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Windows Phone 8.1 was the pinnacle of modern smartphone UX and is still far ahead of Android, with BB10 OS being the only serious competitor. If I had to descr

Windows Phone 8.1 was the pinnacle of modern smartphone UX and is still far ahead of Android, with BB10 OS being the only serious competitor. If I had to describe Android's UI in comparison: usable but I hate every second of it. Especially the text input is so frustrating I have to wonder whether it's intentional.

neogodless 5y ago
It's still a great mystery to me why it seemed like the swipe keyboard (Word Flow[0]) on Windows Phone was so, so good, and yet even SwiftKey which is owned by Microsoft doesn't measure up (but SwiftKey co-existed with Word Flow...) At this point, some seven years since I've used Windows Phone, maybe my memory isn't that accurate, but I remember the transition to using Android keyboards to be very painful. It's interesting to see a thread where even going from Windows Phone 8.1 to 10, the predictive keyboard got worse.[1] [0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-new-word-flow-keyboard-is-the-best-smartphone-text-entry-system/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-new-word-flow-keybo... [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/windowsphone/comments/4smmuc/what_happened_to_swipe_keyboard_in_windows_10/ https://old.reddit.com/r/windowsphone/comments/4smmuc/what_h...
- com2kid 5y ago
  > It's still a great mystery to me why it seemed like the swipe keyboard (Word Flow[0]) on Windows Phone was so, so good, and yet even SwiftKey which is owned by Microsoft doesn't measure up I worked with the guy who lead the swipe keyboard on Windows Phone. Amazing machine learning engineer who lead an amazing team. Some of the work he did for my team was out of this world (ML models to do predictive touch inputs to decrease perceived touch screen latency and improve touch recognition accuracy, on a Cortex m3) Unfortunately for whatever reason his code was never adopted outside the mobile org, and I believe he was moved off that project after its initial version was completed. This is also why the desktop Windows swipe keyboard for Windows tablets at that time terri-bad compared to Windows Phone's swipe keyboard! Also this is possibly why the keyboard got worse, not sure it was long enough ago that I remember it was mid-Win8.1 mobile -> 10 transition but I don't recall all the details and the timeline.
  - swiley 5y ago
    >Unfortunately for whatever reason his code was never adopted outside the mobile org If it were open source people could still use it elsewhere.
slver 5y ago
I'm not sure making your labels so large they don't fit on the screen is part of the "pinnacle of modern smartphone UX". It had interesting ideas that work better for a fancy site, not for a OS that should be used by hundreds of millions of casual users.

neogodless 5y ago

It's still a great mystery to me why it seemed like the swipe keyboard (Word Flow[0]) on Windows Phone was so, so good, and yet even SwiftKey which is owned by Microsoft doesn't measure up (but SwiftKey co-existed with Word Flow...) At this point, some seven years since I've used Windows Phone, maybe my memory isn't that accurate, but I remember the transition to using Android keyboards to be very painful. It's interesting to see a thread where even going from Windows Phone 8.1 to 10, the predictive keyboard got worse.[1] [0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-new-word-flow-keyboard-is-the-best-smartphone-text-entry-system/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-new-word-flow-keybo... [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/windowsphone/comments/4smmuc/what_happened_to_swipe_keyboard_in_windows_10/ https://old.reddit.com/r/windowsphone/comments/4smmuc/what_h...

com2kid 5y ago
> It's still a great mystery to me why it seemed like the swipe keyboard (Word Flow[0]) on Windows Phone was so, so good, and yet even SwiftKey which is owned by Microsoft doesn't measure up I worked with the guy who lead the swipe keyboard on Windows Phone. Amazing machine learning engineer who lead an amazing team. Some of the work he did for my team was out of this world (ML models to do predictive touch inputs to decrease perceived touch screen latency and improve touch recognition accuracy, on a Cortex m3) Unfortunately for whatever reason his code was never adopted outside the mobile org, and I believe he was moved off that project after its initial version was completed. This is also why the desktop Windows swipe keyboard for Windows tablets at that time terri-bad compared to Windows Phone's swipe keyboard! Also this is possibly why the keyboard got worse, not sure it was long enough ago that I remember it was mid-Win8.1 mobile -> 10 transition but I don't recall all the details and the timeline.
- swiley 5y ago
  >Unfortunately for whatever reason his code was never adopted outside the mobile org If it were open source people could still use it elsewhere.

slver 5y ago

I'm not sure making your labels so large they don't fit on the screen is part of the "pinnacle of modern smartphone UX". It had interesting ideas that work better for a fancy site, not for a OS that should be used by hundreds of millions of casual users.