Comment by lukevp
Comment by lukevp 6 days ago
Windows phones were incredible, the OS was the most responsive at the time by far. No apps though. They were building in Android app support when they pulled the plug.
Comment by lukevp 6 days ago
Windows phones were incredible, the OS was the most responsive at the time by far. No apps though. They were building in Android app support when they pulled the plug.
I worked as a Sales Consultant for AT&T wireless during this period. They really did do a great job training the employees. We attended day long trainings and we were each given windows phones as our work phones. I loved my Samsung and Nokia Windows phones and was quite knowledgeable. The issue was that we were commissioned-based employees. What do you think sales people pushed: the iPhone with an entire wall of accessories or the Windows phone with two cases? Employees needed to have their commission structure altered to benefit significantly more from each windows phone sale if this was ever to succeed. This is why iPhone competitors failed initially, the sales people took the path of least resistance and more money, just like most would.
The Nokia N9 was also the last phone by Nokia to be made in Finland. After that, and the whole brand licensing to HMD thing happened, Nokia-branded phones were made in China going forward. Such a shame.
Glad to hear this sentiment, even all these years later. We got there finally, we really did. But oh my, was it a journey. The effort (and investment ms put in) moving mobile computing/devices forward during that time is (IMO) an under song but major part of the work required to get to the modern day cell phone/embedded device.
(I worked at ms starting during ppc/tpc era through wm)
I really appreciated my brief experience with a Lumia - snappy UI, built in radio tuner, and a handful of apps. Not only was the UI responsive, it moved and flowed in a way that made it a joy to interact with. I’d say iPhone is the closest in smoothness, but nothing beats the windows phone UI experience - a sentiment I never thought I’d have.
I was talking to a coworker about Lumia a while ago when I was using it semi-regularly, and he told me he was friends with “the sole Windows Phone evangelist for MS”. We had already seen the signs of WP going out but it was just sad to see how little MS put into the platform. They have pockets deep enough - I saw Windows Stores in public years after I thought they would shutter lol
I thought it was fascinating, agood value proposition, a necessary diversification of the market. I almost wonder just looking primarily at Google's example if a major key to success is just toughing it out and finding an identity and finding a niche in the early years. I feel like this could have been something meaningful and like the plug was pulled too quick. To keep going back to Amazon Prime which played the long long game before becoming kind of a flagship offering.
I always say that many of the things we take for granted today came from Windows Phone
At the time everything was app-based: you are looking at a photo and want to share it? Why, of course you should switch over to the messaging app in question and start a new message and attach it. As opposed to "share the picture, right now, from the photos app"
Dedicated access to the camera no matter what you were in the middle of doing, even if the phone was locked
Pinning access to specific things within an app, for example a specific map destination, a specific mail folder, weather location info
Dedicated back button that enforced an intuitive stack. Watch someone use an iPhone and see how back buttons are usually in the app in a hard to reach place. This leaks into websites themselves too
I still miss the way messaging was handled, where each conversation was its own entry in the task switcher, instead of having to go back and forth inside the app
This made some memories pop. I was on the camera and photo app team. I was not an integral part at all. I think most of my code never made it into the app because being part of that org was a shocking experience. I came from building web apps in an org that got shut down to writing mobile apps that used the Windows build system. My psyche was not prepared.
But I remember I worked with 2 of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with - guy named Mike and guy named Adam. To this day I miss working with them.
I got one because I absolutely hated the duopoly between Google and Apple and wanted to see a third player. It was a pretty good phone. I ended up making quite a bit of money porting apps to it over the years as well.
I bought one cheap at Costco as a travel phone, and I enjoyed using it enough to make it a daily driver once I got home.
In my case I was a Windows user for work and Linux fanboy at home. I just hated the android experience at the time (phone before my Lumia was the original Galaxy I think which was a piece of garbage) and enjoyed playing with a Lumia at the store.
We pulled out an old Windows Phone from a drawer at work a few years ago. I had never used one before but I was actually quite impressed with the fluidity and design of the UI. The design was a little dark but I could understand now what it had it's fans.
Ironically Microsoft is a company that knows that apps make the platform more than anything else and they botched it so badly.
They shot themselves in the foot right out the gate by trying to copy Apple's $99 annual fee for developers to publish their apps. Whatever initial enthusiasm there was for Windows Phone quickly disappeared when they added that requirement. When they finally figured out it wasn't going to be a new revenue stream, they reduced it for a while instead of eliminating it. When they finally realized just how badly they had messed up and removed all the fees, most developers had already moved on and never gave Windows Phone another look.
It reminds me of the failure of Windows Home Server. It was removed from MSDN because the product manager said developers needed to buy a copy of it if they wanted to develop extensions and products for Home Server. Very few bothered. However many dozen licenses the policy lead to being purchased was dwarfed by the failure of the product to gain market share. Obviously that wasn't only due to alienating developers but it certainly was part of it.
> When they finally realized just how badly they had messed up and removed all the fees
Apparently this didn't even happen until 2018, and only then as a limited-time promo! https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-slashes-windows-pho...
To be sure, as noted in this 12-year-old Reddit thread on the program https://www.reddit.com/r/windowsphone/comments/1e6b24/if_mic... - part of the reason for a fee-to-publish is to prevent malware and other bad actors. But it's not the only way to do so.
First-movers can get revenue from supply-quality guardrails. Second-movers need to be hyper-conscious that suppliers have every reason not to invest time in their platform, and they have to innovate on how to set up quality guardrails in other way.
What I don't understand is all this MBA training and everyone thinks they can copy the crazy margins that Apple has pulled off while being 12-24 months behind them. Be that matching the ipad's price point with obviously inferior hardware and no ecosystem like HP/Webos, or tossing up little fee's that act as roadblocks in the apple ecosystem to avoid noise/trash and end up just slowing they growth of the app market everywhere else.
And it continues to this day, when one looks at the QC/Windows laptop pricing, or various other trailing technology stacks that think they can compete in apples playground.
Up until 2011 I was still using one of those Samsung phones with the slide out keyboard, maybe an Intensity II or something. My first smartphone was a Windows phone, an HTC Titan. I really liked the phone and the OS - I thought it was very well done. The only problem: the app store was complete shit. There were barely any apps and the ones that were there were trash barely discernible from malware.
After about a year I bought a Nexus 4 instead.
WebOS was incredible on phones too. Android and iOS basically mined the Palm Pre for ideas for years. In 2010 I had a phone with touch based gesture navigation, card based multitasking, magnetically attached wireless charging that displayed a clock when docked.
Indeed.
As part of a carrier buyout a ~decade ago, my then-partner was given a "free" phone. IIRC, it was a Nokia something-or-other that ran Window 8 Mobile.
The specs were very low-end compared to the flagship Samsung I was using. And as a long-time Linux user (after being a long-time OS/2 user), I had deep reservations about everything from Microsoft and I frankly expected them to be very disappointed with the device.
But it was their first smartphone, and the risk was zero, so I didn't try to talk them out of it.
It was a great phone. It was very snappy, like early PalmOS devices (where everything was either in write-once ROM or in RAM -- no permanent writable storage) were also very snappy. The text rendering was great. It took fine pictures. IIRC, even the battery life was quite lovely for smartphones of the time.
Despite being averse to technology, it was easy enough for them to operate that they never asked for me help. And since they'd never spent any time with the Android or Apple ecosystems, they never even noticed that there were fewer apps available.
Their experience was the polar opposite of what I envisioned it would be.
A long time ago I was given an Android, Apple, and MS-windows phone to evaluate as company phones for the company I worked for. the MS-windows phone crashed almost straight out of the box. and crashed again. and again.
My Nokia Lumia 521 running Windows was the best phone I've ever owned. But when MS bought Nokia, they pushed out an update that made it really slow and buggy.
> They were building in Android app support when they pulled the plug.
That then became WSL1
Okay: multitasking in windows phone was rubbish. You would see a loading screen all the time when switching between apps that lasted seconds. Of course that was still better than the pile of garbage that Android was/is, so it was your only option if you, like me, weren’t able to afford an iPhone. But that’s doesn’t mean I’m going to pretend I miss it.
Upvoted as my experience was similar. I owned 3 windows phones over the years and they were always an absolute joy. The UI was very polished, the call quality was terrific, the camera was awesome, and it did have plenty of apps even if it was a tiny percentage of android or iPhone. To be honest though, I've never been one to care about apps. My experience was anyone who actually took the time to play with one loved it. The hard part was getting people to give it a try. AT&T also did an awful job at the store too as none of their employees knew anything about it.