31–40 of 205 posts
I really liked my windows phone. The colourful live tiles and the physical design were great. What it lacked was 3rd party apps.
For me the saddest thing is not Windows Phone going away, it's Nokia not going all the way with their Qt based Linux distro, Meego. I had a Nokia N9 smartphone, the UI was amazing. It took 5 (I think?) years for iOS and Android to sort of copy the gesture based UI, badly. Damn internal corporate politics at Nokia.
I miss Psion which ironically abandoned the market because they thought Microsoft would dominate it. Some of their ease of use has never been replicated.
It took years for any other mobile platform to catch up to the convenience of my beloved Palm Pre.
One of the things I find very frustrating about Microsoft (and to a lesser extent Google) is how they will walk back nearly anything at the slightest pushback and cancel anything that isn't an immediate overnight success. The Kinect was really, really cool tech, and I dream about what could have been if MS had not made the Kinect thst came with the XBox One optional pretty much right after it was announced.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also deeply enjoyed my Nokia Lumia. They clearly took many design cues from Zune, which was another excellent product I loved that did not take off. I think if MS Phone had stuck it out a bit longer hybrid apps may have helped bring some developers in. It sounds like Nadella still doesn’t get it though. MSFT tried several times to “reinvent the category of computing between PCs, tablets, and phones” and none succee…
I liked mine too. Sometimes I think I was the only one, but now I know there were at least three of us. I had what I think was the lowest end Lumia at the time, a Lumia 520 maybe? It did what it did really well. The camera was surprisingly OK. The tiles meant I could see what I needed without tapping around. It was much more responsive than other phones in its price range from what I remember too.
I'm pretty sure there were hundreds of us; but maybe only tens.
I don't think Microsoft understands how constantly churning the development framework impacts potential developers, because Windows is so big that developers will suffer through churn until they realize they should just stick to ancient methods that will continue to work. Windows Phone had no ancient methods, and important new OS features were tied to new frameworks anyway, but there wasn't enough users to encourage most developers to suffer through it. That they couldn't make Windows Mobile 10 work (well) on low end devices like the Lumia 520 is probably a mix of organizational and engineering failure, but either way, the push from Microsoft to build 'universal windows platform' apps that would only run on Windows Mobile 10 prompted developers to cut support for WP7 and WP8 in favor of WM10, even though WM10 never had more users than the earlier versions.
Also, mobile Edge was soooooo much worse than mobile IE, woof.
#totallynotstillbitter
For me the saddest thing is not Windows Phone going away, it's Nokia not going all the way with their Qt based Linux distro, Meego. I had a Nokia N9 smartphone, the UI was amazing. It took 5 (I think?) years for iOS and Android to sort of copy the gesture based UI, badly. Damn internal corporate politics at Nokia.
I really liked my windows phone. The colourful live tiles and the physical design were great. What it lacked was 3rd party apps.
And it never got that ecosystem because of inscrutable mismanagement so scatterbrained and perplexing that I can't wait for the insider-tells-all book about this post-iPhone period at Microsoft that I assume will arrive in a decade or two. Zune, Phone, Surface, Windows 8, Windows RT, Bing, Cortana, Continuum, Project Astoria, I'm sure I'm forgetting. Apple and Google execs must have been amused.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also deeply enjoyed my Nokia Lumia. They clearly took many design cues from Zune, which was another excellent product I loved that did not take off. I think if MS Phone had stuck it out a bit longer hybrid apps may have helped bring some developers in. It sounds like Nadella still doesn’t get it though. MSFT tried several times to “reinvent the category of computing between PCs, tablets, and phones” and none succee…
I liked mine too. Sometimes I think I was the only one, but now I know there were at least three of us. I had what I think was the lowest end Lumia at the time, a Lumia 520 maybe? It did what it did really well. The camera was surprisingly OK. The tiles meant I could see what I needed without tapping around. It was much more responsive than other phones in its price range from what I remember too.
I think you were far from alone in your disappointment watching it wither on the vine.
One of the things I find very frustrating about Microsoft (and to a lesser extent Google) is how they will walk back nearly anything at the slightest pushback and cancel anything that isn't an immediate overnight success. The Kinect was really, really cool tech, and I dream about what could have been if MS had not made the Kinect thst came with the XBox One optional pretty much right after it was announced.
It was a cool tech solution in search of a problem.