Ten years ago Microsoft bought Nokia's phone unit – then killed it
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Re: Ten years ago Microsoft bought Nokia's phone unit – then killed it
#2I miss Windows Phone. It was fast, did what I needed, and was easy to use one-handed. The Nokia hardware was good (especially the camera, for the time), except the plastic case & screen collected scratches like crazy.
I would have had no problem paying more for a premium metal & glass case for it.
Re: Ten years ago Microsoft bought Nokia's phone unit – then killed it
#3I miss Windows Phone. It was fast, did what I needed, and was easy to use one-handed. The Nokia hardware was good (especially the camera, for the time), except the plastic case & screen collected scratches like crazy. I would have had no problem paying more for a premium metal & glass case for it.
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Re: Ten years ago Microsoft bought Nokia's phone unit – then killed it
#4I miss Windows Phone. It was fast, did what I needed, and was easy to use one-handed. The Nokia hardware was good (especially the camera, for the time), except the plastic case & screen collected scratches like crazy. I would have had no problem paying more for a premium metal & glass case for it.
I still have my Lumia 450. It looks as great today as it did 10 years ago. Windows phone is probably the only UI/UX Microsoft got right. Sadly, leave it to Microsoft to ruin a product by pulling the plug.
Re: Ten years ago Microsoft bought Nokia's phone unit – then killed it
#5I miss Windows Phone. It was fast, did what I needed, and was easy to use one-handed. The Nokia hardware was good (especially the camera, for the time), except the plastic case & screen collected scratches like crazy. I would have had no problem paying more for a premium metal & glass case for it.
I still have my Lumia 450. It looks as great today as it did 10 years ago. Windows phone is probably the only UI/UX Microsoft got right. Sadly, leave it to Microsoft to ruin a product by pulling the plug.
If they open sourced it, it could easily become an actually popular, independent mobile OS to compete with Android/iOS.
Re: Ten years ago Microsoft bought Nokia's phone unit – then killed it
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still have my Lumia 450. It looks as great today as it did 10 years ago. Windows phone is probably the only UI/UX Microsoft got right. Sadly, leave it to Microsoft to ruin a product by pulling the plug.
If they open sourced it, it could easily become an actually popular, independent mobile OS to compete with Android/iOS.
No, it could not.
Ignoring the technical challenges and impossibilities of open sourcing it (Windows Phone 10 is Windows 10, and the Windows Phone 7/8 codebase was its own crazy beast that was tough enough to work with even when you were being paid to do so), mobile operators do not want you running custom code on their stack, and they are the ultimate gatekeepers of what devices are allowed to connect. There will never be a popular, easy to setup open source phone without a complete reworking of cellular service, at least in the US.
Re: Ten years ago Microsoft bought Nokia's phone unit – then killed it
#7Sigh, now we've stuck in a world of Google or Apple. I recall a world where each phone had itself own OS, or firmware. Every phone was different.
I miss my Lumia and my Sony Ericsson k700i and just the simplicity of texting.
Re: Ten years ago Microsoft bought Nokia's phone unit – then killed it
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they open sourced it, it could easily become an actually popular, independent mobile OS to compete with Android/iOS.
No, it could not. Ignoring the technical challenges and impossibilities of open sourcing it (Windows Phone 10 is Windows 10, and the Windows Phone 7/8 codebase was its own crazy beast that was tough enough to work with even when you were being paid to do so), mobile operators do not want you running custom code on their stack, and they are the ultimate gatekeepers of what devices are allowed to connect. There will ne…
> without a complete reworking of cellular service
There is a whole world, besides the US.
But it doesn't matter because there would be no apps anyway.
Re: Ten years ago Microsoft bought Nokia's phone unit – then killed it
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they open sourced it, it could easily become an actually popular, independent mobile OS to compete with Android/iOS.
No, it could not. Ignoring the technical challenges and impossibilities of open sourcing it (Windows Phone 10 is Windows 10, and the Windows Phone 7/8 codebase was its own crazy beast that was tough enough to work with even when you were being paid to do so), mobile operators do not want you running custom code on their stack, and they are the ultimate gatekeepers of what devices are allowed to connect. There will ne…
I don't think Windows Phone 7+ included anything wild on the baseband. It ran on qualcomm chipsets, and I suspect it was just using their modems as-is.
Use an approved modem blob and you can connect. Easy peasey. VoLTE makes it a bit trickier, but not that much.
I mean, yeah, it won't ever be popular. If it's open source, there's no way to sell user data to subsidize the price. And who wants to pay full freight for a phone that probably won't ever fully work... I think I learned my lesson with OpenMoko...
I enjoyed Windows Phone, but I don't see how it would survive without big pockets and a dedicated, focused, and engaged team that can m move mountains. Big pockets alone weren't enough. Good hardware wasn't enough. Microsoft needed to have delivered on their promise of all WP8 devices getting an upgrade to WM10, and WM10 needed to be good on release. Incidentally, what I think was the final build for Lumia 640 was a lot better than the first build; if the first build was that good, the story may have ended differently. Mobile Edge was still garbage on that phone though; Mobile IE was ugly, but Mobile Edge put a queue between the UI and the engine, which meant when the engine was spinning on some page it could barely handle, you couldn't stop it... All your UI commands would be queued up and played later when the engine had finished whatever it was doing... Unless the watchdog timed out and the whole phone rebooted.
Re: Ten years ago Microsoft bought Nokia's phone unit – then killed it
#10 To be fair, Kallasvuo did try to build a software environment for Nokia phones. The largely open source Maemo operating system failed to take off