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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?
No, I'm glad it's dead because it killed Nokia.
My coworker has one and he loves it. It does have a good design, it's nicer than iOS in some ways, and the metro startscreen style works well with touch on a phone or tablet where it fails on a PC.
Yes - the android marketing boys start slinging the sh*t as soon as they see threats. They are doing in this comment section. They play dirty and thats why they won this battle. They will loose the war once Google is defanged and exposed for what they are.
My dream phone would be one with a Windows (Metro) frontend build on top of an Android backend.
I really think the Metro design was, at least in theory, much better than the IOS/Android basic design ideas. Of course MIcrosoft did make a horrible blunder with the Metro design in Windows 8, which put many people off (me included at the time)
I stopped using Google keyboard when I noticed that my e-banking account number (which begins with a letter but is mostly numbers) started to show up in the autocomplete suggestions when I was in other apps. Now I know it's somewhere on their servers, and who knows, it could appear on someone else autocomplete. So nice.
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.
I was going to say that I kinda miss the Palm platform, particularly the Visors. They worked pretty well for me. Maybe it was mostly Graffiti. I got pretty efficient with that by the time Palm wrapped up. I'd take that over the "keyboard" on my iDevices.
I have and Android phone and an iPad, but my partner had a Windows Phone and it was the only mobile UI I've used that hasn't annoyed me. I don't 'miss' it, in the same way that I don't 'miss' BeOS, because I never used either enough to get accustomed to their features and be annoyed by their lack elsewhere. I didn't get one, because she was always frustrated by the lack of third-party support: the built-in functionality was mostly good (though, like Android, the lack of out-of-the-box CalDAV / CardDAV support was annoying) but if you ever wanted to do something that it couldn't do out of the box then it probably couldn't do it at all. If I could buy a Windows phone that could set up virtual Android environments with each completely isolated from the others then I'd buy one today.
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