All Microsoft needs to do is come up with a way to support more than a very select set of Qualcomm SoCs. Bringing Windows Phone to the same markets as Android and maybe Firefox OS will go for is very hard if you stick to a subset of the SoCs made by one vendor.
Well, as someone who likes Major League Soccer, the inability to get MLS Live on a Windows Phone is a reason I as a user wouldn't see any point in buying a Windows Phone.
The point being that Windows Phone is kind of a failure, at least in terms of getting the ecosystem on par with iOS or Android, and it's been that way for many years with no signs of improvement. So I do see a point in a manufacturer of phones, even if you build your own phone OS like both Microsoft and Samsung do, making phones for operating systems developers actually care about.
This whole moving away from "devices and services" promise falls flat on its face in light of Microsoft investing more into Windows Phones. I don't think Microsoft has figured out that being only on 14% of devices means you should make software for other devices the focus of your company, not try to grow that 14% when the reality that this is very unlikely to happen seems kind of obvious.
I would have loved to buy a premium Nokia phone that runs Android.
You have to make compromises to hit these price points, and with WP8's memory efficiency, I think the often dramatic user-visible improvement from supporting LTE is a much bigger deal than being able to play certain memory-intensive games.
I remember when Elop was arguing that WP doesn't need to support more cores as it runs fine on a single core (when Nokia didn't have multicore SoC supplier and MS had only single core kernel in WP7). Immediately as Nokia signed Qualcomm and MS released multicore kernel in WP8, Elop started marketing the more cores, the better. I just have feeling that your argument is a different version of the same.
At that cost, the licensing fees eat up a significant chunk of profit. Not to mention that the OEMs now have a several years' of Android experience.
I'm one for Android though so I settled for a Moto G 8Gb which is just about the lowest price Android handset that actually works properly.
$50 is a more reasonable ceiling: http://www.aliexpress.com/category/5090301/mobile-phones.htm...
That said, from everything I've heard they're almost unusable.
[1] http://www.dx.com/p/m-h0rse-9500mini-w-e08-sc7710-android-4-...
Is it shitty? No, not if it's your first smartphone. Or it's the most convenient way to read Wikipedia / play Angry Birds.
>At that cost, the licensing fees eat up a significant chunk of profit.