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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

> then made a lot of Windows Mobile devices for a long time, which gave them a ton of valuable knowledge about how to make smartphones.

Making a Windows Mobile phone only teaches you how not to make a smartphone. Not to say it's not valuable knowledge.

> Microsoft isn't too happy with the current state of patents

Something that, oddly, doesn't prevent them from using ridiculous patents exactly the way they don't want patents used against them. Their own conduct invalidates their previous position as they seem more than happy to milk every Android licensee until they bleed.

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> Making a Windows Mobile phone only teaches you how not to make a smartphone. Not to say it's not valuable knowledge.

I don't follow. Could you elaborate for me?

Let me try(not the GP here).

From 2002 to 2007, the only smartphones in the game were Blackberry and Windows Mobile(and Palm?). The hardware was slow and not mature and the software was slow, clunky and needed a stylus. Battery life was pretty bad, and task management sucked and ate up the battery in no time. Microsoft didn't seem to care too much about Windows Mobile and reportedly just had 5 or so people on the SDK team.

The phones like the iPaq, Axim and many HTC devices saw decent success in the marketplace. The iPhone came and changed the game by leveraging advances in hardware with very good software.

Thus the sneering and snark at a Windows Mobile phone in the GP post. Windows Phone is a completely different beast and seems to have learned from WM though.

I would add that it looks like Microsoft had never considered WM to be a consumer phone: there were competing with RIM and Palm by throwing more enterprise-worth features, not caring about UX in general (other than maintaining UI styling across applications) and letting hadware vendors ship any hardware that minimally does the job and saves vendors' money. With all due respect, Apple was in an unique position: they had underserved consumer market in front of them and right hardware became available (or the processes were advanced enough to accomodate Apple's requirements in system design).

BTW, ever wonder why Apple doesn't ship LTE iPhone? The hardware quality is not there yet and LTE firmwares are still work in progress.

>Making a Windows Mobile phone only teaches you how not to make a smartphone. Not to say it's not valuable knowledge.

You seem to have no idea how hard it is to make mobile hardware. There's a ton of work involved including having to make arrangements with the suppliers, sourcing components,etc. Being a profitable incumbent is a huge advantage compared to a newcomer.

> You seem to have no idea how hard it is to make mobile hardware.

I do, trust me. That's why I value highly the knowledge of how not to make a mobile phone. Like I said, most WinMo phones are lessons on what not to do - styluses, resistive touchscreens (agreed there was a time capacitive touch didn't exist) hard-to-use multitasking and an inflexible, hard to customize OS (I felt that pain too, but, luckily, Windows CE was almost ready to run on our hardware).

There is, indeed, a ton of work involved and zillions of ways things can (and often do) go wrong, but, luckily, you don't have to build Windows Mobile phones to learn that. The Nokia folks, for instance, always had top notch hardware and never built a WinMo phone.

Even if HTC gained that knowledge from their time making WinMo phones and not from their time making hardware for Dell and HP, that knowledge belongs to them and has nothing to do with the OS their phones were running.

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