Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Do You Miss Windows Phone? (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes: After recently switching on an old Windows Phone to create a silly April Fools' joke, The Verge's Tom Warren discovered just how much he missed Microsoft's mobile OS. Two of the biggest features that are hard to find/replicate on iOS and Android are the Metro design and Live Tiles. "Android and iOS still don't have system-wide dark modes, nearly 8 years after Windows Phone first introduced it," notes Warren. "Live Tiles were one of Windows Phone's most unique features. They enabled apps to show information on the home screen, similar to the widgets found on Android and iOS. You could almost pin anything useful to the home screen, and Live Tiles animated beautifully to flip over and provide tiny nuggets of information that made your phone feel far more personal and alive."
Some other neat features include the software keyboard, which Warren argues "is still far better than the defaults on iOS and Android," especially with the recently-added tracing feature that lets you swipe to write words. "Microsoft also experimented with features that were different to other mobile platforms, and some of the concepts still haven't really made their way to iOS or Android: Kid's Corner; Dedicated search button; Browser address bar; People hub; Unified messaging..." Aside from the competition aspect with Google and Apple, do you miss Windows Phone? What are some specific features you miss about the old mobile operating system?
Some other neat features include the software keyboard, which Warren argues "is still far better than the defaults on iOS and Android," especially with the recently-added tracing feature that lets you swipe to write words. "Microsoft also experimented with features that were different to other mobile platforms, and some of the concepts still haven't really made their way to iOS or Android: Kid's Corner; Dedicated search button; Browser address bar; People hub; Unified messaging..." Aside from the competition aspect with Google and Apple, do you miss Windows Phone? What are some specific features you miss about the old mobile operating system?
I use my toaster, and wish that it ran Windows. I use my washing machine, and wish that it ran Windows. I use my SmartTV and wish that it... could... be... made... to... Blue Screen Of Death somehow. I miss Windows in my toilet unit the most. How nice would it be to have the Windows Recycle Bin's "undo recycle" function in a toilet?
Your calendar is surely off 7 days, today it is the 8th of April.
Do you really need to ask if we miss Windows phone? Are you NUTS?
Yep, as much as much as old people miss polio.
[Cicadas chirp in for variety too]
Absolutely. Almost as much as I miss Passenger Pigeons and AMC Gremlins.
All the UI candy in the world canâ(TM)t make up for lack of intuitive behavior, crashes, and a near complete lack of 3rd party software.
And for the record, they are NOT gone yet. My company is still using windows phone as the only cell phone option. They ugh they are finally supposed to be replaced second half of this year.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
Also, is slashdot getting free MSbucks for every windows article posted, or is this just here more for click/flamebait effect?
That feeling that you were going to wait 30 minutes to do an SMS: "Don't turn your phone off while an update is being applied..."
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
No.
Comedy post?
...I replaced my Lumia 1520 with a Nexus 6p, and recently replaced that with a Samsung Note 8, but the best phone camera I ever had was in the Lumia. We compare photos taken with it to those we took alter, and the Lumia captured much better images.
I liked WIndows Phone just fine -- and I make my living supporting Windows, so learning that OS was a good fit -- but I did not enjoy the two-year forced vacation from available apps. When I bought the Lumia, I lost access to SiriusXM, Square credit card payments, and other applications I had been using daily. I spent almost two years trying to find replacements with mixed results, and finally solved all the problems by ordering a Nexus 6P from Google.
Who knew!
I miss the old Microsoft (around 2009 - 2011, Windows 7 times).
Maybe system wide dark modes and live tiles are patented or otherwise encumbered such that it's not worth while for Google or Apple to bother duplicating them.
You live and learn, or you don't learn much.
No, I'm glad it's dead because it killed Nokia.
I miss it alot. Android is like the Ford Pinto of phones, and while I generally like the Apple devices, I had a much better experience on my Nokia WP than I do with my Samsung S7. I switched not because I wanted to, but because there really wasn't another option...I would have happily stuck with WP if hardware continued to support it.
Android and google in general has set back the mobile and web spaces by at least 5 years due to their need to dominate via ad supported services. They have dumbed everything to make things marketable to Aunt Sally vs elevate the field. Lots of IT / Tech advancements died with things became ad supported. Android is not a success story in my view.
Are you kidding? I still have my Windows phone, it is called Windows 10. They dropped the phone hardware and moved the "live tiles" to their Desktop OS. However, I have to do all of my text messaging through Google Hangouts. It's a strange phone.
I bet you never actually used one, I have had all three and the Windows 18.1 and 10 phones were more stable than the POS OS I have in my hands now.
...I wasn't one of the 2 people owning one.
I once owned a very expensive and nearly unusable windowsCE phone. I was mugged at knifepoint, and though I was greatly upset by the whole experience, I was, at least, releived by that fact that I could now justify spending more money to replace that piece of $4!t phone. Just doing nothing with it would cause random crashes. Kinda sucks when you think itâ(TM)s on standby and will, ya know, ring when someone calls. I canâ(TM)t think of a single feature or app that worked correctly and consistently. I switched to the then-ascendant Motorola Razr, which made it almost worth the mugging!
Love my Lumia 950, it works very well, does everything I need. Occasionally there's an app I wish I could use, but not enough to be a deal breaker. Microsoft did a great job making its apps responsive and I enjoy using the same software on my laptop and phone. I'm sure this will be an unpopular opinion but there was and still is nothing technically wrong with Windows Mobile. Sadly it looks like it won't be getting any further feature updates but the current version is still supported for quite a while yet.
When I renewed my phone recently, I wanted to look at all the options. Unfortunately, Windows Phone wasn't one of them. So I bought another iPhone. But for the first time, I was ready to look and consider.
So...like Swype and the thousand other such apps? Yeah yeah, Swype was discontinued a couple months ago - doesn't mean you get to tout it as a unique feature suddenly.
If that's the sort of crap I was missing with the microsoft phone, then no - no regrets :P /P
I'll replace it when it's dead. For a long time nothing beat the camera. I like the simplistic UI, the tiles and I don't give a damn about app stores. Also the confounded looks I get from colleagues are amusing when they realize that... yes, I'm a *nix and network admin who uses a windows phone. Clear phone calls, text with great pictures, I've got everything I need. Only 2 complaints... outdated browser and it phonebook/contact UI isn't very intuitive.
Because people want animated gifs on their desktop screen, always flipping and twirling and changing their look and running video and displaying ads. NOT.
No animations on the default screen is absolutely the correct way to UI. Microsoft is the one who is fucked up.
No. Most definitely not.
You're welcome.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
If it wasn't for the lack of third party app support, I'd still be using WP. If only Microsoft partnered with BlackBerry, I think together they'd have easily stood up Android/iOS and owned the enterprise market.
I'm so disappointed we aren't able to run NATIVE WIN10 on a mobile device today. It seemed to be on it's way then stopped. This is the only major shift since Satya took the chair that I've strongly disapproved of.
Android is insecure and a mess. Apple is too proprietary. A Windows phone would be a solid alternative and devices have the horsepower to run it.
N/T
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Today I learnt there are people who not only liked live tiles but actually miss them too. I guess it takes all kinds really.
I miss having a viable third option
Hit it on the third shot though... it's hard to make it out on the fencepost at 200' with just the steel sights... eyesight ain't what it used to be.
There are definitely things I miss about Windows Phone/Mobile. The whole "Metro" design worked extremely well on an all-touch interface like a phone. It's a pity most people's opinions of it have been tainted by Microsoft trying to shoehorn it into desktops with Windows 8. If you put the issue of 3rd party apps aside, Windows Phone was quite a ways ahead of both iOS and Android. One of my favorite features was how you could create your own unified inbox for email, but only include the accounts you wanted. It wasn't the most intuitive process, but that was something that could have easily been fixed in a future software update. Live Tiles are also something you just can't replicate on iOS or Android. You could make tiles bigger or smaller to show more or less information, or just make the icons for little used apps smaller so they take up less room on the screen, while making more frequently used app icons larger so they're easier to launch. Or you could make the icons on the opposite side of the phone from the hand you hold it with (so left for right-handed people and right for lefties) to make it easier to use one-handed. There wasn't a need for little gimmicks like Apple's one-handed mode that shifts everything half-way down the screen.
Windows Mobile/Phone 7-8.1 was a great mobile OS that was killed by being too late to the party and never being able to get the attention of third party developers. It found that happy middle ground between not being as locked down as iOS and feeling more polished than Android.
I still use a lumia 640 - can't complain at $30.
...or just "Windows Classic".
Perhaps they could do what WinAmp did when it's users were displeased with 3.0, and made 5.0 which was the best features of 2.0 and 3.0 combines -> 2+3=5 hence 5.0. Likewise, Microsoft could release Windows 17.
PS. I still use Windows 7, but miss the Windows 2000 UI and search-feature. Windows 2010 anyone?
I'm still using Windows Phone, so I can't really miss it.
I'd rather be using almost anything else though.
If she is hot, I might do her...
Captcha: ethics ;)
They are great for Target Practice! Right along with Windoze 10 DVD's, anything Calera/SCO/etc..., and anything Oracle.
I miss it a bit. The interface was head and shoulders above iOS or Android, and performance was amazing on low-end hardware.
I do not miss having access to 95% of the apps that I wanted.
Reorganizing app tiles (damn apple thatâ(TM)s easy)
And swipe keyboard (dam apple you have enough money and engineering muscle to do it)
You mean Microsoft tried to fsck-up UIs on handhelds, also? Next thing you are going to tell me is that they tried to make a handheld media player at one time.
14 Jan, 2020 is the day I divorce MS unless my PCs die before then.
System-wide dark mode: numerous screen filter apps exist
Tiles, etc: many custom launchers to try
As someone who was hyped for MeeGo back then, the absolute commercial failure of Windows Phone has a bittersweet taste of justice.
Circumcision is child abuse.
There are some features of Windows Phone, namely Win10 Mobile, that Android or iOS don't have. The keyboard is the best part, and included a virtual nub to be able to navigate through text. You could also install apps to the SD card, and it was the entire application not just some data of it like with Android (or even being completely unable to move the app to the SD card). Those features are what I miss the most about Windows Phone.
The big mistake with windows is not making the windows phone compatible with windows software.
here people will say "imcompatible hardware" to which I can respond with "emulation" to which they'll respond with "it will be slow" to which I can respond with "the phones are so much more powerful than older windows computers that even with inefficiency they can emulate all sorts of old windows programs"...
To this people will then say "why would anyone want to run old windows software on a phone"... well, a lot of that software is actually really impressive. Furthermore, it expands the liberary of programs that can be run on the phone beyond what the android and iOS has which would make Microsoft competitive with android for a lot of things that they otherwise can't be due to a lack of software.
And it gets better because there's nothing to stop people from writing new software that is compatible with that older archetecture. And you could ask why anyone would do that, but the easy answer is that there are a lot of people that know how to program programs for that but not for whatever new language your phones are using.
"IF" this worked relatively well, I wouldn't own an Android... I'd own a windows phone. I'd load it up with old programs I still use to this day, I'd put some old great games I love on there, I'd have all sorts of great productivity programs on there. I'd literally have an old version of Office on there. Full Excel support on your phone would be pretty sick.
And you could say "but the touch interface"... worst case, I'd have a little micro bluetooth keyboard and mouse. And whenever I needed mouse and keyboard, I'd grab that stuff and basically have a tiny laptop.
I'm not saying this is for everyone. But if the windows phones had this as a feature, I'd have bought a windows phone.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
On every operating system since XP Microsoft has had to disable live content in tiles because it is a gaping security hole.
Over and over they've introduced these tiles/widgets/gadgets/live content ... and they've all been deprecated due to security issues.
Why the fuck would you think they've succeeded this time? They've failed at it so often you have to assume this one is also horribly broken.
My employer standardized on Windows phones years ago after being on Blackberry for years before that. About a year ago, they phased out the last of the Windows phones and went exclusively with iPhones. My only use of the Windows phone was work related because I keep another phone for personal use.
There is one and only one thing that I miss about my old Windows phone: The way it handled meeting notifications from the Exchange calendar. Notification would pop up on the lock screen 15 minutes before the event. You could dismiss or snooze without unlocking the phone. You got reminders every 5 minutes until explicitly dismissed, even after the time of the event.
Meeting notifications under IOS 10 were horrible. One notification 15 minutes before the event and it was easy to miss if you woke up the iPhone with the home button. They made slight improvements under IOS 11 in that you can get back to the notifications if you wake up the phone through the home button. Snoozing brings up a 2nd reminder 6 minutes before the event. You can set a 2nd reminder time on the iPhone, but you have to do it manually for each and every event. I have not found a way to get another reminder at the event time, or to continue reminders after the start time has expired.
The thing I don't miss the most about the Windows phone was the password requirements our Corporate security mandated with mix of upper/lower case and special symbols. Was a pain to unlock. They let us use touch ID on the iPhone which is a huge time saver. I would almost give that up to have meeting/calendar notifications that work the way I want them too. It is a shame that as good as the iPhone is for many things, there are some very basic things that just plain stink.
This is the one time the title "Do you" perfectly fits. The writer is asking the one person who owned a windows phone if he misses it at all. My guess is... 'what, this is a windows phone? I thought it was one of those iDroids my kids are always talking about.'
Can't miss what I was never interested in.
Sure, my 2017 Android phone has all the apps, sure, but it's less responsive, less stable, buggier, and generally harder to use than my 2011 WP8 Nokia.
I very much miss being able to only view 4 emails at a time on the screen (using the smallest font-size). Now that i'm on android and without Microsoft's helping hand in deciding how much of my inbox i can see at a time, i find myself overwhelmed. There's just so much relevant information in one place... i don't know what to do. Though, i've found adding electrical tape to the top and bottom parts of my screen to give me the narrow focus microsoft once gave has helped me during the transition.
Some people will say yes - but they are all Nazis...
i miss baked in SSTP vpn connectivity
I used to carry two windows phones, one for work and second for testing and other nonsense.
My testing phone ran the latest WP version at the time 8.1 or something.
I came across a situation where I had to call emergency services. I tried calling with my primary(testing) phone and WP failed, the phone just crashed.
My second phone did work and the situation was solved. That was the day I decided to abandon WP platform and bought my first iphone.
Though I still use the work assigned WP, the sound quality is good and contacts sync seamlessly with office365.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
While the interface was unusable on a desktop it worked well enough on a phone. I picked up a phone on clearance and used it for a while. It was a $99 phone reduced to $19.99. For a low end model the interface was fast and never felt bogged down.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I wish they kept developing the Fujitsu LOOX F-07C .. I imagine it with the most power efficient intel chips, legacy bios, hdmi and a pair of usb(one for charging), battery that makes the phone twice as thick... oh man... No need for V1agra tonight.
http://www.fujitsu.com/global/...
Next thing you'll try to get me to believe is that there was a Microsoft media player.
What I miss is a competitive ecosystem but not the MS, Palm and Blackberry products in particular.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
This post is an excellent detector of Microsoft fanboys.
Anyone who claims to be using a WP today by choice is clearly a diehard Microsoft fan.
App support for WP was always bad and in recent years, important apps, such as banking apps have been withdrawn.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I already deal with Microsoftâ(TM)s shenanigans on my work computer and home computer. Why would I want that on my lunch break, too?
As someone who actively worked on part of the Winamp code base, this is something that always bothered me, much like the hate for Microsoft trying to do something different. The Winamp team came up with an amazing audio processing pipeline interface in Winamp 3. They also engineered one of the most flexible skinning interfaces ever seen on a desktop. Users couldn't use their visualizers and older skins, therefor it "sucked" and everyone bitched and didnt give two fucks about the innovations being created. Even with a compatibility layer added in Winamp 3, it wasn't enough. So the entire thing was scrapped, sadly. In the MS world, it is entirely the same. Just look what happened to WinFS or Photosynth. Just because something is "different" doesn't instantly make it "bad", but that's the general consumer consensus without even trying to try something new.
Actually, I wouldn't miss *anything* from Microsoft, should it disappear tomorrow. (Captcha: dissolve -- heh)
It was so easy for them to read all my data on the Windows phone, what with their hardcoded backdoors in all MS products. I miss that, says some slave.
SlaveDot is shillhell.
The only thing I miss about Windows Phone 8 was the smoothness of sliding everything with my finger on the home screen. Apple has stutters here and there, Android has stutters by design as far as I can tell. I don't know what MS did there, but they should take a patent on it so these other two guys can license it, because they don't seem able to come up with a solution by themselves.
"Everybody's naked underneath" -- The Doctor
LOL sure it was, Satay Nutella.
If I ever got a mod point to give, I'd probably give that an extra funny, though I was actually searching for gun-related jokes. Something along the lines of "I never miss my Windows Phone as long as I use my rifle. However it's pretty hard to hit it with my revolver." Projecting since my own aim with handguns was never that good?
Actually I think my first quasi-smartphone about 10 or 15 years back was running some kind of Windows OS. They've rebranded their small OS attempts so many time that I can't even remember what it was called. Fortunately I've mostly blacked out those memories except for lingering fears of Sharp and increased nausea towards my occasional involuntary usage of Microsoft software. Microsoft never understood such concepts as small or elegant, though they are great about stealing ideas and proclaiming "It ain't our fault and even when it is our fault you can't do anything to us. Nyah, nyah, nyah."
Then again, and as hard as it might be to believe, I was actually hoping Microsoft could offer a viable email alternative to Gmail. The EVIL of the google has become so much fresher and more pungeant... Maybe my memory is playing games, but I don't think I ever had such feelings of fear and trepidation towards Microsoft.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I run a Nokia with stock android and updates, whatsapp (runs faster + more features), HERE driving works better, firefox browser with blocker which is a huge improvement over the locked down Edge, microsoft tools (mail,onedrive,word et al) all do work at least as snappy and stable.
I postponed migration from Windows Mobile until banking apps where phased out and the Lumia started to get slower and slower (even after factory reset) and was not keen on Android after v1 v2 experiences.
WM had some nice features and offered great value in the beginning, this simply isn't the case anymore, whether it be Microsoft's fault or not.
The only drawback I've encountered is the non-replaceable battery.
I have an iPhone, some Android devices and a Windows 8 and Windows 10 phone. I iuse the W10 device as a backup phone and I really do like it. Lots of things in Windows Phone is much better than the iOSDroid way of doing things.
Inter-application navigation is vastly better for one, and I like the tiles.
Read a book called "The Smashing Mobile Book Addendum"''s chapter on Windows Phone to see a good descript of how W10 phone works vs iOSDroid to see why it is better.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Sorry, but no. It's a crappy phone, even with all the money they spent to make sure it was showcased in tons of television series no one ever wanted it. If Microsoft wanted to make a product someone wanted, they should come out with Windows 7.01, not the endless stream of crap they have been coming out with.
With my Verizon contract ending days before the new 'droid phones came out and with a 30-day return policy, I accepted the Windows phone to give me something to blog-rant (brant?) about until the droid phones arrived. The experience was amazing until Ballmer killed the device by announcing the merge-to-windows-8.
Metro wasn't a cosmetic touch up of Windows, it was a do-over. It was a UI entirely built around the phone/tablet from the very ground up, and it was as delicious, delightful, intuitive an experience as you could have wanted.
It comes down to this: Desktop OSes, iOS and Chrome have displays based on "panels", "windows" ... display elements. Metro was philosophically entirely button based. It sounds trivial/trite, but fundamentally anything the user could see had an interaction property.
Until they started merging it into the Windows UI for "all device support".
That's when people started letting their desktop developers influence their mobile design and you started seeing apps simply ported so that they were "operable" under Metro, or didn't bother.
In every other touch UI, you have to learn/guess what gestures/touches you can make for any given presentation, like playing a flight sim without a keyboard guide, or playing a text adventure and having to guess the author used 'anthracite' instead of 'coal', vs playing a point-and-click game.
In Metro, everything on screen was touchable, everything you could do was on-screen aside a couple of global gestures/physical buttons.
This lead to consistency, this lead to a short learning curve for almost any app.
I'm really, really glad to have had the experience.
I don't /miss/ my Windows 7 phone because ultimately they killed it, and the last few months weren't much fun.
But I do miss the best of Metro and every time I use a droid or ios phone ... I want to kick Ballmer in the Ballmers.
-- A change is as good as a reboot.
Must be that Windows has been the high end platform for graphics for about twenty years (replacing the Silicon Graphics workstations that were hyped in video game magazines of the 90s). Where graphics vendors competed for the 3D graphics crown, and several 3D APIs even : OpenGL, Direct3D and others, with Microsoft controlling only one of these. Old days of old when gamers cared about achieving a hundred fps in Quake 3 first on high end PCs, then on what were now low end PCs a year later. .NET, with garbage collection pauses, they would have been laughed out.
If MS had say built DirectX 9 on top of
There maybe were troubles with Vista and its 3D accelerated desktop on the crappiest integrated graphics. That got sorted out too (while people stuck with XP if they weren't pleased with the bloated monster)
On phones, people are stuck with their Android 4.4 or 5.1 (to this day) and have no option whatsoever ; on microsoft platforms people had the options of running the former OS, or "legacy" graphics (e.g. Windows 7 classic mode, Aero Basic), or OpenGL games, or buying a PS3 instead of an Xbox 360 (a console which had a crappy three-core/six-thread CPU, but ran Windows NT and couldn't afford stupid slow downs)
Come to Windows 8 era, they had been improving the Vista graphics stacks for years, DirectX 9 and later, strong expectations put on 3rd party graphics drivers. Stuff had to be smooth on an Atom laptop. Microsoft made that first-party ARM tablet too, a laughable failure but for commercial etc. reasons.
Nokia isn't dead. They are not heavy in the US market but are elsewhere. I am using a Nokia 6 2017 model without bloatware and security updates every month running Oreo 8.
I only switched from my old windows phone to Android because my new carrier did not support the phone. Just this morning I was talking to my wife about digging out the old phone to use on WiFi.
When she was using hers, it did a great job of letting her know to leave early for work if traffic was worse than normal. And that was without setting her work times.
If by Windows Phone, you mean Windows Mobile 6.1 with a stylus and physical keyboard then sure. Otherwise you'd just be better off going back to an old school palm pilot and a flip phone.
I don't miss my Windows phone. I'm using it right now. What kind of idiot writes this kind of junk?
I don't respond to AC's.
And at least two of my friends still are.
...but my mobile banking app still works and occasionally gets updates.
I don't miss Windows Phone, because I never had one. But I think the market misses it. This two-horse race between Android and iOS is boring, predictable and uninspired. Each copying the other (look ma, I've got a notch now too) to implement the other's latest features on their own grid-of-icons based OS while ignoring the inherent flaws. Android is a mess of an OS that rots over time until you have to do a factory reset, and iOS is a shrine to Apple's arrogance.
The phone market is HUGE and could easily sustain a third player (if people could see past their one-vs-the-other tribalism), be that Windows Phone, Blackberry, Tizen or something else. We need competition, and some new thinking.
L8r.
"How much truth can advertising buy?" - iNsuRge - AK47
Yep. Have two spare phones with removable batteries for when this one goes.
Metro on phone works quite well. Desktop and Server (C'mon.. what were you smoking guys? Really?). It works well. it's a great PhoneOS.
Phones and Xbox .. microsoft knows how to create a great usable device.
Not touching the desktop and server debate beyond metro being annoying and fischer price there.
I missed the Lumia so picked up a second hand 950 for not very much. I hotspot an Android tablet whenever I need the apps.
Nokia the company is dead, chief.
Nokia the brand lives on thru licensing.
The design and UI was excellent. I loved mine, my old mother learned how to use hers in minutes. It worked well for what it was supposed to do, be a phone. Too bad the environment didnâ(TM)t come around with app support. I moved to iPhone and Android since. I would be happy if windows phone and android swapped fates. Android is and always will be a buggy mess.
My Windows Phone was due for an update so after being on the fence between iOS and Android, I decided to try the Pixel 2...I missed my WP almost instantly, some of it was just the shock of change and some of it was just being underwhelmed :
1) "State of the Art" camera is not markedly better than the one I have been using for over 3 years now.
2) Not seeing my photos and emails on the main screen is a big loss (live tiles really should posted to Android and iOS)
3) I get more apps now...but I don't need most of them and the design of these apps is clearly not as good as the Metro or iOS apps
4) I have to charge this NEW phone more than I had to charge the 3 year old one (probably because of all the tracking "features"
5) Android is WAAAAYYYYYY creepier in its incessant nagging to track everything I do (once I "turned off" all those features)
Lumia 925 still is the best looking and functioning device I have used
Still have fond memories of my iPaq 6315 rocking the Windows Mobile 2003 OS.
It could (natively) create office documents, do mapping, take pictures, had push email, etc. a few years before the iPhone and Android were a glimmer in the publics' eye. Any apps created for the .NET compact framework could be run without modification on desktop windows.
Them and the Treos were ahead of their time.
Karma: Can only be portioned out by the Cosmos.
Just look what happened to WinFS
So what happened to WinFS? As I recall it was often promised and never shipped.
No, I don't miss it. I didn't even miss it when it was alive.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
The Windows 'ecosystem' was a vast wasteland punctuated by the occasional pile of steaming horseshit.
You could every app except the one you actually wanted or needed. But Microsoft made up for it with lots and lots of "fart" and flashlight apps.
They had a calendar that couldn't make or set appointments, meetings, or add notes. You couldn't mark a day or set a reminder because it was a view-only calendar, period. It was both utterly worthless AND the #1 rated calendar app in the Windows app store.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
The concept of no longer having "drive letters" scared the shit out of people, they revolted, so Microsoft dropped the entire project sadly.
Interesting, my Nokia stock is doing pretty well lately, and will do a lot better as 5G starts getting rolled out since they build a very large percentage of the gear running the back-end cell networks... Nokia is dead, long live Nokia!
Also, the current Nokia mobiles are designed by former Nokia folks at HMD global, and manufactured by former Nokia folks in a former Nokia factory now owned by Foxconn. So the Nokia cell phones live on through a combination of licensing, and people who used to design/build them now designing/building them again, with a different corporate structure that gives the actual Nokia company a way back into the mobile market with little to no risk. Watch for them to acquire HMD global in the next couple years if all keeps going as well as it has been.
Wrong, Nokia the company lives on. It never died, they sold off the mobile phone division and licensing rights, but have since come back into the market.
My Lumia 950 still meets my needs, and I really enjoy the interface, I have it set up just as I like it and the live tiles definitely add value. As mentioned by others, the search button and ease of switching between apps makes using it a breeze. Good camera too, and integrates well with OneDrive. If/when it dies, I'll miss having such a nice UI and will probably go to Android (I find iOS obtuse and WTF is up with having a UI hardward with all the flexibility of a toaster ?)
It's good luck to be superstitious
People didn't revolt, few even had a clue it existed. MS just didn't make it work. According to one of their engineers no one at Microsoft could even clearly define what it was.
I have to admit, the Nokia 930 (yes, it was the last one with the Nokia name) was the best actual phone I ever used, and if the toddler hadn't lost it on me, I'd probably have gone back to using it as a phone and kept this iphone as a smaller ipad, since it has the apps I need/use.
But I'll be damned if the 930 didn't have one of the best camera's I ever used built in, but the super clear phone calls were worth the next to no app for several years, until my contract came due, and then there was nothing but androids (yech) or iphones to choose from. from the point of view, at leave the iphones are more secure than android.
I don't miss anything about Windows Mobile in particular (and I detest how it was allowed to influence the desktop OS in some weird, genetic abortion of design failure), but I do miss the time before it was released, when the ecosystem was full of promise. I miss the idea of a mobile OS which wasn't a walled garden, but also wasn't a cluster-f of unpatched, vendor "optimized" garbage, with tons of bloatware and more persistent bugs and usability issues than anyone would have thought possible. I miss the promise of something better than iOS, like the Microsoft of old, taking the solid foundation that Apple has built (in contrast to the garbage heap that is the Android ecosystem), copying it, and extending it to generic hardware, so the price would go down, and people would no longer have to choose between affordability and usability.
But then, it was not that Microsoft... it was the new Microsoft, the one which wasn't even intelligent enough to grasp why people on the desktop didn't want a phone UI, much less what might constitute a "better" mobile experience. So much promise, so much failure.
I have one still around and may pop a SIM into it if I break my current phone. The combination of things that made it non-viable early on was a mix of "No Decent Apps" except the MS ones and no decent browsers to use mobile websites/webapps instead (Edge was too immature, other alternatives were few and also immature).
It's still getting the occasional insider update and software updates, and Edge is much more capable and mature now than it was a few years ago.
fencepost
just a little off
The joke is that the Windows Phone got Microsoft thinking that they needed to unify the user interface between Windows (which worked good for desktops) and their new phones (which no one was using). So we ended up with Windows 8, which sucked, and Windows 10, which is a screaming abortion, all for the glory of the phone that no one fucking uses and they cancelled.
Captcha: Atrocity
Thanks M$ for killing that company.
At least with every bullet so far.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I miss it because I think there should be more competition in the mobile OS sector. I also miss Firefox OS and Sailfish (though it's sort of still alive) and all of the other small-fry alternatives to Android and iOS. Google and Apple have become way too complacent and are resting on their laurels. There is no real innovation in phone UIs, and the Windows Phone tile layout was a very interesting idea.
Eat the rich.
I used a Lumia 520 for the last 3 years, only ditching it early this year when the lack of apps became too much. I miss that little phone - it did almost everything I needed, and the UI was far snappier and more responsive than the Android I've replaced it with (and the 'droid has double the memory and a far faster SoC).
However there were definitely niggles with the Lumia that I could never accept. The main one was that the bastardised version of IE/Edge on that thing was terrible - half of the time, navigating to a web page would result in the browser dying and me getting thrown back to the home screen without any warning.
I think, however, that it's most fair to say that Microsoft - or to be more precise, Satya Nadella - killed Windows Phone by removing the company's focus from making it succeed. Left to its own devices, WinPhone was never going to succeed in a market dominated by Apple on the high-end and Google on the low, and Microsoft very obviously understood that when they crafted the phone hardware, which even today is arguably superior in many ways to iPhones and Androids at the same price points. Had they followed through by ensuring the creation - and curation - of the app ecosystem required to compete on the software side, I believe WinPhone would be a notable contender today; certainly not a frontrunner, but with enough market share to ensure it got the apps it needed to ensure its continued presence and growth.
It not only runs fast on basic hardware, my Windows phone also had a way longer battery life than my Android phones with a comparable battery size (and weight).
That's almost certainly because
a) Android is written in Java compared to WinPhone's C/C++, and
b) Android is SO. FUCKING. BLOATED.
No, it really is. Android 4.4 (or at least, CyanogenMod 11) used to have this feature where you could replace the useless "bars" for phone signal strength in the status bar with the actual value in dBm. That was removed, so I went to look at the code to see if I could add it back. The class com.android.systemui.statusbar.SignalClusterView.java was 9.3 KB in CyanogenMod 11, and 26.1 KB in Lineage 14. I can't even find the part in the new code which handles displaying the actual signal strength icon - there are so many pointless layers of indirection, hinting, implication and setting a variable here that something somewhere else might read and maybe do something instead of some nice, simple, easily understood "callIconDisplayFunction()". With all that crap, I'm not surprised that Android runs like arse.
As for iStuff, I've never even touched one before, so I can't comment on their responsiveness.
I miss it because, without it, there is no alternative for Android to compete against. All Android has to do is not be IOS from Apple. Android steams ahead of that happily but Microsoft's offering might have given some options to those of us who remember Apples' legal shenanigans of past years. No tech giant is completely innocent of hiring lawyers but Apple did it to such an extent that it ruled itself out of doing business with anyone who can remember back more than 5 years.
I hoped that some of the offerings would do well. I might have bought one of those if they had been on sale around here. I had a Windows phone once. It was stable(ish) and could do a lot of what I wanted. Then MS seemed to decide to drop the market completely. Was this wariness of Apple lawyers?
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
IF the thing you like in Windows' Metro design are the "Live Tiles" :
- the concept of mobile app that still display useful stuff while in overview mode isn't new at all, HP/Palm webOS (full blown GNU/Linux, not Android related) used to do it. Whenever in "card" overview (looking from affar to all opened tabs, using the "deck of cards, grouped in 'hands' metaphor" specific to webOS - each card can still display its content).
- Jolla's Sailfish OS pushed the concept further: when in "peek mode" or on the home screen, apps are displayed as tiled cards, and have the option to either just display their screen (most of Android Apps as they aren't specifically designed for the feature), or to display "a cover": a useful summary of a few key data and offer one or two quick actions.
(e.g.:
-- The "mail" app will display the number of unopened mails, and offer the quick action to write a new e-mail
-- a battery monitor/health diagnostics will display battery charge status.
-- a system monitor will display CPU use
-- a sport tracker will dispaly total distance and offer pause/resume quick actions
etc.)
This gives the same kind of "information quick glance" as Metro's Live tiles, but tend to be less flashy (most of the covers contain static status text, few do animations).
Also Sailfish OS almost fits the "frontend build on top of an Android backend" :
for ease of development, Sailfish OS re-use the drivers normally designed for Android (Jolla developed libhybris for that purpose) so with a squint, it could look like an Android backend.
(Actuall Sailfish OS only uses the drivers, the OS is a full blown GNU/Linux, but uses Myriad's Alien dalvik to give an Android-compatible runtime environment to Android apps, which is useful as not every single company is going to rush and port their apps to yet another platform, such as Sailfish OS native QT apps). (So it's an Android sandwich : Android in the drivers thanks to libhybris, full blown GNU/Linux in the middle, and Android again in the apps thanks to alien-dalvik for when native QT apps don't suffice).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
a useful link with a long history of how the Elop/Microsoft massacre happened upon Nokia.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Really? Microsoft made a phone? How did they display all that information in the blue screen of death?
I have a Lumia 928, and have already done a few repairs to keep it going. I can't stand Android or iOS, and for one time in its history, Microsoft got something like presenting a large amount of information almost ambiently.
I love the thing. I wish they had not abandoned it after flooding the market with cheap pointless phones, rather than present a decently priced flagship that worked well.
Do I miss what?!
I never used it and therefore don't miss it. When Balmer was in charge of MS, he totally screwed the pooch on this. He was blinded by his hubris about so many things. It was a mistake leaving that guy in charge. I wonder how Bill felt about leaving his company in the hands of that guy.. I'm sure Nokia was happy to see MS buy up their company and then ditch everything as well.. Nokia made a mistake hiring their CEO from MS and should not have been surprised to see where things went after that (although it may have been the plan all along)..
nah, but i do seriously miss webOS on devices.
Is it 'a' phone or 'the' phone that I miss? And yes, I miss it a lot as I am a terrible shot.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
People do not like change. News at 11.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I thought Windows Phone was the best phone system out there. It never received much support from MS, but what's new.
It was very intuitive and for the most part stable. Better than Android and god forbid i-Phone
I used to work for Microsoft (not the mobile division) and we had an internal mailing list where we could talk about the phone and provide feedback. There was a small but vocal group in the community that said we should forget making our own OS and use Android. Customize the phone with the Metro interface, do full Office integration, and expand on things like integration with Xbox. They felt that the killer was that no matter how good the phone was that getting developers to code their apps for a third platform was going to be a constant uphill battle. And they were right. Canâ(TM)t tell you how many times someone would say they would try it if it werenâ(TM)t for the fact that several of their favorite apps were missing.
I am not talking about fancy features. I am talking purely about thumb typing. Windows Phone Keyboard was much superior. Much fewer mistypes.
Yes, yes I do. Interface was better than iPhone and Android. Unfortunately late to the game and by then people were used to the insane gymnastics required to operate iPhones and Androids.
My favorite feature of Windows Phone is that it still runs at the same (moderate) speed that it did 5 years ago when I got it.
The API was just too limited. All the apps felt like they were built from the same high level UI components. This is not necessarily bad. However the tools to build in depth apps just weren't there. As soon as I saw Animoog on an iPhone it was all over.
Seriously, I do miss it.
Zune zuna zune, windows phone, zuna zune
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I think Microsoft failed and then gave up to grab a business niche that would have been an Admin's dream. To be able to domain-join and easily control a Win10 device via group policy would have been great for businesses. Total FAIL!!
Never. POS.
the nokia 1520 was the best phone ive ever had. shattered when it fell one foot off my lap getting out of the car. they just dont make nokia like they used to. it was like the only windows phone ever produced with properly powered hardware. everything else was always underpowered laggy crap. plus that was cortana in my pocket not me being happy to see you.
I love my Lumia 950XL and Windows 10 Mobile. I still power up the SIM-less beast. If it weren't for lack of apps, it would still be my phone. I currently have a Galaxy S8+, however I still power up the 950XL and my 640 just to compare. I miss the live tiles and how intuitive and fluid the UI is.
The 950XL's interface was useful and informative. It was a far cry from Android's resource hogging widgets and iPhone's grid of icons that resemble an '80's touch tone land line phone.
They were like 1990s Macs. Easy to use and people who owned them loved them, there just weren't any apps.
How many of the "no" votes actually owned them (8 or later)?
I put off buying a Smartphone for a long time because I didn't like Android or iOS. They always felt to me like they'd taken the basic idea of a computer desktop (shortcuts on screen and a start menu) and crammed it down onto a phone. While that works fine when you have a mouse and a good size screen it just didn't feel very nice on a phone and I still don't really like Android at all. It works but it's not that nice to look at and there's generally very little information on your home screen. Yes you can use widgets but they don't really blend into any consistent aesthetic so they just look like an unappealing blob. Also if you want a good overview of several things you either end up with a screen cluttered with unappealing blobs or unappealing blobs scattered over a few panels on your home screen. Or you have to rely on push notifications but that can get very cluttered and noisy very fast. Windows Phone 7 and the Metro UI was the first time I saw a Smartphone UI that looked like someone had sat down, thrown out the conventional idea of a desktop and built it to work for a Smartphone. My first and still my favorite Smartphone was the Nokia Lumia 800. Lack of apps meant nothing to me, my needs were simple. Internet, phone calls, messaging, calendar. All I needed. Live tiles let me have plenty of information from calendar, weather, messaging apps at a glance in a way that was clean, uniform and simple. All the home screen of my phone entailed was one page of Live tiles with all the information I needed and shortcuts to everything I used daily and I had it to the point where I didn't even need to scroll up and down, it all fit on my screen at once. If I needed something else then a quick swipe to the left and I had my full app list sorted alphabetically. If I tapped on one of the headings for a certain letter then it would bring up a quick navigation menu that let me jump to the letter I was after. This was brilliant for one-handed operation. Nokia Maps was as good as or better than the google maps of the time. I can never quite get people to understand how amazing the messaging app was before facebook created their own and shut off access for the windows messaging app. Texts, facebook, hangouts, all in the same stream of messages for the same person. Windows Phone was gorgeous, clean, easy to use and made extremely good use of limited screen real-estate. At the time everyone said app support limitations was a drawback but this was during the time when people were writing crazy apps that were fun for a day before the novelty wore off. I didn't really care about whatever fad app everyone was freaking out about. I just wanted a Smartphone that performed the basic functions of a Smartphone as best it possibly could and nothing has ever beat Windows Phone in my eyes. I have and will continue to defend it as a brilliant phone OS ever since I first laid eyes on it. I'm complacent with my more recent Android phones but I will never be really happy with them as long as I'm comparing them to Windows Phone.
Crap, I have a levitation class at 25:131. Better set the alarm to 'cinnamon'.
android is always better than windows and also amazing apps are available view my about same situation : https://world-of-apps.wixsite....
nostalgic only for windows mobile (PPC)