45 ms·

I miss Windows Phone

• zw123456 9y ago
  I work for a large wireless company and I am a volunteer for the new device employee testing program (you get new phones and try them out before they go to market and give feedback, fun... sometimes). I was very pleasantly surprised with the Windows phone and I had trialed a LOT of other phones over the years. I actually thought they were on to something with the tiles, very easy to read with a quick glance. It is too bad there is not a good 3rd options IMO, right now you have basically iPhone and Android. I think it would be good to have another player out there.
• headsoup 9y ago
  I miss Windows Phone. Screen Glance, live tiles, bottom address bar, search button, menus at bottom (until they put in hamburgers in W10), Etc. It was a great phone OS, let down by MS's own declining support of it and the App Gap (which didn't really affect me much, so the first point hurt most).
• tbassetto 9y ago
  I had a Palm Pré and I miss webOS more than any mobile OS I have ever used.
  • madez 9y ago
    With free software and properly documented hardware, you would never need to miss an OS; you could just use it.
    • wpietri 9y ago
      I think that's highly, highly unlikely in this case.What you also need is a supply of skill and labor sufficient to keep things running. There is a lot of new hardware out there. Most manufacturers don't even do real updates for their own phones; I can't imagine what it would take to get WebOS running on the variety of hardware in circulation today. And in this case, having a 2009 v 1.0 phone OS running on new hardware surely isn't sufficient. Our ideas of what a phone should do have expanded significantly. So we're really talking a large development effort. One estimate I see says Apple has 1000-2000 people working on iOS. Given Android's much larger hardware ecosystem, I'd bet the number of people working on Android one way or another is larger. Matching that with an open source effort seems implausible to me.
      • madez 9y ago
        > Matching that with an open source effort seems implausible to me. You don't have to because it is an inadequate comparison. You don't need much effort to continue using old software. There are people who still use SNES with the original OS. Where are the people maintaining that? There are none, because none are needed. If you think an "old" OS isn't sufficient because we now demand things of an OS the old one doesn't deliver, then you would rapidly stop missing it after using it for a while. So, not much development needed either.
        • wpietri 9y ago
          We're talking about a phone OS here. If they just wanted to haul out a 2009 phone out and use it, they could do that just fine, with no open sourcing. You can still buy them off eBay. Since they haven't done that, you might consider that they want something else. I also disagree that using one of those today would make somebody not miss it. What they could reasonably miss is what it could have been. That's certainly what I'd love to see: a WebOS grown up, with a decade's investment along the lines of the original.
  • agscala 9y ago
    How come? My understanding is that the thing people loved the most was the "cards", but ios and android both have something similar with their app switcher now.
    • tbassetto 9y ago
      It’s similar but not exactly the same feeling. It’s hard to describe. I don’t have an iPhone X though (which now has indeed a similar gesture to display the running apps carousel). Another good idea in webOS was to display notifications at the bottom of the screen, I have relatively small hands and they were easily accessible: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/zplVSI0M93o/hqdefault.jpg https://i.ytimg.com/vi/zplVSI0M93o/hqdefault.jpg
  • wpietri 9y ago
    Ah, Palm. I had a few of their Treo series and loved them. In 2002 I had the Internet on my phone! I had email! I had apps! The user experience was clunky compared to what came later, but it was amazing for its day. WebOS was a good try, but too little and too late. They had a 6-year lead on Apple and they blew it. I happened to run across some former Palm people years later and I was told that PalmOS had stacked up so much technical debt that innovation was very slow. It's funny how much people today believe that the iPhone was the first smartphone.
    • beamatronic 9y ago
      Same here. I wanted to add that even in 2000 with a Handspring Visor PDA running Palm OS you could sync with the Internet (news, maps, etc ) when it was in the cradle attached to your pc. There was an app where you could manually tell it your location (street intersection) and it would show you restaurants near you. A coworker had a “Ricochet” cellular modem for his Palm device and he would send emails from the Caltrain. This was in 1999-2000. For me, we had versatile computers with apps in our pocket 18 years ago, the difference now is high-bandwidth, cheap, ubiquitous wireless data everywhere you go.
  • xeeeeeeeeeeenu 9y ago
    My experience with Prē 2 was horrible. I have never used a worse performing phone, and that includes cheap chinese Android devices. I guess basing their GUI on HTML5+js running under WebKit1 wasn't the best choice for 2010 hardware.
  • skinnymuch 9y ago
    I had a Palm Pre and Touchpad. I miss them so much. WebOS was so good. Windows Phone 7 and 8 come next.
• readhn 9y ago
  i was pretty happy with windows phone but not being able to install many apps killed it for me.
  • stinos 9y ago
    I never owned one and regret it: the couple of times I played around with those Lumias etc I was pretty impressed, for reasons metnioned in the article, and the article mentions even more things I didn't know. The whole thing felt 'fresh'. Not unlike the competition, but doing certain things different and actually better. Also I don't care about many apps, so WP would probably have been perfect for me.
• skrebbel 9y ago
  I really like Windows Phone. Microsoft killed it themselves though, by killing the project (I forgot the name) that made it possible to run Android apps on Windows Phone. All their other mistakes are dwarfed by this single screwup. It's like they wanted it to fail.
  • tapoxi 9y ago
    Wouldn't the existence of semi-functional Android app compatibility just mean that developers abandon native apps entirely? It reminds me of a similar dilemma with OS/2. It could run Windows apps, so people stopped writing native ones.
    • skrebbel 9y ago
      Yes, totally. But given Windows's prevalence in businesses, there would've been many serious reasons for business users to use Windows Phone, even if few of the apps were native. And on the consumer side, it was faster and leaner than Android at the time, especially on cheaper hardware. I bet Android apps would've slowed that down a bit but "I miss this one single app" wouldn't have been a reason to avoid the platform anymore.
    • detaro 9y ago
      On the other hand, if it actually has enough customers because it can run non-native apps that's an incentive for developers to make better native apps. I don't think it's so clear cut which one would have happened.
    • lallysingh 9y ago
      You just need a few anchor apps to keep people in the windows side. MS had the ability to do so. Then add some tie ins to encourage 3rd party developers.
• traspler 9y ago
  My only experience with Windows Phone was when I had to port a Cordova app (made with AngularJS) to it. It was a really bad experience for me. The terrible hacks to get the Angular app to even run in the webview on Windows Phone 8.1 was shocking and the performance took a big hit. Bundling and distributing a test version was so complicated without a huge enterprise setup that it was simply not feasible. Windows Phone 10 improved all of that a lot but there were still security hacks necessary for the app to even run. I can only hope developers which created native apps had a better experience than I did.
  • pavlov 9y ago
    It’s not really Windows Phone’s fault that Cordova and Angular are so terrible.
    • jhasse 9y ago
      The web engine on Windows phone is (was) terrible though compared to Webkit/Blink.
    • robocat 9y ago
      Of course it is Microsoft's fault. They could have chosen to put resources into making those projects work better on Windows Phone. Microsoft made a bet on Xamarin instead. Also you had to use their proprietary touch events in the webview browser, which (a) was buggy, (b) had little information about how to use it in practice, and (c) the webview was a branch of IE11 specific to Windows Phone. I think for Update 1 the webview supported the Apple touch event API but it was broken (disappeared in update 2). The dumbest thing is that supporting Cordova properly would have immediately got them a whole heap of lesser known apps without having to give money directly to developers. Money multiplier investments are smart.
      • pavlov 9y ago
        Having more Cordova crap on the Windows Phone app store wouldn’t have made a difference. There was no shortage of lesser known apps on Windows Phone, and enabling even more webview junk would have made the problem worse. Microsoft spent a lot of money on initiatives that got unknown developers to flood the platform with apps of dubious quality. All along the real app problem they had was the lack of top 20 apps, everything from YouTube to Snapchat to Instagram to Uber.
• system16 9y ago
  I used Windows Phone for several years. It was a refreshing take on a mobile OS, and to this day I still think it had the best touch keyboard with the most satisfying tapping sound effects. When I finally did put it out to pasture, it was a breath of fresh air though; I really had no idea how much I'd been missing out on in terms of apps and features on iOS/Android, and how many Windows Phone irritations/limitations I'd just been putting up with. That said, today I use only a handful of apps and barely if ever explore new ones - I mainly only use Firefox, Lyft, a mail client, a reddit client, and photos. I see similar 'app fatigue' among my peers, so I wonder if Windows Phone would have fared better in today's mobile market.
  • ipsi 9y ago
    > That said, today I use only a handful of apps and barely if ever explore new ones - I mainly only use Firefox, Lyft, a mail client, a reddit client, and photos. I see similar 'app fatigue' among my peers, so I wonder if Windows Phone would have fared better in today's mobile market. I don't think so. While there's definitely some level of "App Fatigue", there's a lot of apps that users would never give up. e.g., WhatsApp, Facebook (& Messenger), Snapchat, CityMapper, Google Maps, any banking apps, just to name a few big names that would be used day-to-day. And then there's a lot of miscellaneous apps that I don't use regularly, but do use occasionally, like all the airline ones, or food delivery, or Trainline, or Taxi apps, etc. The transport ones are notable because they make it really easy to add the ticket or boarding pass to the iOS Wallet, which means I have offline access to them (very important when travelling). I think most users have found the subset of apps they really want, and don't have a pressing need to look for more, yes. However, the apps they do have, they would definitely miss if they were gone. Now, a lot of those apps might not be necessary if the mobile web site integrated with the OS well enough (mostly notifications, mic/webcam access, Apple/Google pay equivalent, responsiveness), though some probably wouldn't. WhatsApp is a good example here - all the content is stored locally, on the phone. Making it a mobile website as the default option would go against what they are trying to offer (Signal is the same, I believe?). But since none of the existing platforms offer full integration like that (AFAIK), there would probably have to be some extra work building out those features on the mobile site. And I guess that brings us full circle back to the "no one builds anything for Platform X because it has no users" problem?
• jdhn 9y ago
  I really liked the tile aspect of the Windows Phone home screen. Being able to resize the tiles and then get various levels of contextual information based on the size of the tile was pretty rad, and I haven't seen anything like it since.
• philliphaydon 9y ago
  My Lumia 925 is still the best phone I’ve ever owned. But MS killed itnfor themselves. Windows Phones were kinda big in Asia. Used to see lots of people in Singapore, Cambodia, Thailand, with them all the time. But the high end phones never came to these markets. People I worked with wanted all the new phones but MS didn’t release them in Singapore for over 12 months. People gave up and went android and iOS. I went Android then iOS. There’s a lot I miss about windows phone. And Poki is still hands down the best pocket reader app.
  • detaro 9y ago
    I thought here in Germany they also were making respectable inroads (although that might be distorted since the brightly-colored Lumnias were so noticable), but then they let it languish at a point where they would have needed to double down on having up-to-date and interesting devices around. Most people aren't buying new phones every year, so getting market share will mean sticking around for at least a few cycles. Apparently MS didn't think that'd work out in enough markets?
    • pjmlp 9y ago
      They were, at a given point it was quite common to see them while commuting. A few of our customers also had them as official device for their regular employees.
      • keithpeter 9y ago
        UK: 'jack the lads' used to have lumina phones - the ones that you could get for £100 or that came with contracts. I used to see those a lot outside the local football ground. The central messaging queue seemed popular and video watching &c. Then they disappeared to be replaced by huge Samsungs.
  • rmsaksida 9y ago
    The Lumia 520 was a very popular phone in emerging markets for a while. It was cheap compared to Android phones, had good battery life, decent build quality, decent specs. I think Microsoft just wasn't interested in markets outside the US.
• zoom6628 9y ago
  The only things i liked about Windows Phone were the menu/launcher and the keyboard. Firstly the keyboard was the most accurate swiping input keyboard i have ever used, to this this day. The second is that the Windows tiles and list just make so much sense, surprisingly especially on a 7-8" tablet. Have even put the MS Launcher onto my Blackberry DTEK60 and thoroughly enjoyed that experience.
• ryl00 9y ago
  Jumped on Windows phone back when Microsoft started throwing in the towel (some of those sales were just too hard to resist). I know at some point I'll need to leave (probably back to Android), but for now my Win 10m idol 4s is holding up.
  • mmsimanga 9y ago
    I have a Nokia 730 Dual Sim. I have had it for close to 3 years. Great build quality. I have dropped it several times and the phone is still intact (touch wood). Battery lasts over two days. Here Maps work just fine. The only downside is there are no user apps. No Firefox, no AnkiDroid, my bank doesn't have a Windows Phone app. Despite lack of apps I am content with the phone. I am trying to spend less time looking at my phone.
• snomad 9y ago
  I feel like Microsoft has a string of devices which could have been good to great, and they keep just missing the mark somehow - windows phone, ms band, surface hub, heck even zune was as good as an ipod at a lower price point. Not sure why they keep dropping the ball, lack of focus? Not willing to stay the course? I get dropping zune as the market had moved on, but band was getting good reviews when they dropped it and wearables are still growing. And for the life of me I don't understand why they don't have a motto of a hub in every college class - that device is so perfect for facilitating remote class attendance.
  • Someone1234 9y ago
    The Surface Hub is still around and for sale, we have several of them. They're really good if you're a AD/Skype/O365 shop, if a little pricey ($5K+).
  • Lasher 9y ago
    Zune HD really was a good player. I switched to it after 3 Ipod Nanos in a row had trouble holding a charge about five minutes after the warranty period expired. Cheaper price, longer battery life, better (imo) interface, just poor marketing and hard to beat the Itunes Juggernaut. If you subscribed to the $9.99 a month music service then downloading new music and syncing it to the device was smooth and fast and easy in a way that Itunes still hasn't managed. Like you said, no idea why Microsoft keep creating great products but then suck at selling and marketing them.
    • ams6110 9y ago
      Well it's a good illustration for anyone here: ideas and good software are easy. Building a company that can successfully sell them is the hard part.
  • gdilla 9y ago
    It's not that they were missing the mark, it's that they were WAY late to the game on all fronts. When you have stockpiles of cash, this isn't necessarily a horrible strategy (they ran xbox for 10 years in the red before making money). But in the phone ecosystem, they were crippled because developers wouldn't make apps for them and consumers weren't buying because of the lack of apps. Similarly they made zune in a bubble. While Apple was innovating to make an iPod that also made phone calls.
• Someone1234 9y ago
  I purchased a $30 Windows Phone well after the platform was dead, I just wanted to experience it before it was gone. For a $30 phone, it was incredibly fast and smooth. The tile interface worked well (particularly information dense relative to notification dots/counts on icons we're seeing now), the onscreen keyboard is the best I've ever used (even to this day), and the way updates were delivered (direct from Microsoft, not the network operator or OEM) was a breath of fresh air from Android. As anyone and everyone will tell you, lack of apps killed it. In no small part because Google was using their market position to squish it (yes, I appreciate the irony). Google didn't produce Windows Phone apps, which they're entitled to not do, but then Microsoft tried to make apps for Google's services[0] which Google also shut down. Makes you wonder what would happen if Google pulled all of their iOS apps tomorrow, and then blocked third parties/diminished the mobile browser experience on purpose. [0] https://venturebeat.com/2013/05/15/google-to-microsoft-kill-your-youtube-app-immediately/ https://venturebeat.com/2013/05/15/google-to-microsoft-kill-...
  • enitihas 9y ago
    Given the amount that Google pays to Apple to remain the default search engine on the iPhone, I really doubt they would be willing to take that risk.
    • dep_b 9y ago
      iOS users are the biggest cash cows for e-commerce in the US. Since Google is ad-driven and ads are ultimately paid by people that actually buy stuff it would lower the value of Google overnight by 30%.
  • pgeorgi 9y ago
    > Microsoft tried to make apps for Google's services Where "apps" means "app", and "Google's services" means "YouTube".
    • spikej 9y ago
      I missed not having Google Drive
• MLR 9y ago
  I still use mine, I'm not a big user of apps generally so I can just about squeak by, the tiled UI is still far and away the best available for phones. I hope the Windows everywhere initiative eventually works out, they got a lot of things right about the touch experience but they couldn't follow through on a lot of it.
• joelhaasnoot 9y ago
  Windows Phone was fun to develop for (not). Especially their native C compilation setup was a nightmare, we had to rewrite most of our code that worked fine on Android and iOS to be ANSI C compatible so that the Visual C 6.0 compiler liked it enough.
  • slipstream- 9y ago
    MS's compiler is annoying, it'll only support anything more modern than ANSI C if you give your files a .cpp extension...
    • orbifold 9y ago
      That is not true, it is perfectly happy to compile files that have a .C and .H extension as modern C++ :).
      • joelhaasnoot 9y ago
        I think this was only true when targeting 8.0 and the 7.0 or 7.1 target for 'native' code was an old compiler that got bundled which didn't do this. It was a bit of a nightmare. THe funnest part was that we were at a weekend long MSFT hackathon. None of the (Dutch) dev-types had ever used C(++) code and so couldn't be much help.
  • futurix 9y ago
    I think you are confusing Windows Phone and ancient Windows Mobile.
    • niftich 9y ago
      In fairness, despite Windows Mobile being positively ancient, the constant reboot of Windows' mobile OS, even once it was called Windows Phone, was a contributing factor: customer confusion, developer confusion, variability of upgrade paths, and just market fatigue.
    • seanmcdirmid 9y ago
• CivilEngineer 9y ago
  I remember all the screetching when Microsoft put in "WiFi Password Sharing." Everyone was saying how awful it was to do this. Then Apple puts in in iOS and everyone loves it.
• mlvljr 9y ago
  Plus-onned from my Lumia.
• yantrams 9y ago
  I had a Nokia N9 that shipped with the ill fated Meego OS. Hands down the smoothest operating system I've ever used on a mobile.
  • scooble 9y ago
    I agree. The buttonless swipable interface was a joy to use (not least because it made it simple to distinguish between closing an app and putting it in the background) and the single notification/feed homepage was fantastic. Features like tap-to-wake and the glance screen felt so ahead of their time. I've not really found another phone that has been as awesome, and I am still profoundly depressed at how the phone was killed at birth.
    • u801e 9y ago
      I'm still using one now as my main phone. The only thing I don't like about it is how you have to hold the on-screen camera button down to auto-focus before taking a picture (making it difficult to do with one hand). Other than that, I've had no issues with it.
      • 8xde0wcNwpslOw 9y ago
        That's commitment. I loved my N9 about as much as anyone, but for me, the HW just doesn't cut it anymore. Sure, you could use it as a dumb phone, but perhaps then you wouldn't even need the interface. Anyway, with faster internals, a sharper screen and an up-to-date browser, I would choose Meego any day of the week. Shame it wasn't the case.
        • u801e 8y ago
          > Sure, you could use it as a dumb phone, but perhaps then you wouldn't even need the interface. Well, it's still better than what Symbian provides (I also have an N8). As long as I can browse and post to HN and reddit, use it for off-line GPS, playing music, sms and phone calls, it works well enough for me. It even works for tethering with a USB cable. I suppose once the battery goes bad, I'll have to move on to something else :)
• Gustomaximus 9y ago
  I was always surprised windows didn't do a real attempt on dockable phone -> PC interface. It has so many consumer and enterprise points of entry.
  • rb808 9y ago
    I always thought this too, but now chromebooks are so cheap it isn't really a benefit to have a dockable phone.
  • ThrowawayR2 9y ago
    They did: HP's Elite x3. You can find bundles that include the Continuum dock for $299 at the Microsoft Store; looks like they're closing them out. They're enterprise oriented so the build quality is decent. If you mean x86 compatible dockable smartphone, Intel cancelled plans for their x86 smartphone chip in early 2016 which put a stake in any hope MS had of doing that.
  • digi_owl 9y ago
    They basically priced it out of the range of those consumers that could benefit from it the most.
    • petecox 9y ago
      Yep, continuum seemed like a killer feature on release. But I wasn't prepared to pay $AU1000 to try out a Lumia 950 at the time and the 650 was far too anemic to support it.
      • roryisok 9y ago
        You can pick them up now for a quarter of that, second hand
• pjmlp 9y ago
  I love my Windows Phones, even ended up buying WP 10, when the upgrade from 8.1 wasn't possible. My Windows Phones have gotten more updates than all my Android devices summed up together. The 100% native apps experience, C++ and .NET Native, meant they were more responsive that Android devices on the same price category. And the development environment runs circles around the chaos of Android tools.
  • bitmapbrother 9y ago
    >My Windows Phones have gotten more updates than all my Android devices summed up together. So they osbourned your previous phone and the current phone you have has an OS in maintenance mode and isn't receiving OEM firmware updates. >The 100% native apps experience, C++ and .NET Native, meant they were more responsive that Android devices on the same price category You realize that the high majority of Windows phone apps aren't written in C++ or .NET native, right? >And the development environment runs circles around the chaos of Android tools. This is hilarious considering the number of times Microsoft osbourned the Windows phone development environment.
    • pjmlp 9y ago
      Yeah, so they are written in what, Pixie dust? It might be hilarous to you as part of the Android support team. To us that actually have to deliver software with those tools and fulfill customer expectations, it is a chaos.
      • bitmapbrother 8y ago
        >Yeah, so they are written in what, Pixie dust? C#. Ever hear of it? >It might be hilarous to you as part of the Android support team. At least they're still employed. Windows support team - not so much. >To us that actually have to deliver software with those tools and fulfill customer expectations, it is a chaos. Compared to the Windows store, which is a cesspool of garbage, for both Windows apps and Windows phone apps I would say quality was the furthest thing from their minds.
• niftich 9y ago
  Many aspects of Windows Phone were thoughtfully designed, but they waded into a market where customers expected to install arbitrary apps. There were some high-profile holdouts like Snapchat, whose lack hurt the phone (or hurt retention) among the valuable, younger demographics, while everyone else has been conditioned to be used to a zillion single-use apps, from their bank, their fast-casual restaurant, to throwaway games and random tools that try to imbue phones with some productivity utility. A platform with a low market share and confusing (and ever-changing) developer story couldn't compete in this market, even if they kept putting out decent hardware for not a lot of money. They could have reframed the expectations, and marketed it as a business OS, but with a rapidly declining BlackBerry, they didn't want to pursue what seemed like a failing niche. Or, they could have not screwed up Desktop Windows' app story so much, which exacerbated the issues with developing for Windows Phone. Or they could have arrived at the market several years later, when Progressive Web Apps graduate from wishful thinking tech demos to a viable way of authoring software to be distributed over either URLs or app stores. This is the future that Google wants, their medusa-like competitor who tries to balance their desire to preserve and gatekeep the Open Web with their large install-base of Android phones running apps written in quasi-Java that they got sued over. Windows Phone was a technically sound product positioned awkwardly, and they couldn't persuade enough third-parties to deliver on the expectations that customers expected. But they neither doubled down, nor did an immediate reversal (e.g. Surface RT), so in typical Microsoft fashion they let it flail around for years without any strong messaging to reassure users (remember this from Silverlight? Zune? XNA?).
  • userbinator 9y ago
    but they waded into a market where customers expected to install arbitrary apps. Of course. The locked-down nature of the platform was a big turn-off for me too, since branding it Windows made everyone expect it would be more like desktop Windows with a different UI.
• manaskarekar 9y ago
  Windows Phone 8.1 + Lumia 920 was by far the best phone I have ever used. My friends look at me funny when I say that. There were so many things they did right. Some random things off the top of my head: - Internet Explorer had the address bar at the bottom of the screen. I don't get how nobody else does this. - The tiles work really very well (big one). The usability of shortcuts + active information + dense layout on your homescreen. - The back-button behavior was perfect. It made sense. - Very snappy response throughout. - Lots of pros on the hardware of the Lumia 920 itself but that's a different story. - Best keyboard/swipe setup. - Lots of thoughtful design elements. There's all kinds of stuff that was a joy. I tried Windows Phone 10.1 Dev release and that was horrible. I do wish Windows Phone continued to live though.
  • adamrezich 9y ago
    I've only briefly used Windows Phone 8.1, and haven't seen WP 10.1 at all. What makes it significantly worse than its predecessor?
  • solarkraft 9y ago
    New mobile chrome has the controls on the bottom. It's dumb. I'm using Firefox now.
    • manaskarekar 9y ago
      I searched for that a lot in the past. I wonder if the placement is optional, people could select what they prefer. Looks like that is being deprecated in favor of something else: https://www.xda-developers.com/google-deprecating-bottom-address-bar-chrome-home-chrome-duplex/ https://www.xda-developers.com/google-deprecating-bottom-add...
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• spikej 9y ago
  What about the fact that even the cheapest windows phone ran almost as smooth/fast as a flagship Android phone?
  • lucb1e 9y ago
    As far as I know, that was because Microsoft was desperate to make this investment work out and they almost gave them away for free just to get people to use them.
  • saagarjha 9y ago
    Well, that's because Android was, until recently, a poor and laggy experience even on flagship hardware.
• afandian 9y ago
  I feel the same way about my Blackberry Passport's BBOS 10. The UI is so nice, functional and polished. A real shame it was cut down in its prime.
  • tacoman 9y ago
    I'm going to keep using mine until my place of work forces me off. It's such a nice device and there is no app I need that doesn't work on it.
    • afandian 9y ago
      My next phone was going to be a Gemini PDA but (while it's amazing they got it to market and it's an impressive bit of hardware) it doesn't compare to the sound quality of the Passport and the keyboard is actually quite hard to use. And "apps" is another word for clandestine data collection. Sms, web and email is all I need and it does them excellently. I feel they avoided a lot of the bullshit I see on ios and android by positioning it as a business not consumer device.
• TheWiseOne 9y ago
  I stuck with WP as long as I could and I still miss it. The polycarbonate Nokia were tough as hell and felt solid in your hands. IMO the OS was really solid. If they just stuck with it and kept building, albeit targeting the people that didn't use a lot of apps, I think they could've found a niche. They had close to 25% share already in countries like Italy and Brazil and were popular in India, Africa, etc.
• gdilla 9y ago
  Not widely known - MSFT was throwing around cash at developers and brands to make apps for windows phone. Even providing developer shops to code it. MSFT handed us a check and a dev shop to pay with it. We designed the app in their ui paradigm and had fun doing it. Had enough money left over to take the team out for a fancy dinner when it was all done.
  • Ologn 9y ago
    They did this later on. In 2011, Android Market (Google play) cost $25 for a lifetime developer account. You could develop apps on Windows, Mac or Linux. It came with an emulator. So for the cost of $25, anyone on any major developer platform could write an app. In 2011, you could only program Windows Phone app on Windows (I don't even have a Windows machine where I live). Windows Phone Marketplace charged $99 a year for a developer account. You can say Apple did this to, or that it should be nothing, but apparently it was not a winning strategy. I know a college student who shelled out the $25 back then and published an app on Google Play, now he works as an Android developer for a Fortune 500 company. Perhaps the idea paying four times that, and on a yearly basis no less, to Microsoft, was off-putting. People can straighten their tie and say any business going off on such a venture can afford $100 a year as a gatekeeper, but it didn't work out so well for Microsoft. Apple was already in the pole position so they could get away with it. But you're right, after throwing up these barriers to developer entry at first, they started raining cash on developers to make apps, providing developer shops to code it and so on.
    • seanmcdirmid 9y ago
      They were priming the app pump at the same time they were charging $100 for dev accounts, it wasn't something that came later.
    • scarface74 9y ago
      I doubt that many developers saw having a Windows machine as an impediment to building apps. Microsoft does still have 90% market share in PCs.
• oDot 9y ago
  Sorry to hijack, but the real hero in much of the progress described in the article and in mobile OS overall, is non other than Matias Duarte with webOS. Innovation includes features such as Synergy, Just Type, gesture bar and the card interface. Highly suggest you watch the launch video from CES 2009: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw3cHOEnwTw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw3cHOEnwTw
• open-source-ux 9y ago
  It's a shame that Windows Phone never took off. Microsoft are known for functional but clunky desktop software, but Windows Phone with the Metro UI is, in my view, one of their best UIs. It doesn't feel like a Microsoft product and it's quite refreshing that they took a different path from the UI approach of iOS and Android. The simplicity of the live tiles is a neat way of combining widget-like behaviour and launching an app. A single swipe from the home screen gave you a A-Z list of your installed apps (not a grid of icons like iOS and Android). Contrast that with Android phone approach of separate app widgets, separate app icons and even separate home screens. If you love to tweak to the nth degree, you'll love such features. For the rest of us, it all feels stodgy and overcooked for a smartphone. Interestingly, Windows Phone design guidelines contained ideas we'd also see later in Google's Material design guidelines e.g. such as the emphasis on animation as more than just mere decoration. Here is a presentation from the Windows 7 design team that describes the new Windows Phone UI. It's from 2010: https://www.slideshare.net/stevecla/windows-phone-ui-and-design-language-3511859 https://www.slideshare.net/stevecla/windows-phone-ui-and-des...
• mattnewport 9y ago
  I'm still using Windows Phone - an HP Elite x3. I always preferred it to Android but I've refused to use Apple products for many years and when I decided I was done with Google products I went back to Windows Phone. I'm not big on apps anyway and I've mostly found it a positive not being able to succumb to the temptation to install time wasting or privacy hating apps. The biggest inconvenience is not being able to use the app for one of our local car sharing services but there is an app for car2go so I've just been using them instead. The official LastPass app is really bad too but I get by with it. Not sure yet what I'm going to do for my next phone. I've backed the Purism Librem 5 so holding out hope that will actually ship and be a usable option. Biggest challenge for me there would likely be not having WhatsApp or Telegram (Windows Phone still has both).
  • ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    In the same place. Love my Elite x3, will stay on it as long as security updates keep coming every month. May end up having to suffer iOS if nothing new comes out, but I'll never go back to Android. Definitely hope the Librem 5 works out, though have doubts that it will.
• emersonrsantos 9y ago
  Windows Phone was a beautiful platform for consumers and developers. What Samsung did for Android, Nokia Lumia line undid it for MS. Fautly hardware, devices with one major OS version lifespan, shipped late to the market. Nokia is the company that got stuck in 2005.
• scarface74 9y ago
  A lot of the article just wasn't true. System 7s redesigned happened because the old design was tied to fixed resolutions - the original iPhone's and the iPad's. Skeumorphism didn't scale with different screen sizes Apple's extension system was already being used internally with Apple's hardcoded integrations with Facebook and Twitter used it.
• nailer 9y ago
  > Unified messaging – Microsoft’s messages hub let Windows Phone users chat via SMS or messaging apps like Skype in a single thread without needing to juggle separate apps. This. I never used Windows Phone but I.Am.So.Tired of having to check inboxes for WhatsApp, Email, Tinder, Bumble, Slack and every other app on my iPhone or Android device.
  • lostmsu 9y ago
    Everybody ignored it though. They should have made a store policy.
• ernesth 9y ago
  To me, windows Phone was a nightmare. I previously had a symbian and every interaction with windows phone made me regret it. Windows Phone was so locked and worse than symbian! You could not install another web browser (on symbian I was using opera or opera mini). There did not exist file explorers (apps could not get permissions to explore local files). Consequently, it was impossible to open html files (Edge, the only available browser did not understand the file: protocol). I kept some data in html files on my phone to always have them with me even when offline... The dedicated search "button" was the worst idea ever: it had no use when offline and was barely interesting when connected. It would automatically turn mute when connected to a bluetooth speaker but would forget to unmute when disconnected. The volume control was even more confusing than android one (volume was represented as a number, sometimes, max was 12, sometimes it was 32...). The only good thing (the reason I chose windows phone rather than android) was nokia's GPS app. But it was already ther on symbian! Good riddance. I don't miss you windows phone!
  • digi_owl 9y ago
    Effectively MS, who should have known the value of backwards compatibility, shot themselves in the foot by abandoning the PocketPC lineage. Never mind that debacle early on when people discovered that WinPhone7 would lock an inserted SD card to that specific device (a rarely used "feature" of the Secure Digital standard). With the added irony that Symbian could unlock said cards while Android could just reformat it. Frankly i maintain that the introduction of the iPhone rolled back smartphone development by a decade or more, as look were put before functionality and what used to be a workhorse device became a glorified media player.
    • xeeeeeeeeeeenu 9y ago
      >Effectively MS, who should have known the value of backwards compatibility, shot themselves in the foot by abandoning the PocketPC lineage. Backward compatibility with a platform which has almost zero market share is worthless.
      • digi_owl 9y ago
• nwah1 9y ago
  I kept windows phone 10 up until this week. I actually like that it pushes me to use mobile sites instead of apps. Apps are closed ecosystems with app stores that charge a high markup. Sites are free and open. I can use Uber Lyft, and Facebook without apps. But with discipline you can do this on Android too. Pros: Beautiful Live Tiles Simple interface Unified look Dark Mode Less bloatware Cons: On Windows 10 mobile, the phone would freeze up or even restart as much as once per day Drivers and software seem less optimized and performant even with powerful hardware Never found a mobile site that allows depositing checks No Firefox So as of this weekend I'm now using a fast, stable, cluttered, and ugly Samsung phone loaded with bloatware. I'm hoping LineageOS can make this more tolerable soon.
  • roryisok 9y ago
    Interesting admit the freezes / reloads. I bought a 950XL that would restart constantly, at least once a day. A few weeks later i bought a 950 instead, for the smaller form factor. The 950 has zero issues. It has never once frozen or restarted. My point is, it's not Windows 10 mobile that caused that issue. You might have had a bad battery or device
• bcoates 9y ago
  Still using a Windows Phone (Nokia 1020) as my main phone. It's mostly the Nokia parts that I really love, like the transit app, and the fact that it's user-serviceable with minimal tools. The app ecosystem is actually less of a problem as time goes on; now that Apple and Google ship reasonable browsers in their phones most services I want to use have good mobile web experiences. The real essentials like Pandora / Kindle / WhatsApp are available and still work. The big pain point for me is Slack's web client, which appears to be gratuitously broken on phones.
  • justherefortart 9y ago
    I have a 1020 and loved it. I only switched because when I went from AT&T to TMobile it didn't work worth a sheet in my area (German import I got for cheapo). I was super bummed when MS killed the phones, I was going to get a 940 or whatever it was but the writing was on the wall. Still my favorite phone OS. I recently got an iPhone 8 for a project I'm working on. Holy shit is it worse than Android, and I don't particularly like Android either. Hadn't used the iPhone since the 3, seems like it's just the same. Can't even put friggin icons where you want.
  • mattnewport 9y ago
    I use Slack's Windows Phone app on my HP Elite x3. It has some issues but it's functional enough for when I need to use Slack away from my PC.
    • bcoates 9y ago
      I swear that wasn't in the store when I looked earlier. Updated this year and everything! Cunningham's Law in action I suppose.
• DEFCON28 9y ago
  WiFi password sharing was severely criticized when Microsoft introduced it. But then Apple put in in iOS and nobody batted an eye. There are some ideas that just need time.
  • robocat 9y ago
    The implementations are completely different. Microsoft shared the password implicitly to "friends" without making the security implications clear to the user. It seems like Apple have made the security implications clear to the user: an explicit choice to share the password to one person, and the prompt mentions that a password is being shared. The Microsoft implementation is rightly lambasted.
• oculusthrift 9y ago
  i never owned one but i really liked their idea of having apps display some data in the tile without having to open them up. Really sad that other phones haven’t learned from this.
• untog 9y ago
  I switched from Android 2.something to Windows Phone and the entire experience was a breath of fresh air. It performed as well and as smoothly as iOS, but had easily the best UI out there. It's difficult to remember now just how awful the UI of Android 2 was, and Google let it stagnate entirely with an ill-advised focus on tablet. By the time I returned to Android it was on version 4 and light years ahead of where it was. The performance was (and still is) subpar, though.
• lostmsu 9y ago
  I wish they'd at least kept Edge up to date. That would make my Elite x3 live for another couple of years.
• bArray 9y ago
  Speaking of challenging iOS and Android, not really heard too much from either Firefox OS [1] or Ubuntu Touch [2] - seems as if both have officially been dropped despite looking promising. I think the big two need some competition in the mobile OS space but there doesn't seem to be big support from the actual market itself. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_OS [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Touch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Touch
  • abrowne 9y ago
    FirefoxOS is back for "smart featurephones" in the fork KaiOS: https://www.kaiostech.com/ https://www.kaiostech.com/
• Yhippa 9y ago
  Honestly I miss WebOS on the old Palm phones the most. That phone had everything except hardware speed going for it. Everything including gestures (cards), notifications, wireless charging, and universal search were 10 years ahead of their time. The software was just too much for the hardware at that time. Windows Phone was a close second to me. The worst thing about this all is that it seems impossible for a third vendor to be successful unless PWAs take off.
• haolez 9y ago
  They could open source it. It felt like a robust software product.
• ChicagoDave 9y ago
  First of all, I owned four of the top line Windows Phones as the hardware progressed and have been an MS oriented dev/arch throughout my career. I switched back to an iPhone when MS started playing with the email and calendar apps, making them horribly less useful. Around January of 2015. The 6 plus had just come out. WP hardware was excellent until 2014 when it was clear MS had abandoned the platform. They fell behind quickly at that point. I knew the Midwest MS evangelist and went to a couple of dev sessions on WP and the philosophy was to pump any garbage or duplicate app into the App Store. I argued they should spend money on the top 100 business apps and just make them better than iOS or Android. MS was never going to beat Apple at cheap games. Buying Nokia looked good on the outside but it was clearly a disaster. $6 billion could have enabled a ton of devs to build a ton of apps. I was sad to see it go, but in the end, my iPhone never really gets in my way. I can email, message, call, and surf the web plus have a few other handy apps that just work.
• jmiller099 9y ago
  Lol, funny timing to see this. I pulled out my HTC Touch Pro 2 phone today because it has a keyboard and wanted to do some quick ssh stuff from remotely. Maybe not technically windows phone, since it was called windows mobile then with different design goals. Had to charge it for longer than recent phones needed, but it came up well (except bluetooth). Fortunately WiFi worked with my current phone's hotspot. After that had to find a solution for ssh client. Wound up using a midlet runner found on xda-developers and an ssh jar file. The keyboard usage was interesting after foregoing it for about a decade.
• mmphosis 9y ago
  We need a Linux Phone.
  • dylan-m 9y ago
    Well, we had Meego, WebOS, and Firefox OS, and we failed them :( I wonder what it would take for one of those to actually succeed at this point? Personally I'm finding that I care much less about what apps there are than I did three years ago. It's easy to use progressive web apps whenever decent ones exist, and so much of the functionality that used to be "download an app" is just built in to Android and iOS now so I don't really think about it. That and I guess I've started to accept (and I think there's a growing awareness) that phones are being designed as soul-sucking addiction machines, so the idea of smartphone games is somewhat less appealing…
    • seba_dos1 9y ago
      We never had Meego. We only had Maemo on Nokia N900, which did pretty well, and a Maemo/Meego hybrid on Nokia N9, which was very highly acclaimed, but already dead on arrival thanks to a backstab from Windows Phone (and some poor Nokia management earlier that has led to this situation, to be fair).
    • roryisok 9y ago
      Don't forget Ubuntu phone
• twblalock 9y ago
  Microsoft squandered an opportunity to make an alternative mobile OS at a time when it was possible to do that. In 2010 when Windows Phone was released, the app store concept was only a few years old and many people did not have smartphones yet. These days, I don't see how a new operating system could possibly succeed unless it had all of the popular social media apps on day one.
• dingo_bat 9y ago
  I miss Nokia. Those were the days the biggest mobile manufacturer actually did things beneficial to users! Compare that to Apple today. No headphone jack which is probably more used every day even now than their proprietary shit port was ever used. Oh and the silly notch!
• hateful 9y ago
  Dark mode may be the #1 feature I want from any app or device. I tend to shy away from anything I can't enable it on. I have an Android phone and each version gets brighter. I am in the apparent minority that knows that a screen isn't a piece of paper and not in the majority of people who still believe myths about keeping the light on when you watch TV.
  • roryisok 9y ago
    Even on Windows Phone though, Microsoft broke dark mode on their own apps. OneNote always has a blindingly white background.
• dylan-m 9y ago
  Microsoft and Nokia had a really good balance of software and hardware, and it's still a unique contrast to what Google and Apple are doing. I really liked their colourful cases (although the N9 did it best), and I'm still envious of the dedicated shutter button. Why hasn't anyone else done this? It makes way more sense than that goofy "press the volume button to take a picture" hack that Android and iOS have been doing. For one thing, the shutter button is actually on the right side of the phone. With the volume button, they don't even know if it's at the edge. (It probably isn't). And they keep coming up with these weird things like flicking your phone at the lock screen to open the camera app. No, Google, just add a button.
  • ams6110 9y ago
    Heh wow I've had an Android phone for years and never knew the volume button would take a picture. Who would have thought? But thanks -- that's better than tapping the screen, which was the only way I knew until now.
    • dylan-m 8y ago
      Glad to help! It's better than nothing, yeah :b And if you have a newer phone version of Android, you might be able to double press the Power button to open the camera. In stock Android, there's a thing in Settings / System / Gestures / Jump to camera. (Now, imagine if you could open the camera and take a picture with the same button. Revolutionary! Someone should patent it).
• DrBazza 9y ago
  Like many others here, I still rate my Samsung Omnia, running Windows Phone 7 as the best phone I've owned. The mistake MS made, for me, was abandoning the existing WP7 phones for new WP8 phones, no upgrade path, and taking so long to release WP8.
• kerng 9y ago
  I had one, an HTC. In grand scheme of things, right after the iPhone 3 it was the best phone I ever owned. It was slick, fast and the UI made sense. But there were no apps... The last few years I am using Android, not so impressed. I made it a habit to switch between providers, so I dont develop a strong association with either...
• oneplane 9y ago
  I don't miss Windows Phone or Windows Mobile, but I do miss the idea of a third mobile platform player.
• notadoc 9y ago
  I also miss it and am disappointed Microsoft did not more aggressively pursue Windows Phone. It was fast, unique, and offered legitimately good competition to Apple and Google. Continuum remains a fantastic idea, frankly I am surprised Apple hasn't adopted something similar with iPhone.
• fencepost 9y ago
  I had and used a Lumia 640 for quite a while and it was a really nice phone aside from the app situation. I still have it around and fire it up occasionally to see if there's another Insiders build update for it - if I lose or break my current one I could easily see using it for a few days. I also can't feel that I overpaid for it, I got the phone while they were doing a promotion that also included a year of Office365 Personal - and I think I may have paid less for the phone than that subscription price would have been alone. The app situation though, the app situation was grim even in browsers. I think Edge on it has improved significantly as it has elsewhere, but for a long time you had (pretty crappy) Edge and (pretty crappy) other browsers based on I'm not sure what. I knew Chrome wasn't ever going to be on there, and Mozilla's previous little adventure into other mobile devices had... not worked out for them, but I was hoping someone like Dolphin Browser would manage to port onto WP - it's webkit based, has or had its own implementation to work from (Dolphin Jetpack, so they could update when the phone's built-in webkit was slower), not tied to any Google Play services, etc. The death of Project Astoria (the Android-to-Windows Bridge) signaled the death knell for that and probably WP as well. There were other security lockdowns that I found annoying (e.g. I upload my call logs and SMS to be able to view calls on a calendar and SMS in email), but the combination of "no apps" and "also no browser able to handle mobile website versions properly" was a real killer.
• djsumdog 9y ago
  I wish Windows had allowed other web browsers early on. By the time Microsoft allowed native code, the few alpha projects of FireFox had been abandoned. These phones do have UEFI+ARM. Has anyone unlocked the bootloader? I feel these would be an ideal open source OS mobile platform for something like Plasma.
• fencepost 9y ago
  Regarding "Dark Mode" for Android on OLED devices as discussed in the article, while Google/AOSP may not ever plan to have that there are a lot of steps that you can take to get closer to it. Launcher changes (backgrounds, entirely new launchers, icon packs like TwoPixel[0]), browser changes (Firefox addons like Dark Background and Light Text [1][2]) possibly manufacturer-specific changes (doesn't Samsung tweak a lot of stuff for AMOLED display?) and even replacement firmware. [0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mowmo.twopixel https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mowmo.twop... [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark-background-light-text/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dark-backgrou... [2] https://github.com/m-khvoinitsky/dark-background-light-text-extension https://github.com/m-khvoinitsky/dark-background-light-text-...
• martin-adams 9y ago
  I would love to see Microsoft release a Windows skinned Android phone which comes with all the Office apps, etc, but natively supports all the Android apps. This would then help consumers transition to a Microsoft future. It would however be a blow to the Windows mobile operating system but that ship may have already sailed.
  • roryisok 9y ago
    I wish they'd add live tiles to the launcher
• roryisok 9y ago
  I still use it, and will continue to until I can't anymore. I'm on my third Windows Phone, which I bought just a few weeks ago. I've tried to switch to android, but after a few weeks I missed pinning tiles, and the simpler gallery and superior keyboard
• himme 9y ago
  I used windows phone for more than 3 years. Lumia 630, 730 and 550. To be honest it is way better than android and iphone in terms of usability. I concur with OP that metro UI and all dark theme was the best and unique. I recently switched to android because of lack of updates in the basic apps that I was using. It is still my backup phone. Ohh forgot about the keyboard and unified messaging system. Loved cortana. One thing is I want to point out that all email clients and calendar app should learn to do things right way outlook apps in windows phone did. If you don't believe me use the native outlook and calendar apps you will start hating the google clients. Great jobs phone team at Microsoft!
• hnfoobar 9y ago
  I miss it too... live tiles, outlook integration, camera, fresh new UI
• __sr__ 9y ago
  Nokia Lumia 1520 and 930 are two of the best phones I’ve ever used. More than the tiled interface, I liked the consistancy and the coherence across the OS. The OS followed a certain set of design principles throughout and what few apps were available integrated well with it. Things like the various Hubs were very nice and useful. I’ve always liked the idea of scopes from Ubuntu Phone, and the Windows Phone Hubs were built along the same idea. I’ve always felt that there should be a central app for each category which all providers should integrate with, instead of having individual apps[1]. For example, I usually want to watch a video, not YouTube/Netflix/Amazon Prime/whatever. The Video Hub or Scope should aggregate videos from all the available sources. The same concept can be applied to a Music, Messages etc. Coming back to the point, coherence is something Android sorely lacks. Unless you are using a phone with near stock Android[2], the apps are always out of sync with the rest of the OS in terms of the design language. And many apps don’t even follow the Google design guidelines. While there were not many non-Nokia Windows phones, given their track record on Windows desktops, I don’t think MS was going to allow that sort of interface customisation. The lack of coherence enforces my view that Android is some sort of Frankenstein’s Monster hastily cobbled together without putting much thought into the design - internal or external. I wish Windows Phone had survived, if only to provide some competition to Android. Let’s face it, iOS and Android don’t really compete in any meaningful way. Google is happy to stick to the volumes while Apple keeps the premium segment. And I wish I hadn’t sold my Lumia when Nokia/MS didn’t enable 4G/VoLTE for my carrier. At least I’d be able to use it as a secondary phone. [1] The individual apps can be there for people who like them, but they must plug into the central hub. [2] With Pixel Launcher not being released for other devices, it is not clear what “Stock Android” meany anymore — Google is fragmenting Android themselves. Can you imagine the outrage if MS kept certain Windows features exclusive to Surface?
• nostalgeek 9y ago
  All I say is competition is good. I don't want to live in a world where Android is the only mobile OS out there. This is also true for the desktop space, Windows dominance is an issue, especially since the web didn't really fulfill its promise as an app platform, something Linux would have benefited from greatly. WP browser was also sub-part when it comes to JS/HTML5 support compared to like Firefox on Android at that time. A good mobile browser is just the most important thing for a smartphone.
• Dolores12 9y ago
  The most annoying/stupid thing i found is one can not change sound volume using Settings. One can change sound volume using hardware buttons only.
• ma5ter 9y ago
  I bought a cheap windows phone for my mother four years back, even after 4 years, it works like the day I bought it (fast, no heating issues..), The big fonts and tile interface makes it easy for her to use it without her glasses.
• coldacid 9y ago
  I still use my Lumia 950 as my every day cellphone. When it dies, my plan is to just go back to whatever the most basic dumb phone will be at the time. I've experienced Android and iPhone and neither of them hold a candle to the experience I've had with Windows Phone / Win10 Mobile, so I'd rather just reset back to a point where there weren't things like apps or mobile internet if I can't keep mobile-friendly Windows on my phone.
• znpy 9y ago
  A colleague of mine has a windows phone with the dock that lets him use the phone as a desktop computer. It's super freaking cool. It's sad that this direction is not being developed more.
  • wvenable 9y ago
    Samsung has the Dex doc for both the S8 and S9. Dock your phone and get a desktop-like Android experience.
• jh72de 9y ago
  Windows Phone may be dead, but Windows 10 is continuing the path to run on both Intel and ARM and on all form factors with the same codebase, so finally the next desktop PCs may be smarter than smartphones and equally mobile, at least their core.
• jh72de 9y ago
  While the app Drude mimics the messaging hub by combining fetched notifications in on view, it's a question of when but whether the hub will finally be brought to Android and iOS as well.
• Paraesthetic 8y ago
  I've still got my Lumia 950XL sitting on my bedside table, It still is as smooth and fast as the day I bought it,and the camera still craps all over anything on the market (I miss the camera the most). I think what ultimately killed it was that Satya Nadella didn't have any ability in the consumer space, and simply didn't know how to sell devices. Also taking into account the fact that Microsoft are very slow movers when it comes to doing things under their internal brand (Surface and Xbox being almost separate companies have managed to get around this), and the fact that silicon valley shills are very anti Microsoft also doesn't help.