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this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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Windows phone was the best phone OS I ever experienced. Features were years ahead of iOS and Android.
I remember it being good hardware and the OS was actually really good. It felt very fast when a lot of Android phones still felt sluggish. What they really screwed up was the third party apps. Nobody was making anything for it and they didn’t give developers a reason to. It was a product that should have succeeded if not for bad management.
This is really the same thing that happened with Blackberry. I'm a mobile developer and I was doing entirely Windows Mobile (which wasn't Windows Phone) from 2005 to 2010, and then I got a Blackberry project dumped in my lap. I was astonished to find that 1) Blackberrys were actually very powerful and adaptable devices, and 2) BB's development environment was the shittiest thing ever invented in the history of humanity.
Man you didn’t have to remind me about my Q10. The phone is a hardware masterpiece and the only thing let down was the software going EOL last year. I only wish they release the firmware to public since they were shutting so community can take it from there.
Yeah, the situation reminds me of BlackBerry. I had the 8900 and it was my favorite phone. I remember when they finally did have a little App Store thing and it was terrible. They threw it together in a hurry so I can only imagine how shitty the dev tools were.
Ironically enough, the dev tools were there (and shitty) from the very beginning in the early 2000s, and they were never really improved upon. The biggest problem was that the code libraries were broken up into multiple (and not completely logical) modules and each module you incorporated into your app had to be digitally signed by a remote server every time you wanted to run your in-development app. The signing server was often slow (or completely down) so sometimes it would take 45 minutes to an hour just to test out a one-line code change (the more modules you included in your app, the longer the overall signing process would take, so I frequently ended up writing my own methods to do standard shit that was in the libraries, just to avoid the compile time hit). Sometimes I would just give up and go home because testing was literally impossible.
On the other hand, it was a great built-in excuse for fucking off. If my managers ever caught me napping, I would just say the signing server was down. I was careful never to tell them about isthesigningserverdown.com, which back in the day told you whether the BB signing servers were actually down or not.
Haha that's hilarious. 87% success rate!! https://web.archive.org/web/20101109032847/http://isthesigningserverdown.com/beta
Thanks for the PTSD!
Yup. Even the docs on how to use the store from a dev perspective were always out of date or missing completely.
My brother had one and loved it! But outside of basic tasks he couldn't do anything with it. Eventually he switched to Android just to have apps.
I tried it, but then realized I couldn't even view my photos I took with my Nexus phone at the time. No Google photos app, and the web browser just took me to a page that said my phone isn't supported.
YouTube was also only supported via a third party app, and was missing pretty much every feature.
As soon as I realized I would struggle to do the most basic tasks, I bailed.
name a few. please.
I'm open to being wrong but you need to provide evidence to sway me, because I've used windows phones and developed for them when they were desperate to get games in their app store and it was wretched early on. like comically bad. so whatever firmed up over the years, please, enlighten me, I'm genuinely curious where they were years ahead.
Fuck man I loved windows phone like the guy you're commenting too, and I agree with him. I could have commented and told you all the features I liked that were ahead of its time, about 8 years ago, but ... It's been so long I can't remember shit anymore! Hahaha
Edit: the Camara was fucking awesome. Physical Camara button was pretty dope too, never caught on with other phones so who knows if I'm alone in saying that
Google Nexus (and now Pixel) has always allowed you to double tap the power button to open the camera, and then use the volume buttons to take the photo. Or you can use the volume buttons to zoom in and out.
Isn't this the same? Dedicated buttons that launch the camera and take photos?
Similar but slightly inferior UX. No double-tapping, just a full press (I think) then you can half-press the camera key just like a normal camera to focus, then fully-press to capture. Small, but something I miss, like how if I switch to Android (save for some models) I’ll miss the Palm/iPhone ringer switch - but holding volume down is also something Android-y I miss.
Samsung Galaxy phones are the same way, honestly I think you can even set up an iPhone to do that. It's not the same ... The lower was on the bottom right side of the phone, and was in a perfect position to hold your phone like a camera and snap a picture.
physical cam controls would be pimpin.
It missed custom apps but all the default phone apps were really great. The "people" app already had everything the android's "contacts" app implemented in subsequent years (everything it has today) and also integrated with social networks so if you accessed a contact you could see all their posts from every social media in a custom timeline.
The "me" app also integrated all your social media notifications into one app, allowing you to post to all of them from the same place, see replies and that sort of stuff.
I don't remember what it was, but the "mail" app had a feature that was my favorite thing in the whole WP7, but by the time WP8 came out Google had already managed to make it not wok with Gmail.
Calendar, Camera, even the keyboard. All those default apps were filled with amazing little things. Many of which we STILL don't have in android today.
In third world countries the difference was even bigger. The keyboard suggested local words and names of local places (no system does that these days), the Nokia maps were far more reliable than Google's (my town had been split in half by a new train line and Google maps messed up their data with that, as some streets that used to cross the whole town now had multiple unconnected segments - if you tried to follow Google directions to a McDonald's in one of those segments, it would send you into a slum in another segment).
Plus, the whole UI was cool and the flipping tiles were quite useful.
this was a response worth reading. TY for the deets.
Dark mode and live widgets.
Edit to add: https://www.howtogeek.com/809114/5-ways-windows-phone-was-ahead-of-its-time/
The app support was just so bad in a time where it couldn’t afford to be that bad. But yes windows phone 8 was my favorite UX for a smart phone ever
Loved my 920. HW was sleek and the live tile interface was years ahead of those silly round dots you got on iOS or Android. Sadly they were too late to the game to secure any app interest....oh...and they were Microsoft as well.
I actually had a W10 phone as my work phone. I had no issues with the OS, but app availability was absolutely abysmal. All the crazy W8 touch optimizations suddenly made a lot of sense. Too bad it died so soon.