Comment by 7thaccount

Comment by 7thaccount 6 days ago

13 replies

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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.

LTL_FTC 6 days ago

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.

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cycomanic 6 days ago

While I agree that Windows phone was actually quite nice, I wish they didn't have to kill Meego to make it by planting a mole CEO at Nokia.

If you think Windows phone was great you should have seen the Nokia N9. Still one of the best phones I ever owned.

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  • TheAmazingRace 6 days ago

    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.

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klank 6 days ago

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)

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  • phatskat 6 days ago

    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

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    • glenstein 6 days ago

      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.

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  • anonymars 5 days ago

    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

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justrudd 5 days ago

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.

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RajT88 6 days ago

The only Windows Phone people I know either worked for Microsoft, or were Microsoft superfans. (And the one friend who liked to just be a contrarian - this time he was right, but he's usually wrong)

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  • withinboredom 5 days ago

    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.

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  • bigfatkitten 6 days ago

    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.

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  • 7thaccount 5 days ago

    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.

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