5 ms·

I was a big Cortana + Windows Phone fan (big enough even that I had one in use in 2014) and it did start out competitive. Over time though, Siri got better, Ale

by nxc18 6y ago

I was a big Cortana + Windows Phone fan (big enough even that I had one in use in 2014) and it did start out competitive. Over time though, Siri got better, Alexa got better; Cortana never did. Microsoft shows an inspirational video at Build every year, but what they show never seems to become reality. In contrast, I started investing in Alexa mid/late-2018 and while it was great to start, it has become increasingly useful. It makes phone calls to businesses, and gets it right very consistently; it knows business hours; the automation has become more powerful over time (a category Cortana never even began to touch); and the integration ecosystem is superb. Alexa keep improving, too. Yesterday I invoked a routine that included playing music, while the invoked service was busy playing on another device. While in the past the music just wouldn't have played, now she says, 'Amazon Music is already in use on another device. Did you want to play Thunderstorm Sounds on Bedroom Sonos?' That's just one example, but they are numerous and regular enough that I was able to pick one from just yesterday.

theklub 6y ago
Windows phone was actually legit, I was one of the few who loved it I guess. Those big tiles etc...
- drummer 6y ago
  I still have 3 Windows Phones, 2 Lumia 950s and 1 Wilyfox Pro. Still use my Lumia as my main phone and will keep doing so for as long as I can keep getting new batteries. Windows phone was a superior product. It is too bad Microsoft gave up on it. It saddens me to this day.
  - leetrout 6y ago
    Some parts of it were very superior and some parts were abysmal. The overall flat design was a big pain in the ass when you couldn’t tell what was clickable / editable. The accessibility of putting the data first was awesome. Apps being tiles or a simple list of names was great. They started that with the Zune and it’s still a winning play on the Xbox. It worked great on the phone. I want to try light phone and hope it doesn’t suck.
    - drummer 6y ago
      I have to agree with not knowing sometimes what is clickable. I have that problem now in Windows 10 UI, such as in the settings app. Often the text is clickable but that is not immediately apparent. This is a flaw in their design imo.
- kunai 6y ago
  I'll always have a soft spot for my Lumia. I loved it too
- rbg246 6y ago
  I am also one of those people I enthusiastically bought one back in early 2015. I was one over also by the UI, found it super easy to use.
- cbsks 6y ago
  There are dozens of us! I absolutely loved my Windows phones. I had a couple of different Lumia phones, including the flagship Lumia 920 which had a pretty decent camera for the time, but my favorite was the Lumia 520. The Lumia 520 was only $60, and didn't need a case or screen protector or anything fancy like that. When it was dropped, the back popped off and the battery flew out which reduced the impact on the screen. It had offline maps, a web browser, and the battery easily lasted for 3 days. And if it was lost, it was just $60 to replace! I went through 3 of them before my bank removed their Windows Phone app, which meant that I couldn't do mobile check deposit. I "upgraded" to an android phone, which cost much more and was so much more complicated to use.
  - jborichevskiy 6y ago
    Ahhh I do miss my Lumia 920. Solid hardware and a refreshing take on software.
- virtue3 6y ago
  I was a windows phone dev. It was friggin -AWESOME-. Really sad it never materialized. I had worked on android before and M$ really knows how to treat a dev right.
- untog 6y ago
  In many ways Windows Phone came out at the wrong time (i.e. way too late) but it felt like a real sweet spot for UI. Android had stalled out on 2.x for a year or more while they focused on tablet UI (woops) and iPhone was starting to feel very samey. When I saw the WP UI I was immediately sold. That plus the keyboard made for a phone that was a genuine joy to use. But... no apps. And then they pissed everyone off by announcing that Windows Phone 7 devices wouldn’t get an upgrade to 8. That was the point at which I realised MS didn’t really understand what they were doing and switched to iPhone. I still think there was potential there, but alas...
  - laumars 6y ago
    The UI might have been nice for small pockets of technical folk but it was a mess for a lot of others. For example WP7s emphasis on big long lists made it very hard for me as a dyslexic to quickly scan for the one app I wanted in that list. My eyes would constantly jump about and the lack of other visual clues made it hard to anchor to the item I wanted. I don’t even have this problem menu bars because those have more visual clues that WP7 did. Another issue was how the flat design made it impossible to distinguish between a button and a highlighted block. Also between a hyperlink and normal emphasised text (frankly, hyperlinks do not belong on UIs outside of document markups. There was one time my mum changed her WP7 language to Polish (she has Polish heritage) to see if she could read it. She couldn’t and that mistake was totally user error on her part. But she could read enough to get us to the language settings and it literally took both her and I more than 10 minutes to realise that there was a button that needed pressing after the language selection because the button blended in with all the text on that dialogue. If your only distinguishing feature of interactive elements is their caption then that’s simply bad UI design. To give balance, I’ve used nearly every Windows device on phones or PDAs. While Windows Mobile (and CE before it) had its own issues they were still enjoyable devices in their own ways. But I hated WP7 because the UI constantly left me guessing. My mum hated it for the same reason so switched to Android. One of my friends, who is a reasonably technical Windows fanboy but doesn’t work in the IT industry, he hated it too and then switch to Android. It was not a well design UI at all. And while I’m sure there are pockets of engineers who will miss WP7, I’ve never met a single end user who liked it.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
robomartin 6y ago
Microsoft missed a massive opportunity to implement deep integration between Windows on the desktop and Windows phone. What I mean by that is a smart phone that become such an intimate extension of your computer that it blends into it during use. I remain flabbergasted that today, in 2020, phones don't blend into desktop and laptop computers in any significant manner. I can't browse files on my iPhone X from my Windows 10 desktop through Bluetooth. There are band-aids and work arounds through apps and services. My point is that this should be a natural integration by now, not a pile of band-aids. To be sure, companies like Apple are at fault as well. Think about everything you can do when you plug in a second, third or fourth monitor into your computer. You should be able to do that and more with your multi-core, multi-gigabyte, hyper-connected, high display resolution smart device. I should be able to start a Zoom meeting on my phone, swipe the call onto my computer screen and back. I should be able to drop PDF and other files onto my phone by dragging them into the aforementioned native interface. I still think MS have an opportunity to come out (again) with a phone that is a such a good extension of Windows that it would feel like you ripped the phone right off the Windows desktop and file system. The problem with this is it requires leadership and commitment they might not have.
- virtue3 6y ago
  the "Your Phone" app on windows 10 does some of this. At least I can look at SMS and my pictures and stuff! Over wifi even!
- algorithmsRcool 6y ago
  > I remain flabbergasted that today, in 2020, phones don't blend into desktop and laptop computers in any significant manner. Microsoft did something like that in 2015. The high end Lumia's could plug into a dock with a keyboard, mouse and display and show a windows desktop with a start menu and apps. It was called Windows 10 Continuum and it never caught on. https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/20/9767266/microsoft-lumia-950-review-windows-10-continuum https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/20/9767266/microsoft-lumia-...
  - ta17711771 6y ago

by nxc18 6y ago

theklub 6y ago

Windows phone was actually legit, I was one of the few who loved it I guess. Those big tiles etc...

drummer 6y ago
I still have 3 Windows Phones, 2 Lumia 950s and 1 Wilyfox Pro. Still use my Lumia as my main phone and will keep doing so for as long as I can keep getting new batteries. Windows phone was a superior product. It is too bad Microsoft gave up on it. It saddens me to this day.
- leetrout 6y ago
  Some parts of it were very superior and some parts were abysmal. The overall flat design was a big pain in the ass when you couldn’t tell what was clickable / editable. The accessibility of putting the data first was awesome. Apps being tiles or a simple list of names was great. They started that with the Zune and it’s still a winning play on the Xbox. It worked great on the phone. I want to try light phone and hope it doesn’t suck.
  - drummer 6y ago
    I have to agree with not knowing sometimes what is clickable. I have that problem now in Windows 10 UI, such as in the settings app. Often the text is clickable but that is not immediately apparent. This is a flaw in their design imo.
kunai 6y ago
I'll always have a soft spot for my Lumia. I loved it too
rbg246 6y ago
I am also one of those people I enthusiastically bought one back in early 2015. I was one over also by the UI, found it super easy to use.
cbsks 6y ago
There are dozens of us! I absolutely loved my Windows phones. I had a couple of different Lumia phones, including the flagship Lumia 920 which had a pretty decent camera for the time, but my favorite was the Lumia 520. The Lumia 520 was only $60, and didn't need a case or screen protector or anything fancy like that. When it was dropped, the back popped off and the battery flew out which reduced the impact on the screen. It had offline maps, a web browser, and the battery easily lasted for 3 days. And if it was lost, it was just $60 to replace! I went through 3 of them before my bank removed their Windows Phone app, which meant that I couldn't do mobile check deposit. I "upgraded" to an android phone, which cost much more and was so much more complicated to use.
- jborichevskiy 6y ago
  Ahhh I do miss my Lumia 920. Solid hardware and a refreshing take on software.
virtue3 6y ago
I was a windows phone dev. It was friggin -AWESOME-. Really sad it never materialized. I had worked on android before and M$ really knows how to treat a dev right.
untog 6y ago
In many ways Windows Phone came out at the wrong time (i.e. way too late) but it felt like a real sweet spot for UI. Android had stalled out on 2.x for a year or more while they focused on tablet UI (woops) and iPhone was starting to feel very samey. When I saw the WP UI I was immediately sold. That plus the keyboard made for a phone that was a genuine joy to use. But... no apps. And then they pissed everyone off by announcing that Windows Phone 7 devices wouldn’t get an upgrade to 8. That was the point at which I realised MS didn’t really understand what they were doing and switched to iPhone. I still think there was potential there, but alas...
- laumars 6y ago
  The UI might have been nice for small pockets of technical folk but it was a mess for a lot of others. For example WP7s emphasis on big long lists made it very hard for me as a dyslexic to quickly scan for the one app I wanted in that list. My eyes would constantly jump about and the lack of other visual clues made it hard to anchor to the item I wanted. I don’t even have this problem menu bars because those have more visual clues that WP7 did. Another issue was how the flat design made it impossible to distinguish between a button and a highlighted block. Also between a hyperlink and normal emphasised text (frankly, hyperlinks do not belong on UIs outside of document markups. There was one time my mum changed her WP7 language to Polish (she has Polish heritage) to see if she could read it. She couldn’t and that mistake was totally user error on her part. But she could read enough to get us to the language settings and it literally took both her and I more than 10 minutes to realise that there was a button that needed pressing after the language selection because the button blended in with all the text on that dialogue. If your only distinguishing feature of interactive elements is their caption then that’s simply bad UI design. To give balance, I’ve used nearly every Windows device on phones or PDAs. While Windows Mobile (and CE before it) had its own issues they were still enjoyable devices in their own ways. But I hated WP7 because the UI constantly left me guessing. My mum hated it for the same reason so switched to Android. One of my friends, who is a reasonably technical Windows fanboy but doesn’t work in the IT industry, he hated it too and then switch to Android. It was not a well design UI at all. And while I’m sure there are pockets of engineers who will miss WP7, I’ve never met a single end user who liked it.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

robomartin 6y ago

Microsoft missed a massive opportunity to implement deep integration between Windows on the desktop and Windows phone. What I mean by that is a smart phone that become such an intimate extension of your computer that it blends into it during use. I remain flabbergasted that today, in 2020, phones don't blend into desktop and laptop computers in any significant manner. I can't browse files on my iPhone X from my Windows 10 desktop through Bluetooth. There are band-aids and work arounds through apps and services. My point is that this should be a natural integration by now, not a pile of band-aids. To be sure, companies like Apple are at fault as well. Think about everything you can do when you plug in a second, third or fourth monitor into your computer. You should be able to do that and more with your multi-core, multi-gigabyte, hyper-connected, high display resolution smart device. I should be able to start a Zoom meeting on my phone, swipe the call onto my computer screen and back. I should be able to drop PDF and other files onto my phone by dragging them into the aforementioned native interface. I still think MS have an opportunity to come out (again) with a phone that is a such a good extension of Windows that it would feel like you ripped the phone right off the Windows desktop and file system. The problem with this is it requires leadership and commitment they might not have.

virtue3 6y ago
the "Your Phone" app on windows 10 does some of this. At least I can look at SMS and my pictures and stuff! Over wifi even!
algorithmsRcool 6y ago
> I remain flabbergasted that today, in 2020, phones don't blend into desktop and laptop computers in any significant manner. Microsoft did something like that in 2015. The high end Lumia's could plug into a dock with a keyboard, mouse and display and show a windows desktop with a start menu and apps. It was called Windows 10 Continuum and it never caught on. https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/20/9767266/microsoft-lumia-950-review-windows-10-continuum https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/20/9767266/microsoft-lumia-...
- ta17711771 6y ago