The total failure of Windows Phone to gain acceptance in the market is a huge pity. I have a Lumina 950 as a secondary device (for loading with a local SIM while abroad) and it’s a solid performer with a polished OS, refreshingly ’different’ UI, and excellent basics (build quality, call quality, and battery life). The basic, core apps I ’need’ in this role are available (WhatsApp, Facebook/Messenger, Twitter, & cetera) and it hotspots very dependably towards my myriad Apple devices (iPhone7+, iPadPro10.5, 11” MacBook). It even has some very fascinating features not seen elsewhere (I have a dedicated dock for using certain apps with an external screen, keyboard and mouse, whose name escapes me at the moment).
I really wished they had managed to gain a foothold, because as a platform it really lacks nothing (excepting an app developer base, and actual producers of handsets).
Every major version was a new os. Their phone strategy was terrible and lacked commitment. It didn't help that it was started by one CEO and abandoned midway through by the next CEO.
I had had some Nokia phone with WP7 and it was a pretty nice phone despite lacking some apps, and I was looking forward the the future of the platform. Of course when the future did come witn WP8, they said there would be no updates to existing phones and they were pushing developers to use APIs that would only work on the new OS meaning my limited pool of apps wouldn't grow on my current phone, which hurt more than the no OS upgrade. While the lack of OS upgrade isn't uncommon in the Android world, Google doesn't generally push developers to abandon the old OS base so quickly. So with my Windows Phone basically EOL'd overnight(within about 6 months or so of buying it), I went back to Android.
It failed repeatedly under one CEO, until the next CEO put it out of its misery.
Ironically, by the time it was terminated it had developed into a very valid product indeed. Shame - Apple and Android definitely need more competition from someone with actual resources (sorry to the Sailfish, Firefox OS, Ubuntu Phone, etc etc).
> It failed repeatedly under one CEO, until the next CEO put it out of its misery.
The person who was the head of the Windows Phone group while it failed repeatedly under the first CEO was promoted and put in charge of the entire Windows division by the next CEO.
I don't think that was at all part of why it failed. Palm stuck to their OS but theirs failed too.
I think all that ultimately mattered was that Android became the Windows of mobile phones; an operating system that each manufacturer/carrier could customize to sell the idea of value-add (with no actual value-add, I know).
Palm sold webOS because it ran out of money. It ran out of money because webOS was not a success.
It was really close, Verizon was going to make the Pre its flagship device but changed its mind when the Droid was a success. The smartphone landscape could looks very different right now had the timelines been just a tad different.
I can report this is exactly what drove me from the platform. I adopted Windows Phone out the gate and received a never-ending litany of supportive emails, oneDrive bonuses, etc. There were missing features, but early adopters were promised they were coming and I think most of us thought the experience was worth compromising for early on. Then Windows Phone "7.5" released barely a year after I'd bought my phone, included most of the features early adopters had begged for, and didn't support any of the phones people had already bought. Soon some apps didn't work without 7.5 either. It felt like we all got flipped the bird for taking a risk on Microsoft's platform and I switched to Android. Every aspect of it felt dishonest and disingenuous - "7.5" implies an incremental release, and in terms of features it really should have been one. I have no idea if they just couldn't hack it on the weaker early devices or if MS honestly thought we were all going to run out and buy Nokias immediately. I mean, I nearly did a year later when they were $1...
I have an Alcatel Idol 4s for Windows, and I actually like it a lot.
(Confusingly is not the same hardware as the android Idol 4s. The windows version actually has much better hardware. Snapdragon 820 processor.)
I would say that some of the apps were either sub-par or missing. The Uber app wasn't as good, and there was no Lyft app. Yet, I found that the mobile websites for both were perfectly fine, and you can pin them to your start screen just like apps.
The AMC theater app for both Android and Windows always gave me endless trouble, but I likewise realized that their mobile website was just fine.
The Comcast/Xfinity site likewise can do basically anything their app can do.
I think being forced to use mobile sites is much less unpleasant than one would expect, and this is the way things should be trending anyways. It is the only way to achieve adequate cross-platform development.
As an ex-WP user who also switched to android I would argue the android UX is a step backward in some respects.
When I open an app in WP I received immediate loading/animation feedback.
In android many core actions (such as initiating a phone call) cause temporary freeze while the app loads. Did the phone receive my tap? Do I need to tap again or wait?
Coming from a more fluid interface like the WP this is something I really miss and makes android feel a little more primitive in comparison (but the advanced apps do make up for it)
May be your Android is underpowered? It's not an excuse, of course. My iPhone 4S might lag for a few seconds between receiving tap and displaying an action. Modern iPhone (or iPhone 4S with iOS 6) responded instantly. Or it could indicate some kind of hardware problem, where driver is causing delay somewhere in the stack, for example very slow SD-card or something similar.
It doesn't really have to do with the power of the device, it's just that once you hit the call button the UI hangs until the call starts before switching to 'calling view' rather than acknowledging the user's intent immediately. It's certainly more noticeable on slower phones but it's fundamentally a UX problem.
My samsung s7 edge, has had this problem with phone calls for quite a while and, while not the fastest on the market, I doubt it would be considered slow.
Is there an expectation that most phones won't be able to provide hotspot / tethering for various platforms (not sure if there's some peculiarities with the three precisely branded devices you mention)?
Polished OS, build quality, call quality, battery life -- these features are all available (and were pre-Microsoft mobile) in both Android and Apple worlds.
Be cautious about assuming that the applications you use are all other people will want. I suspect the massive disparity in application volume & variety was the driving force behind Microsoft abandoning this platform.
I don't agree Android offers that as an OS. Battery life is a little hardware specific, but on average Android provides below par "performance per mWh" compared to the other two.
Comparing "average Android" to WP / iPhone is unfair. Apple is the sole manufacturer of iPhone, while WP mainly refers to Lumia (90% market share by MS/Nokia as per [1]). If you want to compare Android with them, its fair to compare something like Pixel / Galaxy because long tail of other manufacturers just drag the average down.
You seem to be misunderstanding, I mean the core philosophies of Android as an OS that make it convenient/powerful in some aspects also lend to it being inefficient with battery life.
Android is making strides with things like Doze, but the same things that make iOS feel locked down for me as a developer compared to Android are also a huge part of the reason why iPhones can get such amazing standby time (since crappy software isn't even allowed to do inefficient things)
And fwiw, if I were talking about hardware, I'd expect the lower-end devices are better with battery life because more of them come with near bone stock Android than flagships.
I was really hoping to have a full Windows 10 phone that ran x86-64 apps and you could then dock and use like a regular computer. I think Intel scuttled that idea when they dropped the mobile chip though. It could have been a game changer.
It's still 100% possible and could be happening either this or next year as mentioned by Snapdragon [0]. There is a Youtube video showcasing full Windows 10 running on an ARM processor [1].
Windows Central have also reported Microsoft's next vision of the OS called "Andromeda" there will be a base OS that can have components bolted on [2].
I've liked that sort of idea, but not really as it has been currently implemented.
What I really want is just some way to maintain my 'working state' wherever I go.
When I'm in front of a desk, I'll want to make best use of multiple screens, higher-speed networking and storage. And when mobile (on a phone or tablet) I still want to maintain my context, at least in terms of what I've been looking at on the browser, in email, etc.
At any rate, I don't want to be power/thermal limited by the processor I can carry around in my pocket.
I think this was the Holy Grail, a regular PC in a phone form factor. Of course you are left with the problem of needing a monitor and keyboard to plug it into when you want to do any work.
As someone that invested into UWP development for Windows Phone, it did not help at all that they rebooted 7, 8, 8.1 and 10 SDKs, always forcing us to rewrite the apps, manually.
The whole .NET Standard only happened to appease developers fed up with the whole story.
On top of that they kept failing the promises regarding the OS upgrades, even dropping devices that were running the preview builds without issues.
Windows Phone 8 was probably one of the best OS's Microsoft ever did. It was fast on cheap hardware and the UI actually had just one idea instead of several layers of cruft of generations of unfinished new ideas. It was more open than iOS where it counted and more closed than Android where it mattered.
Well Microsoft got a great balance between allowing a programmer or a user to do things without allowing them end up with a phone that drains battery too fast, isn't secure, looks like a mess etcetera. Most important is it's update model. It just works.
A mid range WP Nokia would be a great secondary phone to me (disclosure: I'm an iOS developer) if it would have any traction.
Windows 10 Mobile is better. Developers can use the same XAML + C# toolchain for universal apps, but easily deploy to desktops as well. The Edge browser is much better. It is fast, and shares the same kernel as regular Windows, as well as Xbox.
The upcoming mobile version will have something called CShell which means that the interface will be shared among desktop and mobile, meaning that there will be no differences aside from x86 support.
> Are we supposed to buy legacy/obscure devices to get it though?
It hasn't been advertised to regular consumers because it's targeted at business users but the HP Elite x3 is the current flagship Windows Phone device.
Windows 10 Mobile is not getting the Fall Creators Update, it was parked in a development branch, guess how many of us still care about doing UWP apps for it?
The newest and most common out of the existing phones are getting the fall creators update, but a "feature2" branch without CShell. I believe CShell can run all the existing UWP apps.
.NET and UWP sound like they'll be unaffected by CShell, except that developers targetting CShell will want to ensure their apps work on a larger range of display resolutions.
Rumors abound that 10 on mobile isn't getting the FCU for reasons of surprise/marketing/skipping ahead to Redstone 4. There's a lot of talk about "Andromeda OS" and the idea that it is something different from Windows 10 on mobile, but there's also signs/rumors that seem to say "Andromeda OS" is just an internal project name for the release plans after FCU (which is Redstone 3).
I'm right there worried about things. I've got a tablet I keep active in the Windows Insider program and reading release notes it's very disconcerting these days to see the 15,000 build numbers on mobile versus the 16,000 build numbers everywhere else. I want to see excitement in the Feedback Hub about mobile and wish it were easier to run Insider builds on mobile without worrying about accidentally toasting your emergency needs device and/or 2FA device.
I'd like to still hope that the Windows team knows what they are doing this time and the results will work out, but yes, things look pretty bleak today.
Windows Phone was the best thing since webOS. The developer experience was (and still is) a lot better than for iOS or Android. I'm sure it will eventually come back.
I feel like the people currently mocking Microsoft for how "boring" the HoloLens has quickly become because it's primary focus hasn't been games but enterprise and it's still not very consumer-friendly, are missing exactly why Microsoft is likely to be the leading AR platform. What Apple and Google are doing are still just fun toys for kids; HoloLens is already powering incredible business applications in places as disparate as NASA JPL and Ford.
The fact that Microsoft is pushing Universal apps so hard, and if you're making a universal app for desktops, it's trivially easy to allow it to also work on Mobile. A not-insignificant number of times I've installed an app on my desktop and then realized I can use it on my phone, or installed a phone app, and realized it's great on my desktop too.
If UWP takes off, their mobile app support will follow. New Windows 10 S devices only running UWP apps will encourage this progress a lot.
There's a setting now to set Windows 10 Home and Pro to only allow Store apps as well. How soon until that tempts more of us that do unpaid tech support in our free time for family and friends to just turn that setting on for them?
Long story short: Developers, developers, developers, developers. The same reason why people won't switch from Windows to Linux is why people won't switch from Android to Windows Phone.
It’s not only developers (although that was a HUGE Robles and also one of the big two problems with WebOS).
Every time they made a huge change in the OS (for the better) basically none of the existing phones go it. So every time they updated they were basically throwing away the previous platform. If apps weren’t compatible (I don’t know) they may have been resetting that as well.
Combined with how late they were to the party that was just a death sentence.
Sure, but the difference is that Linux might be small in market share on the desktop but it's carved itself a small but self-sustaining niche for itself. Windows Phone didn't even manage that.
There's a mild delight in noting that Microsoft failed to break into someone else's platform stranglehold. Personally I wasn't sad to see it fail to obtain a place in the market.
Disclaimer -- I've never used a Microsoft phone. Indeed, I only know one person that had one - and even then it was an employer decision. Nor have I ever heard anyone wish out loud that their phone was more like their Microsoft Windows computer, or that it integrated better with their existing Microsoft systems. People who want to 'think different' could have embraced Maemo, BB, Sailfish, Firefox, or various other niche platforms. And then observed the same problem -- lack of people developing applications for them.
> Nor have I ever heard anyone wish out loud that their phone was more like their Microsoft Windows computer
The one place I want microsoft to succeed is smartphones. Android spies on basically everything you do. Both android and iOS are vendor lock-in in a way we've never seen before. Compared to the current smartphone OS offerings, Windows was (and is) an incredibly open platform.
Android itself does not "[spy] on basically everything you do", that role is given to the Google-specific services and applications you can - but do not have to - run on the thing. Neither is Android "vendor lock-in in a way we've never seen before", the source to the basic OS is available after all. The exception to this is formed by the device drivers which generally come in the form of "blobs" which are tailored to a specific build of the OS. This makes it unnecessarily difficult to make use of source builds, a situation which might be rectified by "project Treble" [1] but the jury is still out on this.
With the source to Android available and decoupled from the device-specific code it should be easier to create alternative Android distributions. This should also make it possible to upgrade Android on devices which have been abandoned by the vendor and those which never got any updates to begin with.
This is not just theory by the way, I'm using a number of Google-free Android devices myself. They run just fine without those Google bits, they don't spy more than any other device. This does not mean it does not spy at all but that problem is present in all mobile devices from all manufacturers and under all operating systems: the radio interface layer is a black box closed source blob in all commercially available devices that I've come across.
The Android that competes with the iPhone and Windows Phone devices in the market at large is the Android that either has Google Play Services, or occasionally has a much worse (privacy-wise) Chinese alternative suite.
The Android you get without Google Play Services are more like Firefox OS, or Ubuntu Phone, or chrooting into Debian and calling that your "OS", interesting things for developers, but not really what the average end user would consider a serious phone option that's even on their radar.
Those who are interested in the nitty-gritty of keeping a semblance of privacy generally will not baulk at taking some hurdles to get there, nor do they expect their devices to work exactly like those within the walled gardens.
Now if there where a way to combine these two worlds - that of the 'it just works but it knows more about me than I do myself' and the 'it does exactly what I tell it do do, no more and no less' - it would be feasible to offer such a device to a larger section of the general public.
A stripped-down Android distribution - sans Google-specific bits, with some replacements where needed - which does over the air updates just like devices on the other side of the wall would be a good start.
iOS lets you keep a semblance of privacy without hurdles. The walled garden even contributes to it's security.
I think more people who have a passing interest in privacy would rather take a walled garden on some of the best hardware out there with a rather enjoyable, if not powerful, OS.
iOS only allows this if you consider your data to be private as long as it doesn't leave Apple (i.e. the garden). This does not mean your data can not be used for profiling purposes, it just means the profiling would be done wholly within the confines of Apple, Inc. If you trust Apple to not use this data for anything but your personal good you can feel safe and secure. If on the other hand you consider Apple to be an (extreme) example of a profit-driven company you'd do well to reconsider whether you want your personal data within their reach.
While it is hard - and getting harder - to evade profiling it is still preferable to minimise the amount of personally identifiable data collected by commercial or governmental organisations. Using an Android device without Google-specific code can help here.
For the majority of users I'd recommend trusting Apple. If you're in a class of user where Apple can't be trusted I don't recommend a smartphone. They can earn profit by being the privacy oriented alternative to Google's OS.
I think the conversation has shifted from my main point. When the average user hears "Android" or says it, it's "Android + GPS". The GP said Android but seeing as the most common Android devices competing with the other two OSes they mentioned come with GPS I find it disingenuous to try and imply that it's not "Android proper" if it has GPS. If anything Android without GPS isn't "Android proper" in this context because of the amount of functionality it provides that people include when they compare those OSes
I’ve got a Windows Phone* and I honestly appreciated it’s UX. It wasn’t “for me”, but I still appreciated how they took a new direction than just the rampant copying back and forth like iOS and Android do. I kinda wish it had gained share, competition is a good thing, especially when the competitor is willing to step outside the box.
* - Admittedly I also have 10+ Android phones, 20+ iPhones, and 2 WebOS phones.
> There's a mild delight in noting that Microsoft failed to break into someone else's platform stranglehold.
You're forgetting that Microsoft _was_ the smartphone leader around the time of Windows Mobile 5 and 6, after defeating Palm. At one time, there were over 100 models of of Windows Mobile phones on the market. (Android's fragmentation problem was entirely foreseeable because it happened to WM first.)
They lost the market to Apple and Android through a mixture of complacency and stupidity, which is something of a shame. WM was just as open as the Windows desktop; no walled garden, no app store eating a third of your revenue, no vendor lock-in shenanigans, just load whatever software you want and run it.
I really liked my Windows Phone and wish they were still being made. The OS was stable and fast, and you could resize the squares to make them easier to hit with your thumb. Battery life was good. I think if they'd gone with premium hardware they'd make sales to people who appreciate a good looking phone and one that didn't make them wait for pointless animations to finish.
Now that Microsoft has talented hardware people working on really nice products like Surface, they could probably do an in-house design on a new phone. Borrow a page from Motorola/Google's Moto X Pure Edition and put a wooden back on it - it's grippier than plastic or glass, and looks classier too.
Yeah, I may end up switching to Verizon, though I'm not sure how happy they will be. US Cellular owns the towers near me and Verizon has an agreement to share towers with them. However, Verizon recently cut about 12,500 people off because they were using non-Verizon towers too often. (This made some news sites and the municipalities are less than impressed.)
US Cellular doesn't like to activate non-branded phones, though I guess they have started doing some. They share the same tech so I don't know of any technical limitations that would prevent it.
I will need to replace mine. It is running 8 (.1 maybe?) and I guess it can be upgraded but I'd rather not risk it and it is getting long in the tooth.
I should add that I'm in an unusual position where I don't even carry my cell phone very often. I often even forget to bring it with me. I don't depend on it, am not chained to it, and it frequently goes without attention for days or weeks at a time. I don't actually install anything on it. The stock apps do everything I want to do, and more. Right now, I think it's in the cab of the tractor, though it might be in the car.
> I really liked my Windows Phone and wish they were still being made.
They are. The HP Elite x3 is the current flagship Windows Phone 10 device, although it's primarily aimed at business users. You can get a package that includes a Continuum dock for about $700 online.
I like following rumors about possible "Surface Phones", because now that Windows 10 on mobile is a lot more stable than it was at launch it seems a shame there isn't a crazy new hardware device to get excited about. I particularly love the latest rumor (which fascinates me so much) that Alex Kipman of HoloLens/Kinect team could surprise everyone with a true AR handheld "HoloPhone" relative to the HoloLens. That could be a lot of fun if true, and left-field enough that it could generate a lot of fresh Windows handheld computer interest.
At one point, Microsoft was reported to be earning somewhere in the neighborhood of $2B per year in revenues from IP licensing agreements with Android ODMs. I think that's largely fallen away now, but it's not as if Microsoft didn't get a pound of flesh from this platform, commercially.
I miss my Lumia 920 with Windows phone 8.1. I feel bad for MS (Nokia mostly) when I see Apple/Google announcing a feature that has been on WP8.1 for years (Google lens, tap to awake, ambient/always on display, offline maps/navigation, wireless charging etc.).
I accidentally rode an elevator mr gates was in. Just me, him and an EA from exec area
He was carrying a laptop. No case.
It was well before cell phone ubiquity and way before smartphones.
I thought "wow, the richest man carries an unprotected laptop, no briefcase, his hair even uncombed (probably because he just came from heliport)"
I felt "LC" because i cared about a celebrity (and even noted my diary).
Later, the parking guard said it was to be a low key meeting. We all speculated and believe it had to do with using unused bandwith?during overnight hours...
Before I joined Apple I was at Microsoft and I did use a Windows Phone. It was a Lumia 1520.
And honestly the OS was rock solid and worked great (unlike my experience with the Lenovo Windows work laptop I was given which would keep blue-screening after going into hibernate for more than 5 minutes. I ended up switching to a SurfaceBook once that was available and it worked perfectly. Amazing laptop. Like a MacBook Pro. Except without Bash which sucked so you had to learn PowerShell to script things (well until recently now I think there’s Bash on Windows using some kind of emulation trick I guess))
Windows Phone was a solid system with a decent easy to use UI it is kind of a pity it didn’t take off.
But because the app ecoosysem was so poor after about 6 months I switched to a Samsung Android phone (there was no Google Pixel at the time), which had worse battery life but it performed fine.
I use an iPhone now and the biggest thing I miss is the lack of certain categories of apps that I could find on Android or Windows that I couldn’t find in the iOS App Store.
And the feature set of iOS usually lags behind Android but after using it for over a year now it’s really not that bad and I really like the cross-OS integration features with macOS, tvOS, and watchOS.
Universal copy paste is a killer feature imo.
To be honest I’m happy with both Android and iOS. They both have the same set of popular third party US apps in their App Stores.
I had real hopes for the Windows Phones, I thought they were really exploring a unique approach to the whole thing. I'm on Apple right now and it is the Apple ecosystem that keeps me here more than anything.
> Windows Phone was a solid system with a decent easy to use UI it is kind of a pity it didn’t take off.
Agreed. We developed a couple apps way back in Windows Phone 7, and the UI was slick and stylish. The developer tools were fantastic - very fast and easy to create decent apps. Unfortunately we didn't see much ROI for those apps, and then Microsoft decided everyone needed to redo their apps for Windows Phone 8. It was an easy choice to drop support for those apps and stop all development for Windows Phone at that point. The biggest problem people had with Windows Phone was the lack of apps, and it seemed like MS caused that problem themselves.
There was a period where targeting the 8.0 APIs meant you had access to one set of features and targeting the 8.1 set of APIs meant you were missing certain features but gaining others. The constant rewrites was a nightmare from the developer perspective and prevented any traction being gained.
The story of Windows Phone is full of similar bone-headed decisions in which Microsoft continuously pisses off people trying to love it.
It's been a while but here are a few things that stand out to me as being particurarly bad:
Many Windows Phone users came from Zune, so they were super into music. The Windows Phone 7 -> 8 transition made the music app into a horrifically bad experience missing so many features it was laughably bad compared to other platforms.
The flagship for a period of time was the Lumia 1020. Nokia wrote all sorts of interesting applications for it that were later unsupported or removed when Microsoft acquired Nokia.
Microsoft shipped no flagship for a really long period of time (other than the flop of the Lumia Icon available only on Verizon) and so the "super fans" had the choice of sticking with their Lumia 1020 or 'upgrading' to a cheaper build quality and worse camera Windows Phone that had better specs. Eventually when Windows 10 for phone rolled around they promised 1020 users that Windows 10 would support their phones, but eventually they gave in and announced they couldn't make it work. At that point there wasn't a fantastic successor to the 1020 from the camera perspective, so many users just left.
For a period of time the Lumia 520 was the best low cost ($50 - $100!) smartphone on the market. People actually really liked it, but once again it was unsupported when it came time to upgrade to Windows 10. This meant that a large portion of the Windows Phone install base was fragmented. Microsoft decided they didn't want to win the low-end, they wanted to win the high end (high m argin!) so they stopped making cheap phones like the 520.
I think Microsoft's problem is they continuously changed strategies all the time when they weren't seeing returns. They wanted Windows Phone to be "Microsoft scale" instantly. It seems they felt that as one of the world's largest software companies they should be instantly successful and if they were not then it was better to refocus their efforts elsewhere they could make more money. When they didn't see instant sucesss with Windows Phone there would be a leadership and strategy change resulting in whip-lash for users and developers.
I really think they had to take the under dog approach and make a few users love them, then a few more, then a few more. At the time there would have been a class of users for whom the benefits of the platform would outweigh getting the trendiest apps. Microsoft had enormous opportunity: Android phones were unusably poor on low end phones, iPhones were really expensive and more restrictive. The "app gap" to me really seemed like putting the cart before the horse. Even a company as large as Microsoft can't brute force a grass roots sort of thing like an app development community. The "app gap" is used by many to excuse Microsoft's failure to not develop a competitive platform. From my perspective Microsoft's desire to have instant success, to make a device for everyone, meant they made a platform that ultimately failed.
The crazy thing is they still haven't pronounced it dead yet. Perhaps they have a final hail mary device they're going to try, or perhaps some lingering arrogance means Microsoft would rather leave Windows Phone on life support then declare it dead.
For a while WP devices actually had more market share than iPhone on some European countries, because they were the only affordable alternative to Android.
With all these missteps they managed to drive both the consumers that enjoyed WP, and Windows developers that had fun coding apps for it.
I have this gut feeling that since Windows 10 tablets and hybrids are actually more successful than Android based ones, they would like to try a "mini-tablet" that can make phone calls.
But they burned us so many times, that most likely it will be UWP apps that happen to run on such "mini-tablet" by accident, than being made explicitly for it.
> Lenovo Windows work laptop I was given which would keep blue-screening after going into hibernate for more than 5 minutes.
It amazes me that every model Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga I've worked with (four generations now) has some issue along this line. Every refresh requires some driver troubleshooting on my part to find the one that fixes machines that sleep and don't wake up.
Outside of their business line, Lenovo completely phones it in. I never recommend Lenovo for consumers. Heck, even their think-series laptops and desktops often have critical bios and driver updates shortly after release that need to be installed or the machine will bluescreen, lock up, drop wifi, etc.
At work, I only buy Thinkpads and Think-series PCs after they've aged 6+ months. I can't imagine how people get by being early adopters. We early adopted a Carbon laptop once. Borderline unusable wifi and trackpad. It took 6-12 months for Lenovo to release the updates that fixed these issues, and even then the trackpad never felt right to me (misses taps, misses drags, fails to detect two fingers, etc.)
Their business line is what I was referring to. I've never worked with their consumer line.
Every generation has some variety of stupid power management issue. Their 2014 & 2015 model ThinkPad Yoga both had a problem where there was some fault with the system board that frequently caused the trackpad to stop working after sleep/wake. Fix was to replace the system board. The 2014-2017 models have all had sleep/wake bugs that involved a driver and/or BIOS updates to resolve later (often not completely). It doesn't help either that they regularly leave critical drivers out of their SCCM packages.
Wow, I guess 10 years ago - if I said Mr Gates would be walking around with a Linux device as his most often used 'computer' - no one would have believed me.
Its not like he had much choice. Adopting Apple, his historic competitor, would have been too much of an ego bruising for him. Linux is more neutral to MS anyway. MS never had a lock on the server market that linux is successful in. The home computer front has always been under attack by Apple with varying results. Especially today where owning an Apple computer isn't just for 'designers.' Pretty much every college student has one.
Linux ate proprietary Unix, not Windows. Windows "servers" domination as listed by garner and others were tiny office NT4 domains back then, not internet facing websites and such. The web never really got dominated by MS and Unix and Linux always strangled MS in the cradle. Even stats by netcraft are misleading. Sure you'll see a lot of small business IIS crap and Exchange OWA, but that's no the web in general. The web has always been dominated by linux/Unix.
This story was originally reported the same day Apple announced that it would no longer use Bing.[1]. Gates' sudden affection for Android feels like a transparent way to snub Apple in retaliation and nothing more.
In 2010 I nearly joined a company which was building their business on deploying and managing Windows Mobile devices to enterprises. Glad I didn't do that!
He also "played around with Firefox a bit" sometime around 2005 (2004?). I'll take his word for it that he really thought IE6 was still better by then ;)
I think Microsoft hasn't given up on smartphones yet. They will give it another try next year with Surface Phone. Can't just leave such huge market to Apple and Google. It's worth it for them to keep trying to compete. Maybe they'll get it right next time.
I recently switched back to Windows Phone after several years on Android and I'm liking it a lot so far. I switched from a Samsung Galaxy S6 to an HP Elite x3. The app ecosystem is lacking but I have the apps I really need (Slack for work, WhatsApp and Telegram for messaging, LastPass) plus several nice to have apps. I find I don't want a lot of apps any more and would rather use the browser or cut them out completely.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 176 ms ] threadI really wished they had managed to gain a foothold, because as a platform it really lacks nothing (excepting an app developer base, and actual producers of handsets).
I had had some Nokia phone with WP7 and it was a pretty nice phone despite lacking some apps, and I was looking forward the the future of the platform. Of course when the future did come witn WP8, they said there would be no updates to existing phones and they were pushing developers to use APIs that would only work on the new OS meaning my limited pool of apps wouldn't grow on my current phone, which hurt more than the no OS upgrade. While the lack of OS upgrade isn't uncommon in the Android world, Google doesn't generally push developers to abandon the old OS base so quickly. So with my Windows Phone basically EOL'd overnight(within about 6 months or so of buying it), I went back to Android.
Ironically, by the time it was terminated it had developed into a very valid product indeed. Shame - Apple and Android definitely need more competition from someone with actual resources (sorry to the Sailfish, Firefox OS, Ubuntu Phone, etc etc).
The person who was the head of the Windows Phone group while it failed repeatedly under the first CEO was promoted and put in charge of the entire Windows division by the next CEO.
Something to contemplate.
I think all that ultimately mattered was that Android became the Windows of mobile phones; an operating system that each manufacturer/carrier could customize to sell the idea of value-add (with no actual value-add, I know).
It was really close, Verizon was going to make the Pre its flagship device but changed its mind when the Droid was a success. The smartphone landscape could looks very different right now had the timelines been just a tad different.
I can report this is exactly what drove me from the platform. I adopted Windows Phone out the gate and received a never-ending litany of supportive emails, oneDrive bonuses, etc. There were missing features, but early adopters were promised they were coming and I think most of us thought the experience was worth compromising for early on. Then Windows Phone "7.5" released barely a year after I'd bought my phone, included most of the features early adopters had begged for, and didn't support any of the phones people had already bought. Soon some apps didn't work without 7.5 either. It felt like we all got flipped the bird for taking a risk on Microsoft's platform and I switched to Android. Every aspect of it felt dishonest and disingenuous - "7.5" implies an incremental release, and in terms of features it really should have been one. I have no idea if they just couldn't hack it on the weaker early devices or if MS honestly thought we were all going to run out and buy Nokias immediately. I mean, I nearly did a year later when they were $1...
(Confusingly is not the same hardware as the android Idol 4s. The windows version actually has much better hardware. Snapdragon 820 processor.)
I would say that some of the apps were either sub-par or missing. The Uber app wasn't as good, and there was no Lyft app. Yet, I found that the mobile websites for both were perfectly fine, and you can pin them to your start screen just like apps.
The AMC theater app for both Android and Windows always gave me endless trouble, but I likewise realized that their mobile website was just fine.
The Comcast/Xfinity site likewise can do basically anything their app can do.
I think being forced to use mobile sites is much less unpleasant than one would expect, and this is the way things should be trending anyways. It is the only way to achieve adequate cross-platform development.
When I open an app in WP I received immediate loading/animation feedback.
In android many core actions (such as initiating a phone call) cause temporary freeze while the app loads. Did the phone receive my tap? Do I need to tap again or wait?
Coming from a more fluid interface like the WP this is something I really miss and makes android feel a little more primitive in comparison (but the advanced apps do make up for it)
Polished OS, build quality, call quality, battery life -- these features are all available (and were pre-Microsoft mobile) in both Android and Apple worlds.
Be cautious about assuming that the applications you use are all other people will want. I suspect the massive disparity in application volume & variety was the driving force behind Microsoft abandoning this platform.
I don't agree Android offers that as an OS. Battery life is a little hardware specific, but on average Android provides below par "performance per mWh" compared to the other two.
[1] https://www.windowscentral.com/sites/wpcentral.com/files/sty...
Android is making strides with things like Doze, but the same things that make iOS feel locked down for me as a developer compared to Android are also a huge part of the reason why iPhones can get such amazing standby time (since crappy software isn't even allowed to do inefficient things)
And fwiw, if I were talking about hardware, I'd expect the lower-end devices are better with battery life because more of them come with near bone stock Android than flagships.
Windows Central have also reported Microsoft's next vision of the OS called "Andromeda" there will be a base OS that can have components bolted on [2].
[0] http://www.itpro.co.uk/desktop-hardware/windows-10/28534/win... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_GlGglbu1U [2] https://www.windowscentral.com/andromeda-os
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/249292-microsoft-decla...
What I really want is just some way to maintain my 'working state' wherever I go.
When I'm in front of a desk, I'll want to make best use of multiple screens, higher-speed networking and storage. And when mobile (on a phone or tablet) I still want to maintain my context, at least in terms of what I've been looking at on the browser, in email, etc.
At any rate, I don't want to be power/thermal limited by the processor I can carry around in my pocket.
That's Apple's strategy with their continuity technology.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204681
https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/project-rome
The whole .NET Standard only happened to appease developers fed up with the whole story.
On top of that they kept failing the promises regarding the OS upgrades, even dropping devices that were running the preview builds without issues.
So naturally it failed.
Elaborate on counted vs mattered?
A mid range WP Nokia would be a great secondary phone to me (disclosure: I'm an iOS developer) if it would have any traction.
The upcoming mobile version will have something called CShell which means that the interface will be shared among desktop and mobile, meaning that there will be no differences aside from x86 support.
[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13778
It hasn't been advertised to regular consumers because it's targeted at business users but the HP Elite x3 is the current flagship Windows Phone device.
.NET and UWP sound like they'll be unaffected by CShell, except that developers targetting CShell will want to ensure their apps work on a larger range of display resolutions.
I'd like to still hope that the Windows team knows what they are doing this time and the results will work out, but yes, things look pretty bleak today.
If they emulated Android (like Blackberry)... why not just buy an android phone?
I believe that Microsoft will dominate in AR, and quickly become the leading platform.
If UWP takes off, their mobile app support will follow. New Windows 10 S devices only running UWP apps will encourage this progress a lot.
If anybody will actually buy them.
Every time they made a huge change in the OS (for the better) basically none of the existing phones go it. So every time they updated they were basically throwing away the previous platform. If apps weren’t compatible (I don’t know) they may have been resetting that as well.
Combined with how late they were to the party that was just a death sentence.
Disclaimer -- I've never used a Microsoft phone. Indeed, I only know one person that had one - and even then it was an employer decision. Nor have I ever heard anyone wish out loud that their phone was more like their Microsoft Windows computer, or that it integrated better with their existing Microsoft systems. People who want to 'think different' could have embraced Maemo, BB, Sailfish, Firefox, or various other niche platforms. And then observed the same problem -- lack of people developing applications for them.
The one place I want microsoft to succeed is smartphones. Android spies on basically everything you do. Both android and iOS are vendor lock-in in a way we've never seen before. Compared to the current smartphone OS offerings, Windows was (and is) an incredibly open platform.
With the source to Android available and decoupled from the device-specific code it should be easier to create alternative Android distributions. This should also make it possible to upgrade Android on devices which have been abandoned by the vendor and those which never got any updates to begin with.
This is not just theory by the way, I'm using a number of Google-free Android devices myself. They run just fine without those Google bits, they don't spy more than any other device. This does not mean it does not spy at all but that problem is present in all mobile devices from all manufacturers and under all operating systems: the radio interface layer is a black box closed source blob in all commercially available devices that I've come across.
[1] https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2017/05/here-comes...
The Android you get without Google Play Services are more like Firefox OS, or Ubuntu Phone, or chrooting into Debian and calling that your "OS", interesting things for developers, but not really what the average end user would consider a serious phone option that's even on their radar.
Now if there where a way to combine these two worlds - that of the 'it just works but it knows more about me than I do myself' and the 'it does exactly what I tell it do do, no more and no less' - it would be feasible to offer such a device to a larger section of the general public.
A stripped-down Android distribution - sans Google-specific bits, with some replacements where needed - which does over the air updates just like devices on the other side of the wall would be a good start.
I think more people who have a passing interest in privacy would rather take a walled garden on some of the best hardware out there with a rather enjoyable, if not powerful, OS.
While it is hard - and getting harder - to evade profiling it is still preferable to minimise the amount of personally identifiable data collected by commercial or governmental organisations. Using an Android device without Google-specific code can help here.
I think the conversation has shifted from my main point. When the average user hears "Android" or says it, it's "Android + GPS". The GP said Android but seeing as the most common Android devices competing with the other two OSes they mentioned come with GPS I find it disingenuous to try and imply that it's not "Android proper" if it has GPS. If anything Android without GPS isn't "Android proper" in this context because of the amount of functionality it provides that people include when they compare those OSes
Someone tell this guy about Win10 telemetry and store app tracking.
* - Admittedly I also have 10+ Android phones, 20+ iPhones, and 2 WebOS phones.
You're forgetting that Microsoft _was_ the smartphone leader around the time of Windows Mobile 5 and 6, after defeating Palm. At one time, there were over 100 models of of Windows Mobile phones on the market. (Android's fragmentation problem was entirely foreseeable because it happened to WM first.)
They lost the market to Apple and Android through a mixture of complacency and stupidity, which is something of a shame. WM was just as open as the Windows desktop; no walled garden, no app store eating a third of your revenue, no vendor lock-in shenanigans, just load whatever software you want and run it.
Now that Microsoft has talented hardware people working on really nice products like Surface, they could probably do an in-house design on a new phone. Borrow a page from Motorola/Google's Moto X Pure Edition and put a wooden back on it - it's grippier than plastic or glass, and looks classier too.
US Cellular doesn't like to activate non-branded phones, though I guess they have started doing some. They share the same tech so I don't know of any technical limitations that would prevent it.
I will need to replace mine. It is running 8 (.1 maybe?) and I guess it can be upgraded but I'd rather not risk it and it is getting long in the tooth.
I should add that I'm in an unusual position where I don't even carry my cell phone very often. I often even forget to bring it with me. I don't depend on it, am not chained to it, and it frequently goes without attention for days or weeks at a time. I don't actually install anything on it. The stock apps do everything I want to do, and more. Right now, I think it's in the cab of the tractor, though it might be in the car.
They are. The HP Elite x3 is the current flagship Windows Phone 10 device, although it's primarily aimed at business users. You can get a package that includes a Continuum dock for about $700 online.
http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-earns-2-billion-per...
He was carrying a laptop. No case.
It was well before cell phone ubiquity and way before smartphones.
I thought "wow, the richest man carries an unprotected laptop, no briefcase, his hair even uncombed (probably because he just came from heliport)"
I felt "LC" because i cared about a celebrity (and even noted my diary).
Later, the parking guard said it was to be a low key meeting. We all speculated and believe it had to do with using unused bandwith?during overnight hours...
I still feel LC because i read the article...
And honestly the OS was rock solid and worked great (unlike my experience with the Lenovo Windows work laptop I was given which would keep blue-screening after going into hibernate for more than 5 minutes. I ended up switching to a SurfaceBook once that was available and it worked perfectly. Amazing laptop. Like a MacBook Pro. Except without Bash which sucked so you had to learn PowerShell to script things (well until recently now I think there’s Bash on Windows using some kind of emulation trick I guess))
Windows Phone was a solid system with a decent easy to use UI it is kind of a pity it didn’t take off.
But because the app ecoosysem was so poor after about 6 months I switched to a Samsung Android phone (there was no Google Pixel at the time), which had worse battery life but it performed fine.
I use an iPhone now and the biggest thing I miss is the lack of certain categories of apps that I could find on Android or Windows that I couldn’t find in the iOS App Store.
And the feature set of iOS usually lags behind Android but after using it for over a year now it’s really not that bad and I really like the cross-OS integration features with macOS, tvOS, and watchOS.
Universal copy paste is a killer feature imo.
To be honest I’m happy with both Android and iOS. They both have the same set of popular third party US apps in their App Stores.
Agreed. We developed a couple apps way back in Windows Phone 7, and the UI was slick and stylish. The developer tools were fantastic - very fast and easy to create decent apps. Unfortunately we didn't see much ROI for those apps, and then Microsoft decided everyone needed to redo their apps for Windows Phone 8. It was an easy choice to drop support for those apps and stop all development for Windows Phone at that point. The biggest problem people had with Windows Phone was the lack of apps, and it seemed like MS caused that problem themselves.
But they do this with version 6.5 then "rewrote apps" for 7, and then "rewrite apps" for 8 and now for 10.
It's easy to understand why devs are pissed-off from that decisions.
PS: I forgot fiasco with 7.5 and upgrade to 7.9 and 8.0
There was a period where targeting the 8.0 APIs meant you had access to one set of features and targeting the 8.1 set of APIs meant you were missing certain features but gaining others. The constant rewrites was a nightmare from the developer perspective and prevented any traction being gained.
The story of Windows Phone is full of similar bone-headed decisions in which Microsoft continuously pisses off people trying to love it.
It's been a while but here are a few things that stand out to me as being particurarly bad:
Many Windows Phone users came from Zune, so they were super into music. The Windows Phone 7 -> 8 transition made the music app into a horrifically bad experience missing so many features it was laughably bad compared to other platforms.
The flagship for a period of time was the Lumia 1020. Nokia wrote all sorts of interesting applications for it that were later unsupported or removed when Microsoft acquired Nokia.
Microsoft shipped no flagship for a really long period of time (other than the flop of the Lumia Icon available only on Verizon) and so the "super fans" had the choice of sticking with their Lumia 1020 or 'upgrading' to a cheaper build quality and worse camera Windows Phone that had better specs. Eventually when Windows 10 for phone rolled around they promised 1020 users that Windows 10 would support their phones, but eventually they gave in and announced they couldn't make it work. At that point there wasn't a fantastic successor to the 1020 from the camera perspective, so many users just left.
For a period of time the Lumia 520 was the best low cost ($50 - $100!) smartphone on the market. People actually really liked it, but once again it was unsupported when it came time to upgrade to Windows 10. This meant that a large portion of the Windows Phone install base was fragmented. Microsoft decided they didn't want to win the low-end, they wanted to win the high end (high m argin!) so they stopped making cheap phones like the 520.
I think Microsoft's problem is they continuously changed strategies all the time when they weren't seeing returns. They wanted Windows Phone to be "Microsoft scale" instantly. It seems they felt that as one of the world's largest software companies they should be instantly successful and if they were not then it was better to refocus their efforts elsewhere they could make more money. When they didn't see instant sucesss with Windows Phone there would be a leadership and strategy change resulting in whip-lash for users and developers.
I really think they had to take the under dog approach and make a few users love them, then a few more, then a few more. At the time there would have been a class of users for whom the benefits of the platform would outweigh getting the trendiest apps. Microsoft had enormous opportunity: Android phones were unusably poor on low end phones, iPhones were really expensive and more restrictive. The "app gap" to me really seemed like putting the cart before the horse. Even a company as large as Microsoft can't brute force a grass roots sort of thing like an app development community. The "app gap" is used by many to excuse Microsoft's failure to not develop a competitive platform. From my perspective Microsoft's desire to have instant success, to make a device for everyone, meant they made a platform that ultimately failed.
The crazy thing is they still haven't pronounced it dead yet. Perhaps they have a final hail mary device they're going to try, or perhaps some lingering arrogance means Microsoft would rather leave Windows Phone on life support then declare it dead.
They also make statement this spring "no new devices this year" and this is yet-another-example-of-market-alienification.
For a while WP devices actually had more market share than iPhone on some European countries, because they were the only affordable alternative to Android.
With all these missteps they managed to drive both the consumers that enjoyed WP, and Windows developers that had fun coding apps for it.
I have this gut feeling that since Windows 10 tablets and hybrids are actually more successful than Android based ones, they would like to try a "mini-tablet" that can make phone calls.
But they burned us so many times, that most likely it will be UWP apps that happen to run on such "mini-tablet" by accident, than being made explicitly for it.
It amazes me that every model Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga I've worked with (four generations now) has some issue along this line. Every refresh requires some driver troubleshooting on my part to find the one that fixes machines that sleep and don't wake up.
At work, I only buy Thinkpads and Think-series PCs after they've aged 6+ months. I can't imagine how people get by being early adopters. We early adopted a Carbon laptop once. Borderline unusable wifi and trackpad. It took 6-12 months for Lenovo to release the updates that fixed these issues, and even then the trackpad never felt right to me (misses taps, misses drags, fails to detect two fingers, etc.)
Every generation has some variety of stupid power management issue. Their 2014 & 2015 model ThinkPad Yoga both had a problem where there was some fault with the system board that frequently caused the trackpad to stop working after sleep/wake. Fix was to replace the system board. The 2014-2017 models have all had sleep/wake bugs that involved a driver and/or BIOS updates to resolve later (often not completely). It doesn't help either that they regularly leave critical drivers out of their SCCM packages.
What next ?
Only because Linux happened, businesses were happily moving from proprietary UNIXes into Windows NT and 2000.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/25/16361628/apple-siri-bing-...
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/microsoft_on_the_issues/...
More examples:
* Deceptive ads all over the web telling people to switch to Chrome
* You can't use any other search engine but Google from Chrome on Android
* The insane amount of Google integration on stock Android
Google has almost total control over a typical internet user's experience
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4508897.stm