it a little more cumbersome to use but also adds an incredible amount more power.

Seems in line with how Microsoft has been branding since at least Windows XP.

Apparently, it's not living up to the expectations of the stock market. The stock is down 13%. Not sure what people were hoping for.

http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ANOK

They've announced a product, but no pricing or availability. People will immediately stop buying the current generation, but don't have the next generation to purchase - and there is no idea when they will be able to. Nokia just put the brakes on sales, and haven't indicated when they'll let up on them.

But the brakes have been on sales for a while, as we have known that the latest windows phone software won't work on the existing Lumia phones.

Well, let's just say then that they pushed a bit harder. The difference now, is previously I could have purchased a phone, and then in some indeterminate period of time in the future, upgraded to a new phone, and brought all my applications (and, much, much more importantly for most people - my familiarity with the platform) along with me. WP8 is pretty similar to WP7 in terms of GUI.

But now - I know what that new phone is going to look like - so buying todays phone is like buying the previous generation. Also - it was _demoed_ - so it feels like it's going to be released any day now...

Wow, no prices or dates? Fail.

(Guess they just wanted to announce/show off the devices before the iPhone5 announcement ... but without prices or dates, the hype is going to fade into non-existence).

I am now convinced that they organized this event hastily once they knew the date for the iPhone 5 event... kind of like what they did with surface to front-run the Nexus 7 announcement.

Smacks of desperation if you ask me.

I can confirm this. The Surface and WP8 also were announced hastily at the beginning of the summer in response to competitors and not because they were ready.

Amazon originally had Sept 5 for their announce, and Nokia scheduled over it because if they didn't announce before Apple it would be a lost cause. But they needed price. Price is what's going to make this year interesting. Coincidentally, Steve's letter about from a few years ago today said the same thing: http://www.apple.com/hotnews/openiphoneletter/

It will fail, this is the last chance for Nokia, I expect them to go out of the smart phone business very quickly.

This is really scary.

If Nokia goes out of business and its patent portfolio ends up in the hands of a patent troll, there will be an effective entry barrier in the smartphone market (because every current smartphone maker probably has a cross-licensing agreement in place, only new players will be affected).

My bet is Microsoft will acquire what's left of Nokia and use patents offensively against competitors where the CLA's don't cover them, but, even if they decide not to do so, life will get a lot more dangerous in this space.

If that's the case, I hope Google acquires them. The peace of mind not to have that IP in Microsoft's hands is worth a lot of money.

I came to HN expecting to read such a comment thread and I was not disappointed at all.

That's what I used to think too... until I actually owned a Lumia by chance. Now I'm rooting for them because I know I won't get that quality from other manufacturers without buying and Apple product. PS: I'd rather chop off one of my testicles than do that.

Personally, I'm really interested in WP8 and I've held off renewing my contract for a year just to see what will come out. We've had many Android phones in our home and I'm kind of done with them. I would like to avoid the updates nightmare between the carriers and google.

If the experience of WP7 is anything to go by, you're going to be exchanging a nightmare between the carriers and Google with a nightmare between the carriers and Microsoft.

AT&T flat out refused to release an update for my phone, I had to do the WP equivalent of rooting it and manually patching myself.

Microsoft has said they will allow you to download updates OTA even if your carrier hasn't approved the updates yet. This is similar to how major upgrades to WP7 (NoDo and Mango) worked.

Ah, that's rough. I was pretty upset that Sprint didn't release more WP7 phones but now I see why they held off. Unfortunately, it seems WP7 was a transition/beta device.

But, I think it will be different this time with the huge bet they're making with Windows 8 across lots of different devices now.

WP7 was the beta/transition, then it was WP7.5 that was the transition, now it'll be WP8.

I don't see a lot changing - I've used a couple of WP7.5 devices, they nice, but they're not significantly better, or cheaper than an iPhone, Galaxy S3, HTC One, etc, so they're going to struggle.

Microsoft's best chance of marketshare seems to be the implosion of RIM, but that's limited to what, 10% of the market?

As a side note, Nokia's stock seems to have dropped 11% today. I guess stockholders aren't too excited about the new devices and WP8.

Let's see how it sells compared to the iPhone 5 and Galaxy S3. Everything else is moot.

Sales are important. But, lets give them some credit. This is a really well designed phone. And if the (less than impressive) iPhone 5 leaks hold, than this could be the first phone that is arguably designed better than the iPhone. That is pretty impressive.

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