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?"
The WP7 OS is decent enough to use. But that's not the total phone experience.
To total phone experience varies a lot from person to person. But people want choice and the WP7 app store is still relatively barren compared to the mountains of refuse in google play or itunes. It's true you don't need the vast majority of the stuff in the competing stores (or even most of what's on the WP7 store) but why pick and OS without whatever app you like or that will likely miss out on it.
WP7 is a dead man walking. You know it. Nokia knows it. Everyone knows. WP8 is the real prize. But if I need a phone today I'm not waiting around. Especially since we have no idea if WP8 will actually be any good to use. And once I get into the non MS ecosystem I'd need to invest money to switch, and need to wait for a contract to expire.
There's no premium WP hardware. There's mid range, and low to mid range. And calling the 900 mid range in an era of quad core phones is being generous. All else being equal if the best phone on the market is a Galaxy SIII why would I buy a single core competitor? Especially if I have 700 or 800 dollars to spend on a phone.
People still think it's 1995 and that windows is a bug riddles mess. Because if don't know how to take care of your computer it will be a trainwreck and you don't learn you live with outdated biases.
If you want simple easy to understand you get an iphone. You pay a premium for a degree of uniformity. If you want a low end smartphone or a high end smartphone you buy android. If you know how to hack your phone and don't mind flashing roms and so on, you get an android. Where does that leave MS in the marketplace? If you have to wait for a *carrier* to approve an update to your phone then you aren't a happy customer. If you don't understand technology an iPhone doesn't have that problem, if you understand how to install a nightly ROM build android phones are at least better than waiting on the carriers. With a windows phone you're stuck waiting on the carrier, which is simply unacceptable, unless you pay the 99 dollar developer licence.
Microsoft is late to this party. Very late. Unless they can pull a magic Xbox integration plan or something awesome that ties into the desktop (your phone can remote desktop right microsoft? Right? ugh...) they have a hard time asking users to switch. My calendaring is all through google now, so I'd have to move that over. I have invested however much money in google's app store for apps I can't easily port over. There aren't any 'killer apps' for WP7 exclusively.
There's a viable strategy there. Microsoft just isn't executing, and they can't rely on momentum to keep them going. That however, could change, and especially in the business environment integration with their corporate products could really help. b
I have been using Windows Phone for a good 6 months now, and I really do feel backward when using people's iPhones. That being said iPhone has the ecosystem that I am envious of, if a friend is playing a game, very often WP doesn't have it (yet.) So that's very frustrating. I think a lot of people just go with the platforms their friends have, the tile system is a bit jarring for those not familiar with it, and it could be improved a lot (sometimes Metro is just -too- simplistic.) However, once you are used to the system, it's a lot more intuitive than iOS. People complain about the tiles, but when using friends phones they have a sea of icons that honestly just hurt my eyes to scroll through. A lot of people think the WP list system is the wrong approach, but tapping on a letter jumps you to the program you want.
WP's biggest flaw is that it is so late to the game, if you walk into an AT&T store, expect to have an iPhone pushed on you, if you walk into a Verizon store, expect an Android device to be pushed on you. Microsoft made the mistake of not getting in bed with one of the major carriers. Google & Verizon/Apple & AT&T have a lot of power over the purchases of potential WP users. I've walked into Verizon stores with the -only- WP device being treated like the step child, and AT&T stores have had WP booths with the phones all powered down. It's pathetic. Old habits die hard. I do think all 3 of the OSes are very good in their own right, but why WP is lagging sort of baffles me, I'd expect it to at least have some interest among youth looking for Xbox Live integration. The Lumia phones are gorgeous, but honestly on the wrong carrier....Verizon should have been the Lumia's focus. AT&T's is pretty saturated with iPhone. Microsoft shot themselves in the foot with their half-assed Kin device on Verizon.
So, my basic answer is carriers, carriers, carriers, even more so than developers.
Let's not forget the fact that nowadays, what really makes a phone useful is not the "as shipped" factory experience, but the applications.
If you want developers, you need to have either:
1) A well established market ecosystem that makes developers want to jump in, even if there are barriers to entry in the market (Apple iOS)
2) Ridiculously low barriers to entry for a new developer that wants to start producing work for your ecosystem (Android)
Microsoft doesn't have either - They have barriers of entry on par with iOS for developers, but they don't have the market share/ecosystem to entice developers. Not only that, but they seem to enjoy screwing over what loyal developers they may have - http://www.xda-developers.com/feature/enjoying-chevron-say-goodbye-to-your-developer-unlock/
After decades of Microsoft shenanigans on the desktop, and no evidence of them stopping those shenanigans with mobile - who is going to choose to develop for Windows Phone?
Let's not forget the severe platform limitations WP provides - even now that Skype is owned by Microsoft, Skype on WP7 is horrifically crippled compared to Android and iOS simply due to WP7's fundamental platform limitations. That's impressive considering how bad it is on Android (It's #1 on my battery-draining-apps shitlist.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
82. Need to be plugged in to wall charger to sync wirelessly (a funny definition of wireless) [hehehehe]
113. Bing maps need to tap to get voice direction for next turn. [muhahahaha, I imagine the sucker alone in his car]
115. Compass gives wrong reading in the Southern hemisphere due to bad API in the OS. [MUHAHAHA, a first-world compass]
And the list is long. I recon 20% of those are valid for iOS. But the rest is quite epic. Compounded with the lack of apps, I think the OP has his answer...
Agreed. The designer in me goes nuts every time I see text artificially clipped on the right hand edge of the screen. It's just terrible; I hate feeling like the UI designer wrote text for the page and forgot to shrink it to fit in the width provided.
Subjectively, the Windows Phone UI always gives me the feeling that I'm "missing something". I always feel like there's something else I should see, but can't, because it's hidden or on another page. I never know quite where to go to get to something. The fact that tiles are freely arrangeable, and that they don't cover all features on the phone, means that I always feel like the tile screen is a "shortcut" to some magical better user interface that exists somewhere else at the bottom of the phone.
Contrast this to the iPhone UI. I know that every single thing in the iPhone is an "App". I know that I can see all the apps by going to the home screen and scrolling left or right. I know that if I lose track of something, that's how I can find it. Even if it's annoying to have to switch from one app to another, I never have to worry about how to get to something. The value of that reassurance is greater to me than the slowdown it causes.
On the contrary side, the Xbox Live UI is the opposite of the Windows Phone UI. No text is cut off; I never look at the screen and see distorted text or menus. Every single thing is a tile; I know if I scroll left or right I can see all of them. I would bet that over time the WinPhone will have the same UI approaches.
If you're working for a small business that's too cheap to pay for a signed certificate, how is it you haven't at least learned about the free signed certificate services that are out there aplenty?
The myth that small businesses need paid third-party certificates for their own email servers is false, destructive, and harmful to security. It's nothing more than Verisign propaganda to generate profit for themselves at the public's expense. I speak out against it every time I see it, and I hope that you can learn the truth, or if not, at least refrain from spreading misinformation.
I am a professional cryptography researcher, but very much a "real world" researcher rather than one of those theoreticians. I know what I'm talking about.
A third-party certificate is intended for the situation where two parties who don't know each other in advance want to authenticate each other's identity for encrypted communications. For example, if you are purchasing something from a public web site, chances are you have never personally met the website operators to authenticate their identity. In this situation, you need a trusted third party, which is what a certificate provides.
For a corporate email server, especially a small business server, you're simply not in the above situation. You own the server and the machine running the server software. You own the client and the machine running the client software. You are authenticating yourself to yourself. There is no unknown entity participating in this transaction. You do not need a third-party certificate for this! Even worse, by relying on a third party, you introduce a new single point of failure: if the third party screws up, an event which is totally beyond your ability to control, then your security is compromised.
In practice, it's even worse. Most web browsers have thousands of root certificates. If any one of those thousands of parties screws up, your security is compromised. (And this does happen in real life: look up Diginotar or Comodo.) So, by using a third party certificate, you've added thousands of unnecessary single points of failure, not just one, and all of them totally beyond your ability to control.
For a large organization, the number of interactions between unknown parties might be large enough to justify the overhead of using certificates. For a small business, certificates are worse than useless; they're actively insecure. They allow the government of Iran to attack you in ways that would not be possible otherwise (which is what happened with Diginotar). The best authentication method for small business email, bar none, is to delete your email client's entire root certificate store and manually load your own email server's self-signed public key into your own email client with your own eyes and hands. There is no authentication technology on the planet that is more secure than your own eyes and hands.