Here's one issue that Microsoft has to deal with - my Mom asked me, "What is Windows Phone 8.1 - is that the new Windows phone?"
Stop and think about that question from a non-tech perspective. My mom (or yours) likely has no idea that there's a difference between "Windows Phone 8.1" and the "Nokia Lumia Icon with Windows Phone 8.1 installed". Now contrast that with Apple or even the Android world - they don't have such silly branding problems. No Apple user says "IOS 8? Is that the new iPhone?"
Branding is important and to brand the OS with the word "Phone" in it implies, to non-tech/news people, that it is a phone (which it isn't - it's just the OS). My mom doesn't want a "phone with Windows 8.1 on it" but she might want a "Windows phone". She doesn't want a "phone with IOS 8 on it" but she would like an iPhone.
> No Apple user says "IOS 8? Is that the new iPhone?"
But lots of users say things like "Galaxy S5? Is that the new Droid?" (Which is annoying, but doesn't seem to be hurting Android sales.)
> Branding is important and to brand the OS with the word "Phone" in it implies, to non-tech/news people, that it is a phone (which it isn't - it's just the OS).
This distinction would matter more if people bought the phone and the OS separately, but they don't. To the average user the phone and the OS are mashed together into a single indistinguishable thing. You get a new OS when you get a new phone, and you upgrade the OS by buying a new phone.
In that sense the "8.1" label is just a way to distinguish new phones from old ones. If your mom goes to a store and asks for a "Windows phone" they'll have no trouble understanding what she means; it's just a possibility she'll get one that isn't the Latest and Greatest.
But lots of users say things like "Galaxy S5? Is that the new Droid?"
I have a hard time with that. The question itself implies that there are lots of users who know what "Droid" is but don't know what a Samsung Galaxy is - which I, frankly, find difficult to accept. I would think it's 100:1 the opposite way - most users know what a Samsung Galaxy is but few users (relative to user base) know what Android/KitKat/ICS/etc are. So I can't really see your point here.
This distinction would matter more if people bought the phone and the OS separately, but they don't. To the average user the phone and the OS are mashed together into a single indistinguishable thing.
Absolutely - that was sort of what I was saying (yours is much clearer though). Microsoft trying to make the OS version something that people care about is just short-term thinking. People care about a specific version in only a few situations that I've seen: (a) when there's a big marketing campaign around that version, (b) as a reaction against negative press around a specific version, or (c) because they want to upgrade from a very poor experience in their current OS. Those are all short-term (and expensive) customer acquisition methods. Apple's use of "IOS" - the name, the branding, release timing, backwards compat, etc - is so perfect for Microsoft that I guess I don't understand why they don't just copy it.
> I have a hard time with that. The question itself implies that there are lots of users who know what "Droid" is but don't know what a Samsung Galaxy is - which I, frankly, find difficult to accept.
I think you're misunderstanding me -- I wasn't referring to Android, but to "Droid," the type of Android phone by Motorola sold in the US by Verizon. Verizon mounted an absolutely massive advertising campaign a few years back to promote the early "Droid"-branded phones. It lodged the idea in a lot of brains that "Droid" == Android, in the same way that "iPhone" == iOS. So you (or at least, I) still frequently hear non-technical people talk about all sorts of Android devices as "Droids."
That always happens with branding, the terms and concepts are never understood, think Xerox, Kleenex and even iPad; every copy is Xeroxed, every nose tissue is Kleenex and every tablet is an iPad. This sort of usage does not benefit the brand owner.
> Now contrast that with Apple or even the Android world - they don't have such silly branding problems.
I bet your mom will be even more confused if you tell her about KitKat. However I agree with branding issues, if you don't follow an ecosystem, recognizing a new version is very hard. The only exception would be Apple's iOS versions which is a straight numerical increment. When I using Android, I din't get it at first that versions were based off candy names in alphabetical order or that Ubuntu's releases are marked by Year.Day (14.04). Heck even Nokia's smartphone numbering system confuses me.
I installed this update on Monday and so far I am very happy with it. It adds pretty much all the features that I was missing on Windows Phone so far, like separate volume controls, VPN, notifications, and native podcasts. And it does all of that while still running smoothly on my 1+ year old £100 (contract-free) phone.
The one big thing that is still missing for me is Google Hangouts support, but this is obviously not something that Microsoft could easily add. And it is definitely not enough to sway me to iOS/Android.
Every update on my iPad just seems to slow it down.
I learned this the hard way with my iPhone 3G. By the time I upgraded it to iOS 4, the phone literally wouldn't work anymore. It would ring, I would touch the answer button repeatedly and nothing would happen. By the time the slow-as-molasses phone responded to the answer button, it would go to voicemail.
It happened to a lesser degree with my iPhone 4 and I didn't have my 4s long enough to experience it. Basically I think Apple just assumes people are going to upgrade their Apple phone every 18 months, which is a stretch considering major US carriers have clamped down on subsidized 18 month upgrades.
I kinda had the same with my old samsung omnia 7 running wp7, then 7.5 then 7.8, no lags.
I currently sport the 520 (the cheapest of them all, and obviously lowest in terms of specs), and upgraded to 8.1 two days ago, incredible that every update doesn't slow things down, everything is snappy
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.
The main reason I would want to get a Windows Phone is for the camera. Nokia still seems to be the closest one gets to getting a reasonable point and shoot camera in a smartphone.
I started with a blackberry, then moved to iPhone 4S. Bought a MacBook Air, Mac Mini, iPad and now I am using a Nexus 4 for my main phone. My main workstation is Windows 8.1. Note that I rooted both the iPhone 4S and Nexus.
At this point, the camera is not enough of a reason to switch over. I'm over the app love I used to have with the iPhone ("wow, all the cool apps!!") so the lack of apps doesn't mean much. I'm just platformed out. The thought of switching to yet another platform and going through all the hassle isn't worth it anymore.
I love the camera on my 920, it takes great pictures (for a phone), and I have been wholly satisfied with WP as an OS. I have missed the integration with Gmail etc on Android. That's been the worst of it, and it has been manageable.
Given up on any phone cameras. Missed so many opportunities and moments due to camera lag and shitty software. I drag a proper DSLR around with me now most of the time.
If you apply thought and patience rather than treat it like a quick draw weapon, the results are better. For example, just a tree I walked past in London...
I don't know why, but I've overheard reps at Best Buy, Radio Shack, and Verizon answer people's Windows Phone questions with "You don't want that, it's crap".
Lack of proper training aside, from their perspective this sadly is the most rational thing to do.
Phone sales people are incentivized by management to minimize returns, because returns consume lots of time and money.
If you are a sales person, you know Windows Phones have higher return rates (because there will be some app missing or some other feature hole in WP). Selling it is risky.
An iPhone or a Samsung sells itself. And more importantly, it doesn't return itself nearly as often.
I like Windows Phone, but if I worked in phone sales I'd push people towards iPhones and Androids as well.
Part of the reason might be that some manufacturers offer generous sales bonuses to store staff as part of their marketing effort. It's very likely they're doing what's right for them rather than for the customers.
Can anyone who's using the new update explain what Narrator can and can't do? Does it let you use the built in apps, apps from the Windows store, offer gestures to easily navigate etc? I am totally blind and use an iPhone as my main phone do to it's accessibility. I bought an old Nexus 7 to test Android accessibility and wonder if it is worth buying a Lumia 520.
Without a phone in hand, information seems kind of sparse. The Narrator in desktop Windows doesn't seem all that impressive (wouldn't want to kill the 3rd-pary screen reader market, I guess).
From a development point of view, devs still need to add accessibility labels to their apps and use the other accessibility APIs available. I have no idea how easy or hard that is on Windows Phone. iOS is easy enough that a dev would have to be borderline negligent not to type a few descriptive labels while they're doing the UI. Android, not too bad but not as much infrastructure as iOS (I'll admit to being a much weaker Android than iOS dev, so maybe I've missed something) for gestures and the like.
Point being, even if the WinPhone accessibility APIs are fully fleshed out, 3rd party apps still need to support it, and I haven't seen a big push from Microsoft to do so. Contrast to iOS where devs get the accessibility spiel at WWDC, and Apple seems to push it elsewhere. Android, meh, seems kind of tacked on IMO, though I guess it works well enough (fully-sighted user here, so I'm not the most qualified to say, and I'd be interested to know how the Nexus 7 works out for you).
Sometime in the next week I should get a chance to play with a friend's phone that I'm sure he'll have upgraded to 8.1. Again, I'm fully-sighted but have been the "accessibility guy" across several companies (including an accessibility lead at MSFT), so I at least know what to look for. I'll ping you if I have anything to report.
Appreciate any info you get when you get a chance to play with their phone. The Nexus 7 is a bit below where the iPhone 3GS was when it was released. I’m not sure how much of that is me having a harder time with larger screen devices though, I find an iPad much more difficult to use then my iPhone. I’m probably going to get a used Nexus 4 dirt cheap and will actually try using it as my primary phone for a while. I should really see if the newest version of Android Studio is still completely inaccessible. One nice thing about Android is that it is quite easy to program for when blind using the Eclipse based tools.
Wow, I just tried the latest build of Android Studio (0.5.something) out of idle curiosity. Even on Mac OS X, which from my POV has great accessibility at the OS level, you just get big containers without any visibility to the items inside. As a sighted user, this annoys me as well because that (usually) means there are no keyboard shortcuts to work within those containers. Contrast to Xcode, where there's a shortcut for everything and VoiceOver seems to be much more informative.
For all my complaints about Eclipse, you're right, it seems to be much better for accessibility than Android Studio. Too bad sometime down the road Google is going to switch to Android Studio (granted, Android Studio is worlds better in a lot of other respects). Though at the rate they're going, it should be a while. :-)
I don't have hardware, but Narrator works in emulator. Link to manual still is not available, so I don't know full list of features. There are 2 modes of operation, in one of them it activates controls in same places where you touch them, in other it represents content of the screen as a tree for navigation: moving finger left/right activates previous/next control, moving up/down changes level of tree. The problem is that I don't understand what thing triggers switching of modes, I did it in the emulator unintentionally. In any mode it reads content of activated control; double tap in any place of screen allows to use active control, some controls have additional action for triple tap. It's possible to use 2-finger gestures to scroll vertically and horizontally, it announces percentage after performing gesture. Scrolling works on specific level of navigation tree, sometimes it can be confusing.
Common controls are all accessible.
On-screen keyboard is shitty: every key must be activated before use. So typing is probably very slow.
In system tray area it could read every icon (level of network signal, battery, clocks...), but I could not find a way to open Action Centre.
Application switcher is bad, I could not find a way to use it properly. Button for closing apps works, but it's announced as generic button without text.
Accessible standard apps: Alarms, Data Sense, Internet explorer, Maps, Messaging, People hub, Phone dialer, Photo hub, Store.
Inaccessible standard apps: Battery Saver, Calculator, Calendar, Office, OneNote, SkyDrive, Skype, Storage Sense.
Standard apps where many buttons are unnamed, but blind usage is probably possible: Camera, FM Radio, Games hub, Xbox Music.
Emulator contains old versions of everything, so real phone could be different.
This update make windows phone, faster, looking way more modern. All main app have been refactored.
+ Vpn + Notification center + Calendar + Battery + Cortona...
I don't see anything that was not improved.
Anyone can troll windows for windows 8 on desktop, I first.
But the phone version is really great now
I'm going to throw my opinion in here because I find a few real pain points that drove me to Android eventually:
1. If someone sends me a document or a file or something and I need to do something with it and send it back, it's hopeless. There isn't enough of a filesystem to do that sort of stuff with it. The whole WP isolated storage thing is painful and really ruins it for me. Not only that if someone sends me a media file or I download an mp3 for example I can only see it within scope of the app that received it and never can I add it to my music library without connecting it to a PC. I can't even play it without blocking the entire phone UI.
2. I really don't want to have to sign in at all and/or activate my phone as a developer device to deploy any apps or even a simple one shot custom app I've written for my own use. Occasionally, historically with WM6.5 and predecessors I've built the odd diagnostic tool that sits on the device. I can do the same in HTML on a web server somewhere but that relies on a network connection to be there, which even though I live in London isn't always the case. In fact it's pretty terrible in the suburbs. On basic GPRS WP is heading towards useless.
3. Android USB OTG is awesome. I can move stuff between USB sticks, plug keyboards in and all sorts. This has got me out of the crap a few times already and I've only had an Android handset for about a month now. The cable that enabled all this cost me (including delivery) £0.73.
4. Nokia made awesome hardware. Not joking it was the best stuff out there. Since the Lumia 820 though, it's turned to crap. I have repaired a number of handsets and they aren't designed with durability in mind any more and the parts are quite difficult to get hold of unless you're Nokia authorised service. Fortunately they still use standard screws (Torx TX4/5) but when you get inside, it's problematic.
In other words, you're basically saying that WP is even more locked-down than iOS?
I did a bit of research between iOS/WP/Android before buying my first smartphone and the openness and large choice of phones with Android is what ultimately made the decision for me. The ability to root and have full control, install (and develop - eventually, that is...) apps without needing the approval of anyone but yourself, custom ROMs, etc. I probably won't ever exercise all that control, but it's nice to know that I can if I want to in the future.
Had WP allowed more freedom, closer to that of desktop Windows, I might've chosen otherwise, since my main PC runs Windows and there's a lot less constraints on what I can do there.
No WP is not locked down more than iOS. I need iTunes to add something to an iOS device rather than just an MTP capable OS and it destroys the entire device's media collection if you move between machines. That's draconian to say the least.
In the locked down stakes I think it goes:
Android < WP < iOS
The openness of Android is what sold it for me as well though. I'm not sure Windows will remain open indefinitely. The current crop of "modern" or "universal" apps are a step towards a vaulted subsection of the operating system. That will be no banana for me then.
honest question from a non smartphone owner: isn't point 4 true for like > 90% of mobile hardware today? Just judging by the looks of the outside of it?
The outside is of little concern. I repair a lot of handsets (it's my sideline between contracts). There are three classes of handsets:
1. Glued together with proprietary screws and requires heat gun to get inside.
2. Screwed + taped together with Torx screws and requires no heat gun to get inside. Parts are heavily integrated.
3. Screwed together with any screws and requires no heat gun to get inside or any tape. Parts are loosely integrated and easy to replace.
iOS devices are all (1) and some Macs are now as well.
Nokia was a (3) but have moved to a (2) recently which is a step backwards in the war against throwing these things away every 5 minutes due to minor problems. I think that is my problem.
The size of the device is not affected by the above. Some of the smallest devices I've seen are perfectly servicable. It's all down to if they want it serviced or not.
Ultimately parts used to be really easy to get for everything. I'm even seeing shortages on iPhone 5S parts now.
+1 that is a nice classification, which goes for a lot of devices actually.
I also have a slight impression that 3 tends to come with higher reliability and quality in general? Maybe not for mobile phones and other things where fashion sometimes rules highly over function or is at least very important (like in, ugh those ugly screwholes on your phone), but definitely for tools, audio/video gear etc. E.g. my first rotary hammer was pretty much unmaintainable and died soon. The second, higher end one came with a complete parts list + schematics of every single bit in there + easy to get and complete service manual. Didn't need it yet though. And the same story goes for all kinds of devices ranging for walkmans to oscilloscopes I owned.
My (now backup) scope is a Telequipment D83. It was manufactured in 1976 in London in the UK. It is fully discrete (no integrated circuits), has a full service manual that comes with it, has not had a single part replaced in its lifetime and has never missed a calibration. After 38 years the tube is less bright but that's about it. One of these:
I can attest to Nokia's older smartphones being extremely easy to work on. I had a N8 till about 2 months ago. With 2 screwdrivers (Cant recall atm but it was either a t4 and t5 or a t5 and t6) I could completely tear it down and replace just about anything I wanted to in about 2 minutes. Charge port gone bad? No need to solder a new one in place just drop a new one in place. That phone was awesome to work on.
I have yet to dig into my 1020 seeing as it is still under warranty.
The destruction of the hubs is certainly painful. There are many people who're currently struggling with battery drain issues, that's probably going to be fixed though. There's no agenda view in the calendar.
This has been driving me insane. I loved cross posting to Facebook and Twitter from the People hub. The application that brings that back will earn my money.
The prospect of paying for something I used to get for free is kind of infuriating though.
Remember, this is the developer preview release. The intent behind removing those from the People hub, IIRC, was that the Twitter and Facebook apps can integrate into the Hub themselves with new APIs. By the time Windows Phone 8.1 hits general availability, Facebook and Twitter app updates may restore the functionality.
I've not got a Windows Phone myself, but from all the reviews I've read the functionality is neutered somewhat, even after the applications have reintegrated themselves.
I'am a big fan of WP since release of WP7, but I'am thinking that microsoft should close the development of WP as it is too late to fight against ios and android. But as a user of WP8 (lumia 920) i can only say that it's a wonderful product with genius ux design and super-duper hardware, that doens't freeze... practically never. I restart it every month in case the battery drains to 0%. Hope that it can make it in the future, but doens't seems to. About WP8.1 i'am so excited, and in few months hope to get the update!!!!
I am really pleased with this upgrade. The OS feels very polished now. My favorite small upgrade is quiet hours. I like just flipping that one when I am sleeping or writing code. Very useful.
The main problem standing between Windows Phone and market success is that Microsoft handled the transition to touch devices both badly, and differently, across a nominally "all-Windows" product line.
To start with, calling WP7 "Windows" was a travesty. Microsoft thereby only reached the starting line of this race with WP8, in Ocetober 2012. Very late compared to rivals, and rough.
"Modern" or "Market" apps can't do what legacy apps can do. It's hard for those two different types of apps to communicate. Even if apps are compiled to MSIL, legacy apps can't run on ARM devices.
That only scratches the surface of how complex and needlessly restrictive the app development landscape is for something that is all called "Windows" and that has a large amount of code and technology in common.
Microsoft makes developers bear the highest burden in figuring out "What is an optimal development approach for all these things called Windows?" and provides the lowest number of potential customers.
On top of that uncertainty is uncertainty about devices: Does Microsoft want OEMs, or are they going to build their own devices? Are the devices they have built so far established a good track record? Are their OEMs enthusiastic or are they wary and looking for an exit strategy? The question all these other questions lead up to is "Does Windows Phone have a future?"
I've been running 8.1 for the past couple days on my Lumia 920. Overall, I am impressed.
Good stuff in 8.1:
- The new calendar user interface, as Anand points out in his review, is more polished than it was in 8. This was needed since the Calendar in 8 was a bit amateurish in its appearance. If you looked really close, you could see that it used pseudo-Latin words on the days in the month view to indicate you had appointments on those days. But the words weren't the appointment names!
- Six columns of live tiles (3 of medium size) makes the home screen information-dense. I have headlines, updates, the latest movie news, calendar items, weather, TSLA's price ($192?? Maybe time to buy more?), e-mails, and a bunch of other nonsense flipping around and dancing. It's a bit chaotic but overall I like this a whole lot more than what I remember from when I used Android and before that, iOS.
- The signal strength, wifi, and battery life indicators are now always on the home screen. You no longer need to tap the top of the screen to see these. I liked the minimalism they were aiming for by making these slip away after a moment in 8. But I can see why they decided to bring them back as permanent fixtures. Luckily, they still hide in apps, giving maximal screen real-estate to productivity.
- Finally, an official podcast application that accepts URLs. In 8, I wasn't able to subscribe to a podcast via URL, so if the podcast I wanted wasn't in Microsoft's library, a third-party app was needed.
- Accessories such as Data Sense, which gives a breakdown of data utilization, and Storage Sense, which shows how storage space is used. These types of accessory are old news for Android and iOS, but were oddly lacking on WP. I had been using a horrible proprietary AT&T app to monitor data usage previously.
- The notifications ("Action Center") user interface is nice. Very Android-ish.
- Cortana is a cute addition. Finally having a voice assistant app confirms the suspicion I had when Siri arrived on iOS: I don't really have much of a use case for this. I suppose the next time I need directions somewhere, this will be nice. The sparkle of more promise is in Cortana's potential to interface with applications. If, for example, Cortana can use GroupMe (my messaging application of choice) to send messages in addition to SMS, I could find myself using that more frequently. But I don't use a lot of SMS, so Cortana's messaging feature is of limited value to me.
Bad stuff:
- I've had the Calendar application and the music player each crash once. And in both cases, it was a device-reboot style crash. This is a developer build, so I will give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt that the final version will not crash like this.
- Cortana isn't quite living up to its potential. I've not actually used Siri, so I am not saying it's worse than Siri. But I want to see more applications support Cortana, and more smoothly than is done by the few that do integrate today ("Flixster, show latest movies"). For example, I'd like Cortana to just know that I use GroupMe to message my wife and SMS to message someone else. As another example, Twitter doesn't seem to be integrated into Cortana much yet. I think the only integration is Cortana pushing tweets out. Incoming just arrive to the Twitter app and notifications.
It's important to note that the Cortana app itself is in beta. I think the most interesting news about Cortana is that, unlike Siri and Google Now, it can be extended by 3rd-party developers.
For example, my Chase Mobile app uses Cortana. By activating her and saying "Chase Mobile ATM", Cortana will launch the app and search for nearby ATMs. I imagine that the GroupMe developers can extend it in the same way: "GroupMe Send 'your message here'".
> It's important to note that the Cortana app itself is in beta
I would say that's a cop-out. If it's a headline feature, it's not a beta. It should work correctly (ignoring 3rd party apps having to update to integrate).
This applies to Apple as well. When they first announced Siri, they called it beta but it was the headline feature in all their ads.
If you add a weird little feature, I'm OK with the beta label. But you don't get a free pass on half-implemented or buggy software. You can't have it be a focus and say "but it's not ready".
(This isn't about Cortana, I haven't used it and can't comment on how complete it is. This is a general rant.)
Oh I agree, it shouldn't be advertised as a headline feature if it's not fully functional. I'm just pointing out that Microsoft considers Cortana to be in beta, and it's only available on the developer preview of the OS. With that in mind, it's possible that Cortana just isn't doing everything that it should be doing, and thereby isn't quite as useful as it could be.
As someone who uses Siri all the time, I can't wait unt Apple copies 3rd party app integration. There are a number of very small tasks I do repeatedly during any given week that Siri could easily take care of if integration points were available.
The number of lines of "Greeked" text should match the number of events you have for that day.
Random tidbit: among the Greeked text in the old calendar is the phrase "Hello from Seattle." It's a phrase that also occurs in several places on WP, including EXIF data in photos. It also occurs in various other MS products, if you know where to look :)
Unfortunately, MS has a policy against many easter eggs, like the flight sim in Excel, since the Trustworthy Computing Initiative: Undocumented behaviour is untested behaviour, and untested behaviour may lead to security and other issues. Easter eggs in MS products now are limited to such harmless ones.
"Finally having a voice assistant app confirms the suspicion I had when Siri arrived on iOS: I don't really have much of a use case for this."
I definitely can relate to this. I only have three real use cases for Siri these days - setting an alarm, starting a timer and setting a reminder for myself. All three work pretty well with Siri.
I just don't use it for much else. I don't use Siri's dictation features because Siri only shines at dictation when you know exactly what you're going to say, word for word - for "casual dictation", it falls apart really quickly. I can't think of anything else that my first reaction is "let's ask Siri".
Cortana feels like a really expensive "me too" feature.
The change that I dislike the most is that if you want to continue using your Google account, you have to give Microsoft access to it. Many other new settings also try to decrease privacy, but like that one, at least they tell you about it I guess.
Hopefully this is better than WP7(.5), which I personally could not stand and ended up getting an android phone.
My #1 major gripe is that it is a phone second. I could write games for it in C# with XNA, but I couldn't set a custom notification sound. It's dumb priorities like that which made me abandon it.
I was an Android user since it was first out, would you recommend considering the WP as my next phone? All I read around is great reviews, and I am not really impressed with my Galaxy (mostly durability and reliability issues)
Any Android fans who switched to WP and wish to share?
I switched about a year ago after owning Android phones for about 5 years before that. I was kind of a ROM junkie, and finally got tired of the whole thing. When I switched, I quickly learned that Google is not friendly with Windows Phone. You are better off just switching to MS versions of everything (Skype instead of Hangouts, Outlook instead of GMail, etc.) It was actually quite painless to do so. With the release of WP 8.1, I am really liking the OS. I was never a huge user of apps, so the app ecosystem didnt bother me. I've always found an app for pretty much everything and I love the design language compared to Android.
I switched from an Andriod but this was a few years back when it was still on Gingerbird with a noticeable lag. Android may have fixed most of its issues by now but at that time Windows phone OS felt butter smooth and so minimal I could teach my Grandparents to use it. It also crashed less compared to my previous phone and API was so tightly restricted that third party apps din't even access to your messages/contacts, almost providing an unintended privacy net. Offline radio, fully downloadable offline maps, group chats, better email integration and excellent camera were a big plus.
I would recommend going down to your cellular provider's shop and trying out one. Nokia phones would be a be my choice of recommendation. If you just want to run with something, you could even try Nokia Lumia 520/521, its only ~$50 full price and no contract {1]. Atleast it will make a great backup phone for its specs.
fwiw, I have two employees who got Windows phones and, recently, both quickly traded them in for Android phones first chance they had for at least some of the reasons mentioned in the article.
On that note, I have ten clients I routinely monitor their web site logs (I run a web dev company). I have never seen a Windows phone visit any of those sites and they're pretty popular, especially among the under 30 crowd.
Now if only they had a better way to design UIs than using clunky XAML. WinJS + CSS I think is a little better, but still not comparable to what iOS or even Android has.
Can you elaborate what you find ugly in xaml? I am using right now winJs but, in my opinion, xaml allow to be really fast in ui design and binding data. Used in combo with Blend (and I know too many people who totally ignore even the existence of that sw) is a win-win
After building UI's for the two major platforms, I love using the layout and binding engine that MS brought to devices. I have background with ASP.net which is only so far removed from XAML, but it was a very small step to get up to speed and helps me be more productive than the model Android uses and, definitely, less annoying than the tooling available for iOS.
It might be verbose but at least it is logical and well suited for GUIs as opposed to HTML+CSS which were designed to produce linked documents that may occasionally contain dancing monkeys (JS) and now need to be patched with frameworks such as Angular and Bootstrap.
PS: Apple and Google don't care about developer's experience as much as Microsoft does, they just care about customer's experience.
You can't be serious. Android's layout XML somehow manages to combine the general awkwardness of HTML+CSS with the overbearing verbosity of enterprise XML formats.
It's probably because Android's format was originally designed for simple keypad-operated mobile layouts, and then was painfully extended for touchscreen applications.
Loads of HTML5 applications around the web say otherwise. While the HTML approach is indeed rather awkward to use to build applications UI, its flexibility more than makes up for it. Compared to Android XML Layout files, I still prefer HTML.
Stop and think about that question from a non-tech perspective. My mom (or yours) likely has no idea that there's a difference between "Windows Phone 8.1" and the "Nokia Lumia Icon with Windows Phone 8.1 installed". Now contrast that with Apple or even the Android world - they don't have such silly branding problems. No Apple user says "IOS 8? Is that the new iPhone?"
Branding is important and to brand the OS with the word "Phone" in it implies, to non-tech/news people, that it is a phone (which it isn't - it's just the OS). My mom doesn't want a "phone with Windows 8.1 on it" but she might want a "Windows phone". She doesn't want a "phone with IOS 8 on it" but she would like an iPhone.