FWIW, I always liked the Windows Phone OS design. Its text first minimalism was refreshingly useful. It was a big leap ahead from Windows Mobile. I think it had something worthwhile to offer.
I guess MS really learn it lesson and go ham on opensource ecosystem
if its today MS that launch windows phone, I think they can take off
This also made the battery life much better. (Although whenever I mentioned this, the usual retort I got was, of course the battery life would be better if there were no apps to consume it...)
WP would offload applications from RAM as soon as you switched into another application. It was impossible to multitask — you're writing a comment on a message board, switch into a dictionary to quickly look up a word, switch back... and the state is gone. If you're lucky and the application was written correctly, you would only have to wait for 5-10 seconds before you get your half written comment back. If not (which was the norm for the stuff I used), well...
The second Android phone had none of these problems, not remotely to the same degree.
It was such a widespread problem that it quickly became a meme on forums.
Honestly, it's a huge loss for all of us. I always felt like the U.S. government should have blocked Google from making Android "free." It killed the market for all non-iOS operating systems. We'd have a much richer world if all horizontally integrated OSes had to charge a licensing fee, instead of using a search monopoly to kill competition in other markets (and then using said free OS to further extend their search monopoly).
I also blame Google for killing Blackberry. If Google is blocked from using its search monopoly to make Android free, imagine the world we would have.
Android, for many years, was actively bad, but it was also a free OS that phone companies could grab. And the rest is history.
The reality is that they all wanted what Apple had - a walled garden to charge exorbitant amounts. Only Google had the foresight to leverage open source (not free).
Palm and Nokia did have very good OS's at the time and well HP killed Palm and then Microsoft Nokia(those two turkeys)
Android wasn't great but Google iterated very quickly and had the clout to go with it at the time.
Sadly, I was able to get it in 2015 and by then it was too late. I don’t think any phone since then has hooked me like that.
Android, courtesy of being open source, was just able to move much faster
I think if they had just open sourced the OS, like Android, instead of killing it, Windows Phone could have been a decent Android competitor
Their user interface was a true gem - beautiful yet functional. The devices were incredibly fast, and the optical cursor was a revelation. I genuinely believe the way the trackpad cursor functions on the iPad is inspired by BlackBerry’s design.
They owned their space in their time, nothing came close, and then, one day, times have changed and their product become obsolete. I don't blame them.
It's cool to sit on HN and think everyone should pivot on a yearly basis, but in reality it rarely happens for companies that big. It takes a lot of time and effort to change to course of a tanker ship, and when you're in position that you have a product that is precisely on point, competition can't touch you, the most reasonable thing to do is just not to fuck things up... and then it's too late. Sometimes. Most of the time it's the winning strategy.
If anything, Nokia was distaster.
So it makes sense not to rock the boat.
It would be like trying to write code on an iPhone today.
Apps availability was the main issue - there were people who baked their own 3rd party apps for instagram, snapchat and vine. Google on the other hand "fought" with MS by blocking access to YT from their app on the devices - because unsurprisingly ads in videos weren't playing on it. Only Opera released their browser for this platform - Mozilla had short lived Fennec in early alphas.
The OS updates were handled by device manufacturers/service providers and release times differ from one company to another. That could be also another issue leading to platform's failure.
Version fragmentation was also another thing; devices running WP7 couldn't upgrade to WP8 - these had a special 7.8 release which bring some features from 8.0. Same thing happen with WP8 devices - the top-most could get W10M while mid and low-end ones would stuck on 8.1. I tried installing 10 on my Lumia 1320 - it made phone ran hot.
Metro interface was perfect on mobile devices and tiles were an amazing middle ground between icons and widgets at that time. Apple pick up quite recently that concept allowing icons to be expanded into widgets serving particular bits of information. Overall the OS interface focused exactly on displaying needed information instead of delivery form for it; this was achieved by big font and modest use of icons within e.g settings pages. Windows 8/.1 failed miserably on desktop as we know - it wouldn't be as bad if start menu and desktop paradigm would remain and only visually system would receive a flat "lifting" as it did with Windows 10. But at that time it was too late.
At the time I was working on WP apps for a customer and needed 3 different OS installed to work on their apps.
To be fair, I was getting seriously fed up by the poor software support at the same time which may have amplified my resentment.