Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

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I'm amazed by how much MS messed up Windows Phone. At a certain point they were right to give up, but only because of their own incompetence.

I bought a Windows Phone 7 device. Loved it. Still the best mobile UI I've experienced. It had a ton of smart ideas too, like integrating different messaging services into a central app - totally breaking up the app-centric model of iOS and Android.

...except they didn't provide any hooks for third party apps to integrate. Said it was coming. Along with multitasking and other stuff that was already common in other OSes. It never did. Instead they announced Windows Phone 8, and stated that almost all WP7 devices would be ineligible for an upgrade, thus burning their relationship with early adopters. I believe they did the same with some devices from WP8 to 10. Nowadays they've given up everything that made WP unique, so there's no need to use it.

Sad thing is, their initial timing was great. Google had dropped the ball on Android - developing an entire version specifically for tablets (3.0) while the phone OS floundered. Compared to Android 2.3, Windows Phone was a breath of fresh air. But by the time they'd decided my phone was EOL less than a year later, Android 4 was out. I switched back with no regrets. Don't get me wrong, it would have been an insane uphill climb for anyone, but MS, with their resources and XBox etc., if anyone could have entered the market, it could have been them.

I would LOVE to go back to a Windows Mobile phone, like when it was Windows Mobile 6, that I HAD CONTROL of my device, I could access my registry, my autoruns, my hosts, MY NOTES WOULD SYNC (bad-bad-Apple) and there was plenty of software/games/utilities in the WM6 ecosystem.

I had asked the MS community a few weeks back whether W10(mob) is anything like the 6, and surprise-surprise, it was not. No option for a "firewall with learning-mode", no ability to modify OS to my liking/specs. They tried to mimic iOS "close-ness" in the worse possible way. At least iOS has the JB community which works miracles (e.g. Firewall IP)

I think MS was better when they were licensing a very nice WM6 OS to O2, Qtek, and more. Now that ship has sailed.

ps: I think that W10 is more of an attempt to get a piece of the "all your bases are belong to us" (telemetry, snooping on everything, move every-bit-possible to THEIR cloud. I see the/their convenience into doing so, but that makes it a no-buy for me.

Yes, instead of having two OSses with one application API during the transition with Windows 95 and Windows NT (Win32), with Windows 8 they made one OS with two different API's, costing almost two years and bringing no benefits to users, throwing early adopters and developers under the bus.

Like the GP, I also miss my Windows Phone, but Windows 8 killed the opportunity they had.

Blackberry OS 10 has an integrated hub for all communications as well. I've never tried Windows Phone, but I can't see anything me much slicker than that. Didn't do them any favours either, and they started off with a larger base. The lack of an app ecosystem, and some unfounded sentiments of it being obsolete did them in.

I'm on my 2nd BB Classic, and will likely stock up a couple more to last me some years, as there's no better phone for email and ssh. And the few apps I do need that aren't supported I can still run using the Android runtime.

Microsoft and mobile has been a disaster every time they've tried. Not sure why but it's just something they are not good at from end to end, even if some of the pieces are technically pretty good.

> Microsoft and mobile has been a disaster every time they've tried.

Not true. Windows CE was a solid offering.

By what metrics?

Every implementation of this I've seen has been a slow burn disaster. It's still deployed, and it still sucks.

I assume they meant the original release/products. In the late '90s, CE palmtop computers were a joy. I had no idea it was still deployed; it can't have any real connection to those little pocket PCs I loved.

They were loved by extreme early adopters. In practice they were a nightmare: Limited software options, terrible battery life, brutally awful screens, ridiculously big and heavy. They were like a laptop computer crammed into a brick with all the useful features stripped out.

I knew a few people that loved them, but they were not ordinary people.

That's rather overstating things. They were limited, yes, but they were fine for doing email, taking notes, and playing text adventures, which was pretty much what I wanted them to do. This was the late '90s; nobody expected a pocket device to have a full-featured web browser and a massive library of apps. The batteries in mine were for good several days to a week of normal use. 480x240 greyscale was plenty for text-only work. They were certainly less powerful than a laptop, but they were also a lot cheaper, at least at the prices I was seeing in late '97. And they did well enough that several different manufacturers released several generations of machines each, over a period of years.

The Windows CE devices I saw had color screens with a comically narrow viewing angle, incredibly huge batteries that lasted a hilariously short amount of time, and required a fussy little pen to use since most operations could not be done by keyboard alone.

I'm not saying it was totally useless, or that people didn't find it "fine" for some tasks, but it was like a crippled notebook that could barely do any of those things. The only advantage it had was size, and even then it still weighed vastly more than any of the phones from that era. They still cost a small fortune, maybe half the cost of a decent laptop, but since they weren't a laptop or a phone you still had to get one of those anyway.

Compare with two competitors from that time, Danger Hiptop and Sharp Zaurus, took a very different approach: Keyboard centric, good battery life, limited functionality but focusing on specific things rather than trying to do everything.

I never used the later/color models, so that may be the difference. I'm sure it jacked up the battery burn. The B&W ones ran for a good while, and you could find low-end models for $150 or so.

As I recall, the pen was fiddly but not necessary; the screen was pressure-sensitive, so you could use a fingertip just fine, or the eraser end of a pencil. Modern capacitative touchscreens are much more accurate, but I sometimes miss being able to use any object as a stylus. :)

Those are hardware issues with devices from that era, and have little to do with the OS. The iPhone 1 was far more powerful than the CE devices.

I'm going to agree with this. People forget how spartan Palm OS was in comparison, and the balkanized Linux mobile offerings as well as the lack of a good mobile UI toolkit. Making mobile apps for Win CE was a breeze compared to Palm OS.

The technical underpinnings of Windows Phone 7 were total crap because it was based on Windows CE. If they had started with NT then things might have been different.

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