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Microsoft To Kill The Lumia Brand In Favor of a New Surface Phone, Says Report (thenextweb.com)
It's no secret the Lumia brand is struggling to gain any significant market share these days. Earlier this year, it was reported that Microsoft's Windows Phone OS dropped below 1 percent mark share, all but confirming the death of Windows Phone. A new report suggests that, despite the irrelevance of Windows Phone, Microsoft will not be giving up on its mobile OS. Instead, the company plans to drop the Lumia brand by the end of the year and replace it with a brand new Surface Phone in an effort to breathe new life into its flagging smartphone business. The Next Web reports: There is some credibility to the claims. Microsoft's Lumia lineup has shrunk to just four models, and there's nothing to indicate it's working on a successor. In the U.S., where Microsoft has struggled to shift Lumia phones, it has removed the link to buy them from its website. On the retail side, stores have started removing units from display, and are trying to shift remaining stock by offering steep discounts. Further evidence comes from two since-deleted tweets from Laura Butler, engineering director at Microsoft, who posted "Surface iPhone ;-)" on September 6, and "Surface Phone not NOT confirmed. :-)" on September 7, in reply to questions posed by other Twitter users. Microsoft is expected to hold an event in October, where it's believed it will announce a new Surface all-in-one. As Ars Technica pointed out, this could be when Microsoft announces its new Surface Phone, just in time for Christmas.
It's a 2 year old processor.
intel killed the roadmap for phone SoCs earlier this year.
So unless MS want to cram a netbook CPU into a phone, it's likely to be an ARM.
Windows phones aren't that bad either if you aren't a teenager who needs all the latest apps, or a hacker hackity hacking roots away.
I have a windows phone sitting in a drawer that I bought as a backup phone because it was super cheap. Anyways here's why I think it sucks:
Flat UI is totally shit. Many people think flat UI just means a clean, easily scalable interface, but that's false. Flat UI means you can't offer any hints of three dimensional depth. So no gradients, no shadows, no overlapping objects. This means that skeumorph is basically impossible. Too much skeumorph (i.e. the heavily bitmapped crap Apple recently did away with that scales like shit and ages worse) is bad, but no skeumorph at all is worse. The purpose of skeumorph is to make UI elements look recognizable as everyday objects you deal with in the real world so that you can intuitively determine what they're supposed to do. Windows phone (and windows 10) just discarded this concept entirely. And also since you have no depth, the only way you can distinguish objects is make them have sharply contrasting colors, which contributes to an ugly fisher-price look.
This is why, in my opinion, Material Design is by far the best smartphone design language by a mile: It remains simplistic while still retaining light skeumorph, scalability, and you can use practically any color palette you want.
And speak of colors, on windows phone, when you need to find an app that you don't have pinned, it's easily the worst experience of any smartphone OS. Why? Because you have to scroll down a big long list of names with icons that mostly look identical. In many cases, when recently got a new app and haven't used it for say, a week, you might not remember the exact name, but you might remember what its icon looked like, especially if you're a visual learner. However on windows phone, that won't help you a whole lot. The whole fucking UI is one big doldrum.
Oh but wait, the common windows phone fan argument is that static icons look bland, and that windows phones tiles are innovative and unparalleled...except they're none of the above. Let's do a little comparing and contrasting of Android widgets:
- Android widgets can update in real-time.
- WP "live" tiles can only update once every 30 minutes by default, and the shortest interval is every 15 minutes unless you create a website that constantly pushes new data to it (i.e. it can't be done locally by an app) and even then the shortest interval is one minute.
- Android widgets, like a calendar widget, can be configured in practically any dimension. This means they can become a big vertical list, which means something like a calendar widget can show multiple events in succession.
- WP tiles have limited dimension and by design only show one object at a time, and flip at an interval that you can't control, so you can easily miss something, like say you could have an appointment shortly but it's showing the next event after that. This also can become annoying to people who might have forgotten what app the tile is for.
- Android widgets are fully interactive. This means that, like a calendar widget for example, can be scrolled, and you can tap the calendar event to directly open that event in the app. Some widgets obviate the need to open the app at all, take for example Google's "what's this song?" widget.
- WP tiles don't do anything other than flip, and tapping them just opens the app. That's it, they can't do anything else. If you want to navigate to a specific email, voicemail, text, calendar event, etc, tapping that event while its showing on the tile doesn't open that item, it just opens the app.
Another major annoyance with windows phone is it's downright awful at multitasking. Try for example, to browse a webpage while your maps app downloads offline data. Oh wait, you can't. As soon as you switch to the browser, the download stops. In Windows Phone, Microsoft's philosophy is that paint shouldn't dry unless you sit there and watch it dr