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> Yesterday I bought my second Windows Phone (Lumia 820). This also just works.

I call shenanigans.

> Email is the same everywhere,

...as with all mobile OSes.

> all the apps just works,

In contrast with iOS? I'm not buying it. "Apps just work" is Apple's selling point for their iDevices and that reputation wasn't just bought by their marketing department.

> plays any mp3 without complaining (my sodding iPhone never did!),

Pix or it didn't happen. What MP3s was your iPhone - with it's iPod internals - unable to play?

> Nokia Drive just works,

iCloud, Dropbox, and SkyDrive are available on iOS. Nokia Drive is better than all of those?

> maps actually work (again something my iPhone shot down),

iOS has Apple and Google native maps apps. What specifically is better about Windows maps than either of those?

> talks to exchange without problems,

...just like iOS, which licenses ActiveSync from Microsoft.

> is exactly the same as my old Windows Phone 7.8 device (no who moved my cheese),

Can't argue that.

> opens all my documents nicely, reads any pdf fine.

...just like iOS. I'll be honest: I'm having a hard time buying most of those examples as they run contrary to my own (and anecdotally, most others') experiences.

No - email on iOS is a piece of shit. It regularly drops connections to exchange, mail bombs people when sending a message and IMAP is unreliable as hell as well. Not only that, it starts to lag unbearably after a few days (up to iOS 6). I send and receive a LOT of email - it just can't handle it well.

Yes in contrast of iOS. That reputation is bullshit. Regular crashes of Mail, Safari as in multiple times daily. I've had the device freeze at least 2-3 times a week as well. In the year I've been using Windows Phone, IE mobile has crashed twice and the device hasn't failed once (Lumia 710).

Won't play mp3s - this is rife. The ID3 parser on iOS devices is a piece of shit: http://www.google.com/#q=iphone+wont+play+mp3s This has been known for literally YEARS and plagues all apple devices from iPod, to touch to iPhone to Mac.

Nokia Drive - do you even know what this is? It's not a Skydrive/DropBox clone. It's a fully blown 100% FREE offline turn by turn satellite navigation and mapping platform akin to your average satnav. It's pretty amazing and is a deal breaker for iOS:

http://vr-zone.com/articles/nokia-lumia-smartphones-get-maps...

Regarding Apple and Google native maps, see above again.

iOS's ActiveSync is a piece of shit. It doesn't work properly, duplicates my emails, mailbombs people etc. Now whoever's fault this is I don't know (it may be Microsoft?) but I'm not concerned about this - it just doesn't work properly.

> No - email on iOS is a piece of shit. It regularly drops connections to exchange, mail bombs people when sending a message and IMAP is unreliable as hell as well. Not only that, it starts to lag unbearably after a few days (up to iOS 6). I send and receive a LOT of email - it just can't handle it well.

Fire your email and/or network admins. I'm serious. I only receive a couple hundred emails and send a few dozen, so maybe I'm not a heavy user like you are, but I literally can't remember the last time Mail.app crashed. It's always worked, day in, day out, and without failure.

> Won't play mp3s - this is rife.

All the recent "iphone won't play mp3s" query hits were problems with iTunes Match. I absolutely agree that it's had its issues, but it's been running smoothly for quite a while.

> Nokia Drive - do you even know what this is?

I guess I didn't. So it's like one of the apps listed at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Apple_iOS#Navigating_feat... then.

> iOS's ActiveSync is a piece of shit. It doesn't work properly, duplicates my emails, mailbombs people etc. Now whoever's fault this is I don't know (it may be Microsoft?) but I'm not concerned about this - it just doesn't work properly.

"My mailserver is obviously misconfigured because I'm having symptoms that almost no one else is describing. I shall blame my phone vendor."

You know, I'm not even really that much of an iOS fan. I've been eyeing my coworker's Galaxy with increasing envy. As a Linux developer, it's looking more attractive to me by the day. It's just that some of your claims ring hollow and a bit outrageous, like if I were to criticize a Lumia 920 by saying that it crashes hourly. That just doesn't jibe with anything I've seen online or heard from friends.

> Fire your email and/or network admins. I'm serious. I only receive a couple hundred emails and send a few dozen, so maybe I'm not a heavy user like you are, but I literally can't remember the last time Mail.app crashed. It's always worked, day in, day out, and without failure.

I don't think so. We're a large Microsoft consultancy. We have 2 certified exchange admins who know their shit. it's not misconfiguration. One is an Exchange MVP as wlel. This is a regular problem with all iOS devices connected to Exchange. We've had a large insurance company who is a client ban all iOS devices as well due to this issue. They've switched to Android.

> All the recent "iphone won't play mp3s" query hits were problems with iTunes Match. I absolutely agree that it's had its issues, but it's been running smoothly for quite a while.

Look harder.

> I guess I didn't. So it's like one of the apps listed at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Apple_iOS#Navigating_feat.... then.

Absolutely nothing like any of them. I've spent about £200 on iOS navigation apps and nothing comes close. Only a real piece of dedicated hardware is anything like it for accuracy and reliability.

> "My mailserver is obviously misconfigured because I'm having symptoms that almost no one else is describing. I shall blame my phone vendor."

This is not a mail server issue. By elimination, Android devices, Windows Phone devices, Blackberries, Outlook on desktop all work fine. The only odd one out is iOS.

This is surprisingly common. Most people just don't talk about it as they don't give a shit or don't get annoyed by app crashes etc. They assume that's the status quo, then shout at their ops team who sort it out.

> I don't think so. We're a large Microsoft consultancy.

Color me surprised ...

We're also an oracle java certified and redhat certified and VMware certified and more of our kit is on Linux, so it's not biased :)

My point is that we're citably competent all the way through.

In my experience, there are two kinds of people:

1) People who don't use the Microsoft technology stack.

2) People who use Microsoft's proprietary technology stack, and then get annoyed at products that fail to interoperate with it seamlessly, despite the fact that it's undocumented, proprietary, and notoriously difficult to interoperate with successfully.

There are very few people who use MS stack and don't get annoyed at interoperability concerns, because those people realize that the fault lies with Microsoft, and stop using Microsoft's stack.

oh come on...

Don't feed the troll.

iOS latest version fixed a problem with Exchange, so I would not be surprised.

Nokia Drive is not like the apps you listed. It's free, high quality, world wide navigation. On my iPhone I use Apple Maps right now. It has potential but besides the already discussed issues my number one annoyance is that it's absolutely not offline! I got bit by this twice, the app is completely useless without a sufficiently fast connection.

> I've fallen in love with Windows again. It just works.

You and I have had vastly different experiences.

I have spent the morning trying to get Rails installed on a Win7 box. This has required numerous painful hoops to jump through, and I am actually not even finished. I finally got 1.9.3 installed, but am hung on some OpenSSL requirement. It has been a massive, huge waste of my day.

The default command shell sucks rocks, so I'm using (or attempting to use) cygwin, specifically zsh. I have no access to tmux, and while screen works it is not my preferred multiplexer. Even under zsh, though, the typical Ruby commands (ruby/irb/gem/etc.) have to be run with their .bat equivalents, which is a needless pain. The latest issue is with something related to OpenSSL, and I'm still digging through that one.

These are all issues that have been specific to Windows. I ran this exact same code with zero problems on my home OS X box not 4 hours ago. git pull/bundle/rails server, good to go. On Windows this has taken the better part of a day to get going.

You sound like an astroturfer, honestly. "I'm honest, I use other systems. It's just that they all are just awful compared to Windows. Here are generic reasons why, with few specifics."

> shit crock of a POSIX environment

What does this even mean? OS X is POSIX certified. Windows is not. Are you saying POSIX is crap, or that OS X's implementation of it is? Either way I would challenge you to back up that statement up. OS X is the best Unix I have personally had experience using.

believe it or not Windows has actually had a POSIX subsystem since the NT days, and MS still provide it for Windows 8.

I'm not sure what POSIX certified means, but Windows is UNIX in the same way Mac OS X is...

Wikipedia has this (and more) to say on POSIX:

Not to be confused with Unix, Unix-like, or Linux.

POSIX (pron.: /ˈpɒzɪks/ poz-iks), an acronym for "Portable Operating System Interface", is a family of standards specified by the IEEE for maintaining compatibility between operating systems...

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

The old MS POSIX subsystem was replaced by the amusingly named SFU (Services for UNIX). Then that got replaced by the bought-in Interix.

Mac OS X is UNIX because it's certified under the Single UNIX Specification: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification

Windows is not in any way UNIX. There aren't even any certified Linux distros (AFAIK). Mac OS X is UNIX.

Other than the fact OS X is a certified UNIX and the NT kernel isn't UNIX, yes...

I wouldn't install rails on a windows box. That's like mixing acid and base together. Forget it. Use Linux. Even I said I have a Linux VM.

Try PowerShell ISE v3 if you want a shell for windows. That's actually a pretty scary powerful bit of kit:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/4...

I think you are trying to hammer a nail in with a screwdriver by expecting it to be the same. Embrace the platform's strengths, not try turning it into UNIX and whinge when it doesn't work.

OSX POSIX Certified? That means typically "buggy as fuck but the API is complete". That's as far as the certification goes. They couldn't even get rename(2) to behave properly for about 8 years. Google it. So many little bugs like that shot me for ages. That and the fact the whole damn CPU architecture changed one day.

why do you do this ? Windows is my desktop enviroment where i run my tools, but all my webdev lives on virtual machines that run Ubuntu. So much easier.. even on OSX i do it this way, and it works beautifully and my desktop OS doesnt matter at all.

"it's just all boringly functional and uneventful these days."

As it should be—they've had time to work on the issues and should be competitive by now.

OSX, meanwhile, is still Unix under the hood. I'm frankly stunned that someone coming from a straight FreeBSD background wouldn't value that highly. But your experiences with hardware, while I'm sure legitimate, do not mirror my own. I've owned two MacBook Pros (starting with the first Unibody model) for the last 6 years and both have been rock solid daily drivers, and "functional and uneventful," but also very nice to use—not really boring.

To each their own, is the moral of all these stories. If Windows is gaining stability and OSX continues to be high quality, it just gives everyone more options and lowers the barrier-to-entry of computing.

Twenty years ago you had to invest in your desktop and build it yourself, and laptops were rare. Ten years ago only nerds knew how to maintain Windows. Now you carry an always-connected computer in your pocket and a 4.9 pound supercomputer on your back. No part of this is bad.

As it should be—they've had time to work on the issues and should be competitive by now.

Yes this is it. But I wasn't getting that with OSX. In '06, it was pretty good compared to say Windows XP but since '08 it's been declining rapidly into whack-a-mole problems.

OSX is a bastardised version of UNIX under the hood which is "even worse than HP-UX when you haven't paid for the compilers" to deal with I found. Getting a reliable toolchain up that worked properly was a PITA.

You click a button marked "Install" in XCode and it installs the tools into /usr/bin. That sure is tough.

OS X userland is pretty stock BSD. It may be unfamiliar if you are used to Linux.

Putting the GNU tools on is pretty easy with Homebrew or MacPorts, though. Getting those is first thing I do when I set up a new Mac: grab Xcode, install the command line tools, get Homebrew, brew install coreutils, findutils, and gnu-sed.

That's an installed toolchain, not a properly working one.

"(no who moved my cheese)"

Try migrating from Windows 7 to Windows 8. Whole wheels of cheese are moved around and the flavor has changed... :)

Yes I know. I've tried Windows 8 and I don't like it, but thanks to the culture of support and choice, I'm not all that bothered as Windows 7 is good and supported for another 7 years (until 2020). Something (Windows Blue?) may come along and change things by then. I'll deal with it when I get there.

I'm on a 2007 built Lenovo T61 which I can actually see lasting until 2020 as well the way it's going.

I keep hearing that. Fortunately I haven't experienced it. When I used Windows 7 and wanted to open a program, I tapped "Windows" and started typing the app name. That still works in 8.

My only complaint is a "go back" problem, where opening something like a media file from the desktop opens a Metro/Modern app, and closing the app takes you to the Start Screen rather than back to your desktop. Otherwise, I spend my time on the dual screen desktop mode, using my programs, just like I did in 7. Only now with improved dual monitor support.

I recently switched back from Mac to Windows. I was using Windows 7 on my work computer, and I found myself being more productive and enjoying it more than my home Mac.

Windows 7 really is quite good, and I don't much care for the directions Mac OS X is heading.