Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: What's Your Beef With Windows Phone?
First time accepted submitter occasional_dabbler writes "Reviews by 'commentators' such as this one predict certain doom for both Nokia and Microsoft on the basis of the OS being a failure, yet whenever the Lumia handsets are reviewed in the mainstream press they are often highly praised. Windows phone is an immature OS, certainly, but it does pretty much everything you need in a smartphone, is getting better with each update and it is beautiful. I have a Lumia 800, and now I'm used to how it and the WP OS works I find it a painful process to go back to an Android or iPhone for some obscure app not yet supported on WP. WP gave me the same feeling I got when I bought my first iBook, fired up OS X 10.1 and realized I had just been shifted up a decade. So why so serious? What do Slashdotters who have really tried WP think of it?"
Most apps come out on the iPhone first.. except the viruses and porn apps...
1) i cannot write software for it without a license to develop, because the phone is locked down
then buy a license! bfd. same is true for iphone.
2) once i write something for it, it cannot share that code with my friends even if they also had a windows phone, because the phone is locked down
buy a license and post it to the store, so anyone can download it. and they have to have windows phones duh.
3) the phone cannot work as a usb drive, it is locked down and can only sync data via closed protocols or closed applications
then... get a usb drive? call me crazy. I have one on my keychain.
4) the battery drains very quickly, this is just a problem for this model
so it has nothing to do with windows phone, but you're going to hold microsoft at fault.
5) there is no decent browser on the phone, it has internet explorer that does not handle many of the basic things a browser should do like implement createElementNS()
just use ffx for windows phone if it's a big deal for you.
6) i cannot write c++ code for this phone, this phone need C#, or javascript or maybe some other CIL based programming language
an opportunity to improve your skills?
7) this phone is product of a company with a very bad track record which uses the profits of its other monopolies to bully itself into this market
yeah but it also uses its brain trust and size to develop really good programs to leapfrog others.
8) because windows phones are so locked down, like apple devices are, they are the bringing about the end of digital freedoms for consumers
and nothing of value was lost...
9) the phone is riddles with licence agreement and dialogs that want you to give away all your data. for example, the first time you run Internet Explorer on Windows Phone, it will ask you: "Do you want to share you browser history with Microsoft so we can [...]? {YES) (CANCEL)." The use of 'CANCEL" implies that IE wont start, thus bullying people into clicking YES.
better than google, which just takes all your data without asking.