I really liked my Win8 phone. That said, battery life on the Nokia 920 was so poor (about half a day) because some low-level driver was spinning like mad, gobbling power and making the device physically warm. Microsoft took over a year to fix the problem (if they ever did). While WinPhone 8.1 sounds great, my experience with support would make me think twice.
I switched to an iPhone. Kind of boring. But it's pretty easy to find accessories for it.
The mail client on Win8Phone was much nicer than anything I've found on the iPhone. If there's one thing that Microsoft PMs understand, it's productivity via email :-)
I'm having a really hard time understanding all of the love for the email client - I've seen people praise it in various articles as well. It's completely awful at productivity.
1. You can't attach anything other than a photo unless you're forwarding an existing attachment. There's no easy way to attach saved documents from Downloads or Office. You have to go to Office, find the doc and click share.
2. You can't do inline edits on forwarded or replied emails - the keyboard disappears when you try to change an existing part of the message. This is so frustrating for business as I can't clean up anything when forwarding.
3. Search tends to be particularly bad at finding things - I can go to Gmail search and get it instantly, but it'll be omitted from results on the Windows phone.
Win phone 8 mail is definitely simplistic and sleek - but not for a second would I call it productive.
Didn't Windows Phone's mail client break gmail threading for the longest time? I remember a huge hubbub over this a few months ago (or maybe a year or two?)
No, it won't. I personally like WP a lot, but this is (again) a winner-takes-it-all market. I think most people would say they like OSX (even if they have never actually used it, but it's fashionable to like OSX anyway), still, OSX market share has been stagnating forever.
What Microsoft can do with a good mobile OS is to stay in the game until the next big thing (as Apple stayed in the game with Mac until the iPod and the iPhone became a big hit).
> I personally like WP a lot, but this is (again) a winner-takes-it-all market.
But iPhone had seemingly won initially, and Android ate up ground from it even back when Android was complete shit. I think there's less lock-in for average users than there was with PCs, so it seems like what is required to gain market share is to give bigger cuts of the sales to the carriers who are selling the phones.
How long has it been since you went into an AT&T store and they tried to sell you an iPhone? They push Androids like it's crack they need to get rid of before the cops catch them. Because they make more money there.
>But the iPhone had seemingly won initially, and Android ate up ground from it even back when Android was complete shit.
Android gained its market share by being free. That's a strategy that only works once. Yes, Windows Phone is now free, but Android's market share lead (and corresponding advantage in network effects) is nigh insurmountable at this point.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Android : smartphones :: Windows : PCs. In both markets, Apple pursued a "high-end" integrated hardware/software strategy with a focus on premium devices and premium user experience. This opened up space for a secondary player to offer an inferior good - one that consumers could choose if they wanted similar capabilities and were willing to accept a certain level of degradation in fit and finish. The problem is that there's only room for one such player. In the PC space, that player is Windows. In the smartphone space, that player is Android. Windows Phone is like the BeOS of smartphone operating systems. It does a lot of interesting things, and it's better than Android in many ways, but network effects among software developers ensure that it'll never catch on. It's sad, but such is the market.
Still, from the consumer side of things there's far less friction/lock-in. Switching between phone platforms brings pain only in app selection, most data (like pictures, calendars and email) is all online and doesn't need to be moved over[1].
The key here like you say are software developers. I think Microsoft is aware of this and their purchase of Xamarin is them taking steps to solve this problem. In the future you could see Microsoft showing developers how they could build their applications for all major smartphone OSs with their tools, allowing them to eat up ground in the app space.
[1] Contrast this to PC vs Mac, where even switching from an old PC to a new PC can be a daunting task, and the risk of data-loss is high.
Re [1]: Windows has included a tool for migrating data to a new computer at least since Vista (I think for legacy versions it was a separate download). It works really, really well.
Windows on desktops had a lot of network effects that Android has no equivalent of.
Microsoft Office on Windows tied people in with proprietary document formats that pushed Windows for business use. In the smartphone world the main apps are cloud based and social (Facebook) and picture / video based, not document and complex data format based. Moving without losing anything you care about is much easier.
There's no Smartphone equivalent of "a Windows domain" - something that brought Windows into an entire office, once it had got into part of an office.
I suspect in the early days, people copied a lot of Windows software and that had a network effect because people had friends with programs and games. That effect has been closed off a bit by online activation and a lot by App stores and jailed environments. So if such an effect did help cement windows desktop adoption, it wouldn't help Android.
And what is there to support your claim that there's "only room for one such player" (second fiddle to iPhone)?
It's true that the main apps are cloud based, but cloud based isn't the same as open. The fact remains that apps come to iOS first, Android second, and Windows Phone sometime between months later and never. This is a real problem for Windows Phone users, especially when it comes to messaging apps. If all your friends are suddenly using Snapchat/WhatsApp/<new hot messaging app> you're going to be left out if you're on Windows Phone. In fact, you yourself refer to this phenomenon when you say, "people had friends with programs and games". Replace programs and games with messaging apps and social networks and you have exactly the same effect.
You're confusing overall growth and market share. To keep things really simple if the overall number of smartphone users goes from 1 million to 1.5 million that's 50% growth of the market. If my particular flavor of OS grows 30% during that same year I'm actually losing market share even though I am crowing from the rooftop "Hey we grew 30% last year!" Here OP is saying just because there's a lot of love for Windows what it really needs to do to be the year of the Windows phone is take share from iOS and/or Android.
After I got burned with the Samsung Omnia 7 fiasco (WP7 low features, no updates after 7.5, useless without Windows and Zune trash) I will not touch a Microsoft phone again, not even for 20$ !
There were a couple of updates that were supposed to have fixed that problem. Of course AT&T sat on the updates for months, and the get-warm-and-die issue was never truly fixed. The feedback loop is on the order of six months, if not longer.
The carrier is clueless about how to deal with firmware issues other than doing lots of up-front testing before releasing updates (and it's really unclear how effective that testing actually is). If you're in warranty they'll offer to replace the phone (gee, thanks) but of course they are powerless to truly fix anything.
So my experience with a showstopper bug was (a) over a year to a non-fix, (b) utterly useless support from the carrier, and (c) no indication that MS even knew about the issue, other than rumors from my friends in the WinPhone division that the next patch would fix it (and it never worked).
Is there a way to get support from MS on this? I have to admit that I never checked. (The issue is moot for me, but shortening the feedback loop would help WinPhone quality a lot).
I never waited for the carrier to update the phone. We've been able to get updates via the free "developers" program within short windows after announcements of said updates. e.g. Just installed the update yesterday that was announced at Build 2 weeks ago? I have a device on each platform and my Note 3 gets used for consumption, my iPhone collects dust, and my Lumia 920 does most of the daily business. Still my favorite.
My 928 still suffers from intermittent, device-warming phantom battery drain, hoping 8.1 fixes it. Luckily the "Battery Saver" feature seems to be a so-so stop-gap if you don't mind missing email notifications.
I had this issue a few times, and each time it was due to an app being stuck on an initial setup screen. Going through the prompts solved it. Strangely I had the same issue on android a few times. My 920 gets two days of battery life.
Yes Exchange integration is the big thing I miss after moving to Android. Then again I'm more productive and more attentive if I ignore the constant stream of email on my phone and just periodically check it with OWA.
I switched to an iPhone. Kind of boring. But it's pretty easy to find accessories for it.
The mail client on Win8Phone was much nicer than anything I've found on the iPhone. If there's one thing that Microsoft PMs understand, it's productivity via email :-)