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?

Comments

I Miss Windows In Everything I Own

[OpenSourceAllTheWay]

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?

Re:I Miss Windows In Everything I Own

[arglebargle_xiv]

Do You Miss Windows Phone?

No. Next question.

Metro design and Live tiles??

[ruir]

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?

Re:Metro design and Live tiles??

[burtosis]

I ran into an old windows phone today. Then I put it in reverse and ran into it again. I miss that old windows phone sometimes.

Re:Metro design and Live tiles??

[Darinbob]

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.

Re:Metro design and Live tiles??

[cyberpunkrocker]

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)

Re:Metro design and Live tiles??

[FuegoFuerte]

I don't miss it, because I still carry a Lumia 950 as my primary phone. Why do I do this? Because I've used Android, and the OS is slow and clunky and unintuitive to use, even though I've been using Android tablets for several years. And iOS? It looks like a pile of regurgitated icons splattered around a desktop leftover from Windows 95. The hardware may be decent enough, and things might play nice together if one is willing to invest in an entirely Apple household of hardware, but the basic layout and design of the UI on both iOS and Android is rubbish by comparison to Windows Phone.

Microsoft made a LOT of blunders with Windows Phone, for sure... killing Project Astoria was probably one of the last nails in the coffin for the OS, as that would have allowed for the app ecosystem everyone wanted. Letting people get used to nifty features like truly unified messaging, and then pulling them back out, also was a big blunder, IMO, though possibly driven by the companies (facebook, etc.) that they originally had integration with.

Many of the features Windows Phone had are still not in any other mobile OS, and several have even (sadly) been stripped from the current versions of Windows Phone. Even so, if I could by a current handset (say, a Nokia 8) and load Windows Phone onto it instead of Android, I would do so in a heartbeat, because for everything I *really* need a phone to do, it just works.

Yes I do

[aglider]

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..."

Re:Yes I do

[Fly Swatter]

Good thing there are no pesky updates to get in your way anymore. It is now the perfect phone.

I don't miss the OS, but I miss the camera

[spywhere]

...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.

No, I'm glad it's dead because it killed Nokia.

[DemoLiter3]

No, I'm glad it's dead because it killed Nokia.

Re:No, I'm glad it's dead because it killed Nokia.

[Stormwatch]

Nokia was a walking corpse when MS bought them

Because their Microsoft-planted CEO Stephen Elop killed it from the inside. Nokia was doing pretty well before the disastrous move to Windows Phone.

What?

[Proudrooster]

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.

No, because I'm still using it

[mdsharpe]

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.

Schadenfreude

[Stormwatch]

As someone who was hyped for MeeGo back then, the absolute commercial failure of Windows Phone has a bittersweet taste of justice.

It wasn't bad honestly

[ArchieBunker]

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.

Re:It wasn't bad honestly

[Voyager529]

I never understood the animosity to the Windows 8 start screen. What is the use case for the cramped start menu? You are doing one thing, you are looking to launch an application. Why constrain that function to a corner of the screen? One thing, full screen, maximum real estate given to do that one thing. I am not launching an app and also scanning my desktop for some other reason. I switched my Windows 10 back to full screen start.

The full-screen part isn't the source of the animosity. The source is basically everything else. What you call "cramped", I see as "information density". As a go-to example, let's use Magix Vegas, formerly Sony Vegas. Is the program icon under "Magix", "Sony", "Vegas", or "Movie Studio"? With the multi-column paradigm, I can fit 48 items per column, and 6 columns on a 1920x1080 screen. Whichever one of them it's under, it'll be readily apparent in short order. On that same 1920x1080 screen, the Windows 8 Start Screen shows 35 entries - less than a single column in the older paradigm. Given that Windows 8 was rarely run on a tablet, for 99% of people the reduction in information density wasn't a tradeoff for which they received a benefit. Additional annoyances involved the 'charms' menu for which a UI cue was never implemented, and an unintuitive pinning procedure. Now, the go-to answer is always "just type what you want!" There's no UI cue for that, either, it's been possible since Windows Vista, and if that's the primary way of launching programs, then congratulations, we're all the way back to a command line paradigm.

As for the Windows Metro UI apps, they are still in Windows 10. I have no problems with those either.

That's fine. There are plenty of reasons to not-like Metro UI apps, not the least of which because of how limited they are.

Cant resize it? Again, what is the use case.

The operating system is literally called "Windows". If MS wanted to use a different paradigm, fine, call it "Tiles" and see how well that works. You're stating that you don't understand the animosity, yet you require users to justify their preferences. "Because f'k you, that's why" is the only necessary reason as to why window resizing over tiling is preferred. I may well want to see just the status bar of a background process, which takes 3% of a screen rather than 25. Snapping is helpful, tiling is useful, but to assume every situation lends itself to not-windowing is shortsighted.

You can tile them on the screen. Dock them to the sides. Arrange them to see multiple apps at once. I don;t see the issue.

Few argue the problem. Most argue the requirement.

Unity uses over a quarter of the screen for the launcher, is someone bitching about that? Not as much, because it's "Linux" and we are used to it being schizophrenic in UI design. *SMH*

Well, first off, you just called using a quarter of the screen a schizophrenic UI design while arguing that full screen was acceptable earlier. Second, the Unity UI also spent the last few years receiving its share of criticism. Finally, Linux has options on that front; using Kubuntu or Xubuntu or Ubuntu Mate are all entirely viable and listed on the main Ubuntu download page, and tutorials for switching between them are incredibly easy to find and follow. Linux makes it far easier to change one's desktop environment than Windows, and while I would love nothing more than to be able to load up a Windows computer and end up in KDE or Cinnamon, the system just doesn't do that.

And yes, I own and use a Windows 10 phone as my primary communications device and it is better by design. I don't need your stinking 'droid apps :P

I'm with you here. I've got maybe three dozen apps on my phone, in total, over half of which are either rooting/backup tools, or apps that could be readily replaced with a website if the developers wanted to put the slightest effort into one.

Re:No No

[darkain]

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.

Re:Ha-ha! Sure!

[evil_aaronm]

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.

No gun jokes?

[shanen]

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.