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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 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.