[deleted]
I had a Windows Phone and I loved it. Fight me.
[deleted]
Submitted 14 hours ago by ohsweetbasil@lemmy.world to [deleted]
Comments
protist@mander.xyz 13 hours ago
unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 13 hours ago
Fight me.
No, you already have some strange inner demons you apparently need to fight.
protist@mander.xyz 13 hours ago
Counterpoint: Windows back then wasn’t as reviled as it is now. I also wonder how many of the people upvoting you ever even put their hands on one
JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 13 hours ago
IMO Microsoft made a decent mobile OS. I will give them that.
You know what else kicked ass and died too soon? Zune.
I really think both these were only bad because not enough people got them. Trying to enter a saturated market that already has two really big, established players is not easy.
Microsoft just really can’t go against Apple or Google.
jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works 13 hours ago
I had a Zune. It was a phenomenal product. It was just priced too high and trying to compete in a market flooded with cheap MP3 players.
I think the video player functionality wasn’t as big a selling point as they thought it would be to the average user since you either had to purchase films from the store …or acquire them in other ways and convert them to a supported file format.
neukenindekeuken@sh.itjust.works 8 hours ago
Fucking loved the Zune.
hateisreality@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
I’ve still got my HD…best MP3 player made
Hubi@feddit.org 13 hours ago
The hardware was way ahead of its time. My 950 had USB C, wireless charging, a OLED WQHD display and a removable battery. You could even run the desktop edition of Windows 10. And that was in 2015!
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 hours ago
You could even run the desktop edition of Windows 10. And that was in 2015!
If I recall correctly that was called “Continuum” and was a big goal for MS at the time. It’s why they kept the Windows 8 tiling style for the phone and kept the option to use the tiling style in Windows 10 early on because they wanted every version on every device to functionally work the same. That way, whether you were using a tablet, a phone, a laptop, a desktop, or some other as-of-yet-not-defined form factor, you’d have a “continuum” of experience that was unchanging. The goal was to have a phone you could plug into a keyboard, mouse, and monitor, and use just like a PC.
I never had a Windows Phone, but I messed around with a friends, and I have to say, I never understood why they dropped their plans, it was ahead of it’s time and would have been a literal game-changer in the PC-use-space. I actually had really high hopes for the whole program at the time and was quite disappointed that they bailed on their plans and stopped developing the Windows Phone entirely, and by extension, their plans for Continuum. To this day that’s still my dream phone, one that’s essentially also a desktop computer in disguise.
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 hours ago
Okay but an OLED wasn’t exactly ahead of it’s time. Every smartphone had an OLED since like 2011 barring iPhone and crappier androids.
AlecSadler@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 hours ago
I had this Lumia 1020 and loved it.
No fighting here.
lgmjon64@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
I get it. I owned a Zune and two models of windows phones. They were actually pretty great at the time.
TomMasz@piefed.social 12 hours ago
Fight you? I feel sorry for you.
Magister@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Worst or better, I had an ASUS Zenfone 2, with an intel x86 processor, was able to install Windows on the phone, natively.
hateisreality@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Zune HD was amazing too
panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 13 hours ago
Same
It was a good phone
Elgenzay@lemmy.ml 10 hours ago
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
What OS is that? Does it get updates?
plant@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 hours ago
It’s a windows phone. Do you think Microsoft is supporting the device?
gmtom@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
The goat. If it wasn’t intentionally sabotaged by Google it would have done way better IMO.
zqps@sh.itjust.works 8 hours ago
How did you take that picture?
Dozzi92@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
It about time this classic was brought to modern standards, although I’m not sure a Windows phone is exactly modern, but whatever!
Elgenzay@lemmy.ml 8 hours ago
With my current phone. I just still have my old Windows phone lying around
yyprum@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 hours ago
Personally I always hated the UI. Big bold ugly boxes of bright colors and a little text in a corner? Ugh
The best phone hardware and best phone UI, Nokia N900 with Maemo. Will never forgive Microsoft for grabbing Nokia and fucking it up, although Nokia managers were doing great on their own on destroying the company.
And special mention to the OpenMoko project. Pity it died.
deacon@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Shoutout to the Palm Pre.
bacon_pdp@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Still the best UI of any smartphone. Pity no one picked it up.
KingGordon@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
The lack of a real app store with real apps is what killed it imho.
red_bull_of_juarez@lemmy.dbzer0.com 13 hours ago
There is this, if you’re into the look: play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ss.squa…
TIN@feddit.uk 13 hours ago
That’s amazing! What a unique style choice
DiabolicalBird@lemmy.ca 9 hours ago
Been using the premium version of the launcher for years, absolutely love it. Won’t use anything else at this point, I’m even starting to make my own full tile images
JustAnotherPodunk@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
You can still have it! Check out the square home launcher for android.
Katana314@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
This was a time period when I willingly shilled Microsoft because they were the underdog option. I didn’t want Google to have monopoly on web design or non-Apple phones, and I think I was right to.
Of course, now Microsoft holds its own unholy monopolies, and I can regret that all I like…
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 10 hours ago
Microsoft has been a monopolist since before United States vs Microsoft. That’s why Bill Gates is just another billionaire piece of shit - he stole and destroyed more than he can ever give back, because monopolies create a deadweight loss.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 hours ago
Microsoft is the original tech monopoly
Zer0_F0x@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Microsoft really shit the bed with Windows Phone.
The UI was great, it ran great on budget hardware and the high end Lumia lineup had some banger features, crazy Nokia cameras etc.
I had 2 of them and I really believed the OS would become a viable choice along with Android and iOS…and then Microsoft proceeded to do absolutely nothing with it for years. No incentives to build apps, no tools to port over existing versions for devs, never got an Instagram app, no push for desktop mode or a decent file system or compatibility with regular desktop apps via a translation layer for x64 (how apple launched M1), nothing.
They put no effort and just let it die. Such a shame.
huppakee@piefed.social 11 hours ago
I also believed in it at first, but aving to telling my friends my phone didn’t
kibiz0r@midwest.social 11 hours ago
Honestly, the developer experience was shit.
They tried to leverage their decades of prior investment and use it as an advantage, but what it actually felt like was a wobbly Jenga tower where every little thing had a caveat and no clear happy path.
Contrast that with iOS, where it felt like they basically started from scratch.
I think Microsoft thought they were lowering the barrier to entry by allowing existing WinForms, ASP.NET, and Silverlight (lol) devs to reuse their stuff, but in practice it made it harder to get started. Every app felt like a legacy codebase from the jump.
criss_cross@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Them trying to make Windows 8 UI match this was a bad move
jj4211@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Except how bad was it for Microsoft?
They didn’t lose share. For the people that rightfully saw Metro as a painful dumb direction in Windows design language, they just stuck with Windows 7. Microsoft didn’t have upside they wanted, but they didn’t have the downside.
They tried to pump life into their mobile platform by throughing their desktop platform under the bus. Because they have zero competitive pressure, they attempt to do that with essentially zero downsides. Just like now they can make their OS little more than an advertising platform for the Microsoft Store and Microsoft services without real repurcussion.
criss_cross@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
I meant more it was a bad experience for the user. It clearly didn’t work as they scrapped it for 10.
Did they lose market share anything? Nah.
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Yes, and I distinctly remember people going around believing that Microsoft was going to save us all from the Apple/Google smartphone duopoly with this and deliver us unto freedom and the promised land. Fucking Microsoft, of all people.
All of us nerds who were involved in the prior Windows CE/Mobile/PocketPC debacle saw the inevitable coming from a mile off.
SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 hours ago
What do you mean no apps, it had Internet Explorer and Skype, that’s practically the whole internet! /s
TheMinions@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 hours ago
To be fair most apps are just a browser.
Instagram, YouTube, reddit, etc.
WanderingThoughts@europe.pub 10 hours ago
A browser with added data collection.
HappySkullsplitter@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
I really liked my Windows CE phone back in the day
Felt like Buck Rogers for like a week until the iPhone came out and somehow made my phone obsolete by having way less functionality than the Windows CE phone
djdarren@piefed.social 9 hours ago
I had an HTC Wizard that ran on Windows Phone 5.0. It really was a piece of shit, but I loved the slide out keyboard and the fact that I could stream internet radio with it (when I was on wifi).
But I remember having to explain to someone that no, just because it ran ‘Windows’ it couldn’t run Limewire. That said, it’s entirely possible that someone wrote a version of Limewire that it could run.
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
Concur. I had a Motorola MPx200 for a while. That thing was boss. This was solidly still in the feature phone era and people’s minds were blown by the fact that you could just do whatever you wanted with this thing and nobody did anything to stop you. Make your ringtone any .mp3 or .wav without having to pay the carrier store 99 cents. Make your home screen wallpaper anything. Just stick programs and games on it by connecting it to your PC and copying files over. Hook it up to anything with a normal for the time USB mini-B cable, not some $40 proprietary bullshit. Etc., etc. It was great.
And since it was a chunky flip phone I could answer a call by flicking into the air like a penny and catching it, because the inertia would snap the screen open.
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
I briefly had a later model than this, made by Motorola (Window CE). It had a blackberry-style keyboard. I wanted to like it but it was painfully slow. My friend had given to me after he upgraded his phone. I gave it back to him it was so bad. Apparently a lot of other people had a very different experience though.
DrFistington@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
To this day, my Nokia windows phones were the best phones I’ve ever had. Insanely good cameras, battery life, use experience, and they came with wireless charging before it was cool. If there were still at least basic app support, I’d still be using it
evening_push579@feddit.nu 11 hours ago
Same! My two Lumia phones were really great imo. The final straw was when my banking apps stopped working. By that time ios got
tileswidgets on the home screen, so I went with an iPhone.
gray@lemmy.ml 13 hours ago
Didn’t have Grindr, useless
the_q@lemmy.zip 13 hours ago
Mike Johnson?
TachyonTele@piefed.social 12 hours ago
Or “his son”
dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 hours ago
I remember the Zune Touch. I remember the squircle.
Lootboblin@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Lumia’s free Nokia Music app was great. You just picked genres and pressed play. I still got 820 and I even used it for a backup phone this year when my 3310 (HMD) battery got busted.
fubarx@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Way back when, MSFT would set up developer meetups and give everyone who showed up a free Windows phone for development. I still have a couple in a box somewhere. People would take them, but nobody wanted to make apps. Everybody was busy enough with iOS and Android.
MSFT even tried to pay companies to port their popular apps to Windows. A few took the money and did the port, but nobody wanted to support it.
Samsung was also trying to get people to write apps for their watches. Same issue. It’s really hard to break in if you’re entering an already crowded market.
CatZoomies@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Loved this phone. I had the Nokia Lumia 920 in yellow. Fantastic user experience back in the day, but unfortunately no apps.
Fedizen@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
I had a 35 dollar windows phone I used for like 4 years and it could somehow do GIS navigation without using data if you downloaded the maps and did a fucking good job.
It couldn’t do a lot else but that was absolutely part of the charm.
Baphomet_The_Blasphemer@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
I loved my Windows phone… the lack of quality apps was their real downfall IMO.
Valmond@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Least ugly windows phone UI
Grass@sh.itjust.works 9 hours ago
the windows 8 start menu as a device?
FlexibleToast@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
I only knew one person that had one. He worked for Microsoft.
commretrial@lemmy.zip 11 hours ago
Yeah, but Noika, IKEA, and no IKEA
RaivoKulli@sopuli.xyz 8 hours ago
It was a pretty good for budget phones but the lack of apps sucked
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Why do the design remind me of Teenage Engineering? Same people are responsible for both?
1985MustangCobra@lemmy.ca 12 hours ago
i wish windows phones were around still. the GOAT
ordnance_qf_17_pounder@reddthat.com 12 hours ago
Can you imagine how bad Windows phone would be today if it had survived? Co-pilot infested shit.
They were amazing in their day though.
kibiz0r@midwest.social 11 hours ago
Hard to say, actually.
Bennyboybumberchums@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
You might just be the most optimistic person… ever… lol Reading this is like watching TNG, and seeing a version of the future that could be, but never will be.
fuzzzerd@programming.dev 10 hours ago
Now I’m even more bummed out it didn’t survive. Still a good thought experiment.
ZC3rr0r@lemmy.ca 8 hours ago
I think you’re on to something here honestly. Windows Phone was Microsoft’s last big new bet in the consumer market (you could argue Game Pass here, but the scope is more niche than a general compute platform), and I am sure that if it succeeded there would’ve been a significant cultural shift at Microsoft, similar to how the success (and subsequent revenue stream dominance) of iPhone/iOS did at Apple.
Sadly, we don’t live in that reality, so now everything Microsoft makes (again, with exception of the aforementioned and dreadfully mismanaged Xbox/Game Pass efforts) for consumers needs to have some kind of enterprise revenue angle to get greenlit at all. From experience I can tell you that a large number of great product ideas wither on the vine at Microsoft simply because management doesn’t consider anything that won’t move the needle on enterprise revenue.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
At least there would be some competition against Google and Apple.
M137@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Competition is not an objectively good thing. Just look at Microsoft now, how would what they are made anything better in the smartphone space? Their phones would be just as shitty as Win 11 is with AI and data collection.
Bahnd@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Honestly, I was only interested in the hardware. Nokia made most of the phones that ran Windows phone and they made bricks.
x666m@lemmy.zip 10 hours ago
Only good thing about them. Apps were all functionally the same and always half broken, all the time. But the phones looked pretty cool.
UltraMagnus0001@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
I mean Google has gemini