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Comment by antr | Hacker News Reader

I still haven't seen one windows phone, only windows tablet.

Not like that in the UK. They're everywhere.

They're really cheap here (820 = £179 SIM free) and they work perfectly with giffgaff for a mere £15 a month for unlimited SMS, data and 400 mins calls.

There is no better experience for such little cash. Cheap androids are all crappy.

That's the point. In Germany you can get a Lumia 520 for ~130€. And they are quite snappy for such little money.

They are cheap here (in the US) too. You can get a Lumia 521 for less than $100.

I see them quite frequently here in Germany. By far not as often as I see Samsung phones and certainly less frequently than iPhones – but I do see them.

In your typical Deutsche Telekom shop they get about as much shelf space as the iPhone, if not more. Of course, the large wall of Android phones dominates everything.

Funnily enough, today I also saw my first Surface (a Pro) in the wild, used by an American researcher who held a guest lecture at university.

I'd say half of my "non-technical" friends have old crappy androids (and generally dislike them) and the rest have iPhones or windows phones (and like them). Apart from one hold-out on a Nokia feature phone.

I've not asked but I wonder if early android has put people off going with modern android when upgrade time comes around.

Your friends don't seem very representative of the market.

I bet it depends on the local market. I was at Redmond over the summer and I'd guess the market share was 50% WP, 25% iOS, 25% Android. Some parts of the town have higher WP usage, others less.

Well this is why I'm not surprised that WP is growing in share. For my friends it seems to be if they want to spend money on a "quality" phone they go for apple, if they want a cheap phone then WP. The only people I know with high-end androids are programmers and SEOs.

Probably... I had a Gingerbread android and it would be really hard that someone convinces me to go back to that, it was just horrible.

You should see the latest models - they have 8-core CPUs and the scrolling is now almost as smooth as in WP/iOS!

Heh... almost as smooth as my 2-year old dual-core iPhone 4S, or the single-core WP7 HTC Mozart I had before that?

The only people I saw with Windows Phone were Nokia holdouts - they always bought Nokia and never tried another brand.

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