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Microsoft Is No Longer Selling Any Lumia Windows Phones On Its US Store (neowin.net)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Neowin: It seems that Lumia has reached the end of the line, as the Microsoft Store is no longer selling any of the company's Windows Phone 8.1 or Windows 10 Mobile handsets in the U.S. The first signs that the end was approaching for Lumia came back in February, when Microsoft launched the Lumia 650, which was said to be the last in the company's Lumia line. In August, Microsoft removed all mention of Windows handsets from its U.S. store homepage, relegating 'Windows phone' to a dropdown menu instead. This week, just one Lumia handset remained on sale: the ATT-locked Lumia 950, available only in white. Now, that model has sold out too, leaving none of the company's Lumia handsets available to buy on its store. The Windows phones page on the Microsoft Store lists thirteen products, but eight of these are out of stock. When more stock is expected on a temporarily sold-out product, Microsoft typically replaces the 'Add to cart' button with one that says 'Email me when available'. Instead, each of these products now has a grayed-out button, stating "Out of stock."
The fact that they're no longer offering them for sale probably doesn't significantly change the number they are selling.
The problem was that they never sold any Lumia phone through their store (or any others). This just makes it official.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
and the consensus between us was that Microsoft couldn't make Windows phones cool to teenagers. It's funny, but it seems like the teenage demographic decides what phones are going to succeed, even if they're not the ones making the final buying decision (or even the biggest buying demographic). Me? I'm gonna make a Samsung J7 or LG Stylus Note my next phone since they're cheap, have decent radios and 2 GB of ram. But I'm a nerd, so I'm choosing on specs.
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All that money, how many billion spent, and they couldn't shell out a few extra 10 million dollar bills to have the apps written? And it's not the first time they failed to properly buy their way into a market. Just makes no sense to me...
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
Yeah, I had one of those as well. Windows Mobile was a good three years behind iOS UI design at the time. Some could argue that they never caught up.
I've had nothing but issues with my Lumia 950. Windows Mobile has some really good design/usability ideas but jesus it is buggy.
I regularly need to reboot the phone to fix GPS issues. A patch came out a few months ago that made Bluetooth not randomly get completely corrupted with my car, but the implementation is still buggy. Using apps while playing music causes stuttering in the music. I've had the phone for over a year now and it still feels like a beta device.
The worst part of it is that the previous versions -- Windows Phone 7, 8, etc. -- were masterpieces. They were stable and exceptionally lag-free. The whole idea to merge the mobile and desktop OSes -- the kernel with 8 and the shell with 10 -- wasn't a bad one but the execution was just so incredibly poor.
If Microsoft is smart they'll gut the department heads working on mobile and get some new talent in. Or maybe bring some of the old talent back. Or maybe just fold the idea.
Some could argue that they never caught up.
Those who'd try to argue that would be wrong. Apple's clutter of unrelated icons on a grid (aka: my grandmother's desktop in 1998) is dog shit. People just don't care for whatever reason. Window's customizeable, live tile thing is really neat, super useful, oh, and isn't ugly as sin.
I don't respond to AC's.
Great.
Now MS can remove their cell phones out of the start menu and desktop and bring back aero, menus, skuemirphism, and a consistent UI so we can upgrade past 7.
We all know Windows 8 and 10 bombed because MS crippled them to turn the PC into a cell phone so old people afraid of change would want a Windows phone.
Well sorry for those that said MS had to focus on mobile. It clearly failed.
Modern is out and win32 is back in hopefully very soon
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Even hardcore Lumia users have grown to dislike their Lumia phones, by now. Almost always it's because the lack of features compared to Android.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Eventually, their turn will come around in terms of fashion, and eventually, people who use their phones for work will discover Windows Phone.
That's cute, but in the real world, no. I know it's fun to slag off on others' choices as unserious, but those of us with Androids and iPhones are using them to get real work done. We're not sitting around playing Pokemon Go all the time. I mean, we can because it's available and sometimes we do, but we also use them extensively for mail, Slack, project planning, calendaring, SSH, and all the other work-related stuff you're doing on your beloved phone. I promise you that you're not the only person using their phone to Do Important Things.
You looked at the available options and picked Windows Phone. Cool. We looked at the available options - just like you did - and chose something different. I too bought the phone that I genuinely like.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The problem is those tiles are basically windows phone's crowning feature, and yet they are total non-functional crap compared to what Android widgets can do.
Windows tiles just flip at an uncontrollable interval, which means if you aren't looking at relevant information when it's up then who knows how long it will be till you actually see it again, and tapping it just launches the app. Also contrary to their namesake, they aren't actually live, rather they only update about once every 15 minutes. And then of course, they only have one of three possible layouts.
Android widgets are real-time, virtually unlimited dimensions, are interactive (I.e. you can scroll through your emails or calendar events rather than waiting for it to flip) and you can tap individual objects in the widget (for example, tapping an email opens that email, not just the app.)
And in fact, Android is so versatile that you can make it fully imitate the windows phone UI. And indeed, there are launchers on the play store that do exactly that.
Android's flexibility is exactly why it dominates the market, and windows phone's limited feature set "with a shiny UI!" is why it flopped.
FWIW, I have both a 950xl and a EliteX3. I replaced my Galaxy and Ios devices with the Windows Mobile devices because they work so much more intuitively for me.
However, it wasn't too long ago, when I was using my Galaxy S2, that I never tired of bashing Windows Phone 6 and the prior iteration - Windows CE. They were terrible in my opinion. With the advent of windows 8, the game changed. The UI finally surpassed both Android and Iphones and I found the devices worked great. Windows 10 is even better.
However, by this time, the proverbial ship had sailed and the world uses Android. (Some folks in the US still cling to Iphones, though I cannot figure out why.)
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The phones you mentioned run Atom, which is something Intel abandoned for mobile. Likewise, they haven't been interested in cramming a tablet Core M processor into a phone.
If you've been following the announcements, Microsoft are partnering with Qualcomm to emulate x86 on Snapdragon.
Also contrary to their namesake, they aren't actually live, rather they only update about once every 15 minutes. And then of course, they only have one of three possible layouts.
Push notifications are practically an industry standard now. Why would they be using pull? I realize that email notifications would be based on polling intervals, since only Gmail implements push for email and only with Android.
Since licencing undisclosed tech in android is where all of Microsoft phone division's profits have ever come from.
The Year of the Windows Smartphone, eh?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I fully second this. My first smartphone was a Lumia 520, when Windows Phone 8 was first out. Previously, I never touched texting, but Windows Phone 8 made it a breeze. That, and some other things - OneNote in particular - made it a work in the park. The GPS was good, particularly in conjunction w/ HERE maps. Only downside was limited customization in terms of colors and backgrounds - something completely fixed in Windows 10.
I currently have a Lumia 550, which I use as a travel phone. (I'd have used it here in the US as well, except that I'm w/ Verizon, which doesn't accept this). This phone is a Windows 10 Mobile phone, and comes at $150 unlocked. It's pretty good, and pretty similar to Windows 10 in terms of look & feel. As I mentioned above, it would make a great workphone, if an office is distributing phones to be used for business uses. It has OneNote, Office, Maps, a multi-function calculator (better than either the iOS or Android calculators), and most business apps, like say currency converters, are available in the store. It does lack some apps like Lyft or Uber partner, which is a tad inconvenient, and it also lacks business VOIP apps like 8x8. OTOH, w/ WhatsApp, it does have at least 1 app that supports video calling and VOIP calling.
I am disappointed to see the Lumia line ended, particularly since the Surface Phone is not promising, given what they've said it will be. First of all, there are NOT more native apps for Windows 10 than there for Windows Phone: as an example, search in the Windows store for Yelp! or Fandango, and see if you find it. It IS there on Windows Phone. Therefore, it's not accurate to state that there are more apps on Windows 10 than there are on Windows 10 Mobile, and people are not gonna run applications like Autocad or Visio on their phone. So it is already a mistake to think that the PC has apps that phones don't have that are actually usable. To make things worse, the new Surface Phone won't have an Atom or anything: it will have a Dragonball that will EMULATE x86. Past great CPUs like the Alpha emulated x86 and went nowhere. On top of other things, that will also increase the power consumption.
If you can get your hands on a Lumia, be it a 640 or a 150, do it, otherwise look at one of the third party vendors like HTC or Blu. But avoid the Surface Phone whenever it's out - it won't be worth it.
Just keep that phone as long as it lasts. That's what I'm doing w/ my Lumia 150
Actually, that's a good point. One thing that the Lumia line had was a wide range of choices and price points. IMO, too many - something they've corrected in the Windows 10 Mobile lineup, where they offer only the 950, 640 and 150. If someone wanted a barebones smartphone, there was the 520 (or now, the 150), and if they wanted the high end phone, they could get those as well.
So maybe they wouldn't like to spend $600+ on any Lumia, but at least, if they have to spend several hundreds less, they have a choice in the Lumia lineup. There are a plethora of choices in the Galaxy lineup as well. In case of the iPhone, there is just the 7, 6s and 6.
And there was much rejoicing. You don't have to consider yourself middle-fingered this time around, Microsoft - you are middle-fingered.
Those cameras appeared on a Symbian model (808?) and were pretty good. The first model of Windows phone that had them didn't have the software chops to actually take advantage of them. Then they sort of just went away.
Oh, while they were a real ~50 megapixel sensor, they usually used some fancy interpolation to bring it down to a really good 12 MP or so image.
This is all correct, except that the Nokia 808 (AKA Pureview) had a 41 MP sensor, of which only 38 MP were used. Apart from that, everything you wrote is accurate.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Certainly worthwhile to kill Nokia for.
I realize that email notifications would be based on polling intervals, since only Gmail implements push for email and only with Android.
Wrong again. K-9 mail does IMAP push.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Not quite what I meant. It doesn't do IMAP push, it does server-side IMAP polling and its own push. Requiring you to abandon your preferred email client (that isn't paired with the email provider). Neither GMail nor K-9 do anything standard that could be supported universally - email just doesn't have a mailbox protocol for that.
Neither GMail nor K-9 do anything standard that could be supported universally - email just doesn't have a mailbox protocol for that.
sigh
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Each program maintaining a separate connection to a separate push server is not as energy efficient as every program sharing one. That's the whole reason why there's a centralized push notification system.
It depends on which apps they missed - and there were plenty. However, for those who required a minimal feature set, Windows Phone 8, and now Windows 10 Mobile, are very adequate. If one is using it for work, then things like Office, OneNote, Outlook, the calculator are there, plus a few utility apps like currency converters that can be downloaded. Some common apps are there, like Yelp, Fandango, Facebook & Twitter, but it does miss stuff like RetailMeNot, and more importantly, things like AirBnB and Lyft. Also, until a few weeks ago, there were no popular VOIP or video calling apps: that just got fixed by WhatsApp adding support.
It's because they were descended from Nokia stuff where they had what looked like an insanely huge number of models, until you get that it does scale when you are selling millions of phones per year. Microsoft were not selling in such volumes so that made the cost of supporting multiple models something to be noticed.
They killed Nokia and are wearing it's skin, but they are no Nokia.
Taking the Lumia off the market is a very intentional maneuver on Microsoft's part. They are hoping that by the time they launch the Surface Phone in Q4 next year with full support for X86 Win32 apps on ARM that we will have largely forgetten about how much the previous Windows Phone underwhelmed us. Also making a short but clean break gives them an excuse not to upgrade all the phones on the market right now to the new OS that supports X86 Win32 apps.
Mostly it was shit like Clash of Clans in my experience doing support for them. But there was a steady trickle of other apps that people would ask about.