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Comment by psbp | Hacker News Reader

I switch between iOS and Android, but the Lumia phones do seem attractive to me despite WP. They could have really differentiated in the android market, or at least forced Samsung to make some better hardware choices.

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WP, especially WP8 got pretty got reviews. Why the hate ? Especially with Nokia phones where you get Nokia Maps for free. I don't know of any Android phone where you get an offline quality GPS for free.

I went from iOS Google Maps->Apple Maps->iOS Google Maps on my iPhones. The Google Maps worked really well.

The HERE Drive+ from Nokia Maps though is fantastic. One nice feature (of many)... it shows you the current speed limit on every road that you're on. It also shows you your current speed and it is dead-on accurate. It can even be set to give an alert if you exceed the speed limit by x MPH.

Hands down, the built-in Lumia 928 maps application is better than any maps application I ever used on any of my three iPhones.

Maps app or Driving Navigation app? Because they're extremely different use cases. My experience with Nokia Maps was very poor, but I don't need to drive, so never got to try that out.

>My experience with Nokia Maps was very poor, but I don't need to drive, so never got to try that out.

I'm amazed by that. In London the mapping is top notch, it has pedestrian paths and such which gmaps is missing. However for Soho where bars come and go in weeks, its often out of date for POIs. But as normally if I'm in a place that changes often, I'll have data, that isn't an issue (one can always fall back to gmaps data).

But outside of London Nokia maps are hands down the best I've found. This holds true in the countryside of England, France, Spain, Italy, Morocco, Vietnam... I mean in the middle of nowhere Vietnam, I've good offline all the directions I need to my cycling. Amazing, gmaps didn't even have a road there, and bing, well lets not talk about bing maps. The only one that comes close is the Open Street Map project. But they lack POIs pretty much completely. On my motorbike in Thailand, I had not just Fuel places shown, but also coffee places. With no mobile phone signal...

Whilst I use windows phone as my primary device, I have some uses (SkyDemon) that require me to have an Android too, but I will say that the Nokia mapping is so bloody good, I bought a 720 (as in the UK they were £120 off contract!) for a friend as a travel phone, only for the mapping.

However, I don't use it when driving in the UK, because it doesn't have 'accident black spot warnings' or speed trap locations.

I don't drive, I mean, most people don't drive in my market....and that's where I'm supposed to look for maps on my 920?

HERE is a suite of applications.HERE Maps is ... maps, HERE Drive is the GPS/NAV app, and HERE Transit is public transportation.

And none of them work! I mean, my phone is locked to the Chinese App Store, you'd think the built in apps would at least work here also.

Also, who the hell decided to give a bunch of apps the same prefix in an alphabetically ordered list?

Most GPS apps are broken there due to gov rules, you'd have better luck buying a local cheap GPS device.

That's the one part I don't like about it but that's because I go 5-15MPH over the speed limit at all times.

you can adjust the limit at which point it alerts you. You can set when the alert will go off area that have below 80km/h speed and those with speed over 80km/h. Mine is set to ping on 15km/h+ on the slower areas and 18km/h+over on the higher.

You can always turn that speed warning off if it bothers you.

They could also not be a dick and stick to the speed limit.

And that's the problem with Nokia and their phones. People are buying them for the hardware, despite the OS. They could sell so much more with Android.

I'd say they could even beat Samsung in sales eventually (again). But right now I can't even extrapolate how much time it would take them to ever do that, if even possible.

>> despite the OS

For a normal user, how much does the OS matter in 2013?

The OS playing ground is much more level today than it was in 2008.

I'll be upgrading my iPhone 4 soon, and frankly, I'll be considering everything OS out there. I'll actually be choosing based on hardware more than OS, because all the web services that I use are supported by every operating system.

I guess if you're really into apps, the ecosystem might matter, but I suspect a normal, non-geek really doesn't need access to hundreds of thousands of apps if their core needs are satisfied.

The OS doesn't matter; the apps do (at least the few "important" ones).

Most notably absent from WP is Instagram, which will be resolved when Hipstamatic launches for the OS.

WP8 is getting a native Vine app, and with Instagram playing "me too" on video this may force them to develop a native WP app.

There is a feature equivalent WP app that uploads to Instagram that is an unofficial Instagram app, can't remember the name now though, but for users that want Instagram the reviews have been good. It's pretty much everything Instragram is sans name.

its called instance [1], and yeah, its pretty damn good.

third-party devs really are the lifeblood of the wp ecosystem and continue to amaze me with the quality of the apps many of them put-out. coupled with an increasing capable mobile web, its made the app gap virtually non-existent for me.

[1] http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/instance/ef18d20...

Don't Fhotoroom http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/fhotoroom/acad1e... or Metrogram http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/metrogram/5dec28... let you share photos on Instagram already? Disclaimer: I've never used them.

The public Instagram API is read-only and it looks like the Windows Phone apps that support uploading do so through something called Instagraph, which seems to be an unsupported method of getting photos onto Instagram.

The "Windows Phone lacks apps" meme is getting old very quickly. But then again there is a grain of truth there. Most applications that you use day in and day out are probably already there natively or as a very good clone. The part that might hurt you is when the next hot application comes along it is likely that a native or clone for Windows Phone may not exist right away and you might have to wait for a few weeks to get it. Android also has this problem to some extent. If you are always chasing the new hot apps on your iPhone then you might stick to iPhones a bit longer until app makers warm up to Windows ecosystem.

Try being locked to an obscure marketplace region like china, and it's much more painful. Facebook, Skype are all MIA, and you can't change your marketplace even if the software says you can (it just ignores your config options).

iPhones sold in china don't have this problem, so they are a safer buy.

I agree completely, and in my opinion the stated reason not to go with Android - ie "being different" - is moot, when you consider that every phone maker can make windows phones too. Having a differentiation that you can't protect at all is not worth having many less apps to offer.

I agree completely, and in my opinion the stated reason not to go with Android - ie "being different" - is moot, when you consider that every phone maker can make windows phones too.

They can, but they don't. And Nokia is indisputably the king of Windows Phone world, even though HTC have created some perfectly great devices. It's unlikely that Nokia could ever topple Samsung from the Android top spot.

You can be sure that they will, if WP will get traction thanks to Nokia.

How is WP compelling at all for other OEM's when Nokia has 80 percent of WP's market share? That's much worse than Samsung with 30 percent in the Android market. I wouldn't even consider it worth my time, especially when besides the extremely dominant market share of Nokia within WP market, it also means very few devices per total being sold. the numbers just aren't compelling at all for others. Plus, you have a lot harder time differentiating, too.

Nokia has such a big market share because nobody wants a WP, but still enough people want a Nokia. If many people will start wanting a WP, many others will want in - especially the low cost manufacturers, which can simply differentiate on price.

There's a huge first-mover advantage in that, though. As I said- like with Samsung and Android. They're going to be incredibly difficult to shift now.

Samsung wasn't the first mover for Android (HTC was the one), while Samsung was among the first movers with WP - the other ones were HTC, Dell, and LG. Nokia wasn't among them. So much for the first-mover advantage...

I am glad that there's more competition in the marketplace rather than just Apple and Android and that there are companies looking beyond earnings in their next quarter.

Apple could have probably made more money over the years by selling Macs with Windows and retiring their own OS.

Competition is good, for example see the flat look and concentration on typography that both Android and iOS borrowed from Windows Phone.

That's why I don't get all the deriding of Firefox OS and Ubuntu Phone. Android has plenty hardware OEMs behind it.

Exactly.

I tell everyone competition benefits us all. I find people railing at iOS or Android or anything else ridiculous.

Yet people persist in that. Oh well.

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