Comment by bombcar 2 days ago
Was this around the time Microsoft kept switching what "windows phone" was? I remember that the one friend who got into it loved it, and then they released something completely incompatible and he abandoned the platform.
At the time Steve Jobs was putting his foot down against allowing Flash on the iPhone because the performance was so pants, Microsoft was going all in on Silverlight which had exactly the same problem.
That’s a popular misconception.
The first iPhone had a 400Mhz processor and 128MB of RAM. It was so resource constrained that you couldn’t put a picture on your home screen because it would have taken too much memory.
It could barely run Safari. If you scrolled too fast, you would see checker boxes while trying to render the screen.
When Flash did finally come to mobile on Android, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1GB RAM. The first iPhone with those specs didn’t come out until 2011.
Even then on Android, Flash ran horribly and killed your battery. I had a high end Android phone on Sprint back then.
It's easy to forget how popular flash was in that decade. A lot of us found it annoying on desktops too. Not to mention Linux, where we'd deal with binary blobs that were pretty unstable, not because we liked it but because you needed it to interact with the world.
I have not so pleasant memories of having a few different versions of their plugin and I'd try to figure out which one worked for a given website, symlink the right one and restart the browser. And that was the way to watch videos online...
> When Flash did finally come to mobile on Android, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1GB RAM.
It worked on Maemo years before that though, with 600MHz Cortex-A8 CPU and 256 MB RAM. Nokia N900 had out-of-box support for Flash in its Gecko-based browser.
I believe Symbian had some support before that too, but I don't remember and haven't checked the details.
Wait, it wasn't about performance, but it was about Performance?
It was that a pseudo-machine/VM approach put the VM IP owner (Adobe, Sun/Oracle) in driver's seat for control of the product's precious HW resources while letting their affiliates define the UI. What could go wrong, knowing that to invite in the vampire of their bloat & risk was to give those IP owners a competitive leg up to override all your design choices and serve their own markets, contrary to everything Jobs had done to rescue Apple from its clone wars.
Oh, and that Flash and Java were the world's most popular malware/APT delivery vehicles at that that continued to wreck PCs for many years after 2007.
But it wasn't about performance!
Or why Jobs choose to not drive a stake into his own heart to defend from vampires.
It would be interesting to see a companion presentation from the POV of Cingular/ATT. They likely also were very surprised and entertained by Jobs' device!
My 90s PC had similar specs and ran Flash websites just fine. It also supported desktop backgrounds and animated screensavers just fine.
nit:
> It was so resource constrained that you couldn’t put a picture on your home screen because it would have taken too much memory.
Clearly you drank the Apple koolaid that later artificially limited wallpapers to 3GS (or 3G?) and above when they introduced the feature in later iPhone OS updates.
We had wallpapers and great homescreen and dock themes on jailbroken iPhones without a significant perf impact.
P.S. Contemporary Windows Mobile phones had Texas Instruments OMAP ~200MHz processor IIRC with less RAM and iPhone (2G) was comparatively great.
I had the original iPhone, then swapped it for a flagship android and hated it. I tried Windows Phone out a few years later and loved it and had two of them over the years. Some apps didn't exist for it and that sucked, but the OS was snappy and something different that I really liked. The Nokia windows phones were great. I knew it was doomed though as when I got them from the carrier, I was apparently like the only person despite it having its own wall at the brick and mortar store lol. I still miss it.
A relative of mine had a Windows Phone and kept it running at least until the mid 10s. It was fast but he could basically only do calls and SMSes with it because nobody wrote apps for that OS. Everybody in app development (devs and their customers) was keen to see Windows Phone die quickly so they could spare time and money and develop only for two OSes.
Thy were really great on supporting a bunch of less popular platforms (feature phones and the like) WhatsApp supported Blackberry for a long time. WhatsApp probably supported a potato for quite a long time.
Yes, the Windows Nokia Phone was quite an interesting alternative. Though I never owned one I played with one and was pleasantly surprised, the 'workflow' was very good, the UI as was nice, it was snappy. If they were around today I'd probably think about owning one.
>I still miss it.
There are dozens of us !
I miss so many things besides the UI. seamless integration of Cortana with in-car bluetooth to read incoming SMS, live tiles, fantastic cameras in Nokia devices.
The Lumia was essentially a N9 ported from Linux to Windows. The N9 was the best phone I have ever owned. The UI was fantastic. In particular, the offline navigation application was incredible.
Nokia could have succeeded in the smartphone market. They had the 770 since late 2005. But they were a typical corporation, conservative and plagued by internal politics. Bringing Elop on board, with his Windows agenda, didn't help either.
I had forgotten the name, but yeah, I had a Lumia for my first one. Hardly anyone I knew had one, but the ~5 I knew were absolutely in love with theirs.
I remember having a Windows PDA when I was in college, and developing a bit on top of Windows M. It was a reasonable platform.
But Microsoft was too greedy with their licensing schemes and demanding too much adaptation from the hardware and chip manufacturers. You’d think they would adapt their OS and drivers, but no, you had to tape out new silicon for them. So they’ve lost the mobile OS market.
It feels like something like this may happen with the AI OS now. They are pushing hardware manufacturers to conform to their standards while Linux is adapting to what is available and working already.
Microsoft tried to do the same thing on the Desktop side too, but on the desktop they were forced to keep the backwards compatibility in place so it didn't finish off the platform the way it did on the Phone side.
Amusingly Microsoft is still trying to make the walled garden happen. Lots of cheap Windows laptops and Desktops ship in what is called "Windows S" mode where only Microsoft Store apps are allowed to run. But again because PC owners don't abide that kind of bullcrap they also have to supply a way to tear down the walls (it's surprisingly easy, albeit permanent: just download and run a free app from the Windows store) if you want to use the machine in a normal way.
If memory serves, it was a custom kernel and OS, then a semi-custom kernel with a few OS components shared with Windows 8, and then the Windows 10 'core' kernel (same as on the Xbox One?) with many shared OS components.
At each step they left the majority of devices behind.
What was equally worse was the triple (quadruple?) switch of app frameworks. If I remember correctly it was a dotnet abomination, then ?? then WPF and finally Xamarin.
Good luck convincing your platform 3rd party developers to entirely relearn and rebuild their app four times over in the span of a few years.
Interestingly enough, Windows Phone itself was far ahead of it's time. Buttersmooth UI, flat UI, built-in global and app dark modes, all in the early 2010s.
WinCE (which was rebranded as Windows Mobile at one point) basically had a cut-down version of Win32 as its app framework. There was also .NET complete with a WinForms port.
Windows Phone 7 had Silverlight as the app framework, which, to remind, was itself basically a rewrite of a subset of WPF in native code for perf (although the public API remained .NET).
And then after that it was WinRT / UWP, which was effectively further evolution of Silverlight in terms of how it looked to app devs.
WP7 was a really low point for the series because not only the new app dev story was completely and utterly incompatible with anything done before, it also had a very limited feature set in terms of what you could actually do inside the app - much worse than the iOS sandbox.
WP7 -> WinRT transition was easier because WinRT was so similar to Silverlight in terms of APIs (in some simple cases you literally just had to change the using-namespace declaration to compile). It also added enough functionality for more interesting apps to be viable. But by then, the reputation hit from both devs (who were being told to again rewrite everything they already rewrote for WP7) and users (who were being told again that their devices won't get the new OS, and the new apps are incompatible with the old OS) was too much for the platform, IMO.
And then on top of all that Google actively sabotaged it by refusing to make apps for its popular services - such as YouTube - and actively pursuing third-party apps that tried to fill that gap.
Not only Silverlight, XNA was used for games.
After WinRT transition, Microsoft sabotaged themselves, due to the way WP 8 => WP 8.1 => WP 10 happened to be, with rewrites, promised upgrades that didn't happen, deprecation of C++/CX, and plenty of other missteps.
Buttersmooth UI is how I'd describe it too. I loved the themes at the time too.
It was incredibly smooth. The Windows Phone 7 browser was also very smooth compared to the iPhone/Android browsers of the time. Some miracles worked somewhere.
Also the keyboard was incredibly good.
Out of curiosity...why did you have several? Were they budget models?
I wouldn't exactly call flat UI a good thing. They are one of the horrible flaws of our current UI design trends.
As I recall it, calling Windows Phone "buttery smooth" is quite an overstatement. I remember it looking drab dull and cheap at the time.
I had two Lumia flagship phones - Lumia 800 with Windows Phone 7 and Lumia 930 with Windows Phone 8 (which I later upgraded to 10).
Both look and feel awesome, not cheap at all. At the time, Microsoft were paying developers to port apps to Windows Phone. There were developers who took the effort to make their app look native, and I'd say Windows Phone 7 had the best UX to this day.
2009 and earlier: Windows Mobile was based on WinCE. The UI was garbage but the innards were pretty functional, and there was desktop-like multitasking. Unpopular opinion: they should have just done a UI refresh of that thing and moved it to an NT kernel. There were a lot of cool third party hacks on this platform.
2010: Windows Phone 7 was still WinCE, but they removed full access to WinCE APIs, and got rid of PC style multitasking. They had a new UI framework for first party apps. Then for third party apps they had a port of Silverlight that imitated the new UI style. The latter had really terrible performance.
They had to base this release on WinCE because the NT kernel port to ARM wasn't ready yet. Blocking access to "good" APIs could be seen as a way to ensure app compatibility for the next release.
2012: Windows Phone 8 had the NT kernel. Also, windows 8 and windows RT shipped. But the silverlight-inspired UI framework of Windows 8 was different from the Silverlight fork from Phone 7. So you had yet another UI framework rewrite to cope with.