Ask Slashdot: What's Your Beef With Windows Phone? 1027
First time accepted submitter occasional_dabbler writes "Reviews by 'commentators' such as this one predict certain doom for both Nokia and Microsoft on the basis of the OS being a failure, yet whenever the Lumia handsets are reviewed in the mainstream press they are often highly praised. Windows phone is an immature OS, certainly, but it does pretty much everything you need in a smartphone, is getting better with each update and it is beautiful. I have a Lumia 800, and now I'm used to how it and the WP OS works I find it a painful process to go back to an Android or iPhone for some obscure app not yet supported on WP. WP gave me the same feeling I got when I bought my first iBook, fired up OS X 10.1 and realized I had just been shifted up a decade. So why so serious? What do Slashdotters who have really tried WP think of it?"
I like mine (Score:1, Interesting)
I've used all 3 (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree - it looks and works great. To me, it feels like a phone OS designed with the small form-factor in mind, rather than a porting of a "desktop icon" metaphor to a smaller screen. The home screen is designed to expose a number of things you want to do/see without requiring to navigate anywhere or launch an app. Simple things like the way the buttons feel and animate make the experience better. I find it both more enjoyable to use than Android and iPhone, and also snappier (using a Samsung phone, haven't used the Nokia). The main thing it lacks at the moment is the breadth of apps, but it's getting there. My normal phone is Android, but when I'm due for an update I'm likely to switch to WP.
Ecosystem, hardware etc... (Score:5, Interesting)
The WP7 OS is decent enough to use. But that's not the total phone experience.
To total phone experience varies a lot from person to person. But people want choice and the WP7 app store is still relatively barren compared to the mountains of refuse in google play or itunes. It's true you don't need the vast majority of the stuff in the competing stores (or even most of what's on the WP7 store) but why pick and OS without whatever app you like or that will likely miss out on it.
WP7 is a dead man walking. You know it. Nokia knows it. Everyone knows. WP8 is the real prize. But if I need a phone today I'm not waiting around. Especially since we have no idea if WP8 will actually be any good to use. And once I get into the non MS ecosystem I'd need to invest money to switch, and need to wait for a contract to expire.
There's no premium WP hardware. There's mid range, and low to mid range. And calling the 900 mid range in an era of quad core phones is being generous. All else being equal if the best phone on the market is a Galaxy SIII why would I buy a single core competitor? Especially if I have 700 or 800 dollars to spend on a phone.
People still think it's 1995 and that windows is a bug riddles mess. Because if don't know how to take care of your computer it will be a trainwreck and you don't learn you live with outdated biases.
If you want simple easy to understand you get an iphone. You pay a premium for a degree of uniformity. If you want a low end smartphone or a high end smartphone you buy android. If you know how to hack your phone and don't mind flashing roms and so on, you get an android. Where does that leave MS in the marketplace? If you have to wait for a *carrier* to approve an update to your phone then you aren't a happy customer. If you don't understand technology an iPhone doesn't have that problem, if you understand how to install a nightly ROM build android phones are at least better than waiting on the carriers. With a windows phone you're stuck waiting on the carrier, which is simply unacceptable, unless you pay the 99 dollar developer licence.
Microsoft is late to this party. Very late. Unless they can pull a magic Xbox integration plan or something awesome that ties into the desktop (your phone can remote desktop right microsoft? Right? ugh...) they have a hard time asking users to switch. My calendaring is all through google now, so I'd have to move that over. I have invested however much money in google's app store for apps I can't easily port over. There aren't any 'killer apps' for WP7 exclusively.
There's a viable strategy there. Microsoft just isn't executing, and they can't rely on momentum to keep them going. That however, could change, and especially in the business environment integration with their corporate products could really help. b
My experience (Score:5, Interesting)
WP's biggest flaw is that it is so late to the game, if you walk into an AT&T store, expect to have an iPhone pushed on you, if you walk into a Verizon store, expect an Android device to be pushed on you. Microsoft made the mistake of not getting in bed with one of the major carriers. Google & Verizon/Apple & AT&T have a lot of power over the purchases of potential WP users. I've walked into Verizon stores with the -only- WP device being treated like the step child, and AT&T stores have had WP booths with the phones all powered down. It's pathetic. Old habits die hard. I do think all 3 of the OSes are very good in their own right, but why WP is lagging sort of baffles me, I'd expect it to at least have some interest among youth looking for Xbox Live integration. The Lumia phones are gorgeous, but honestly on the wrong carrier....Verizon should have been the Lumia's focus. AT&T's is pretty saturated with iPhone. Microsoft shot themselves in the foot with their half-assed Kin device on Verizon.
So, my basic answer is carriers, carriers, carriers, even more so than developers.
Re:I don't have a beef with one (Score:5, Interesting)
Google the "Smoked by Windows Phone" vidoes on YouTube.
You mean this clever little failed marketing exercise? [mynokiablog.com]
Thanks for mentioning that. Since you've staked your credibility on that misbegotten biased-loaded [mobileread.com] shill-fest, we know how to assess the rest of your breathless excitement.
Re:uhhh... (Score:5, Interesting)
All those f*ckin' tiles drive me nuts! It's like a kindergardener's art project!
This sounds like people's complaints about other helpful lmitiations
1) single menu at the top, rather than per window
2) interfaces that must be operable by one mouse button.
3) white space blocks in python
Sometimes human interface guidelines are empowering not limiting. And when you get down to something as small as phone, I can see how this matters more and more. The Windows abstractions to tiles and metaphor on a larger sheet you are viewing a slice of make sense to me. The obvious question is how not to get lost on the larger hidden sheet and how to provide quick access without resorting to clumsy menu hierachies is what windows seems to be solving in a nice way. Apple spent a lot of time thinking about it too. What will matter is intutiive and consistent application of guidelines will empower users by giving them strong mental models of how to interact.
I can't say if I like win phones or not. Haven't had to live with one.
The main reason I probably won't try is over years I've standardized my needs to macs, so for me it's going to be either an iphone, or disposable phone whose OS won't be important to me.
Re:uhhh... (Score:5, Interesting)
Single menu is the perfect example here. It is 100% pure form over function. All it buys is an unadorned display pane. It does this at the cost of always making the menu bar take up the maximum possible space and always positioning it away from where your focus, and usually your cursor, are.
A pretty good analogy to WP7 maybe?
Re:poor (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm a Canadian so I'm not sure how true this is, but I think Europeans tend to look at disdain at Microsoft as a corporation.
I don't know about the rest of Europe, but if the UK is anything to go by, I think you're overstating the case. I don't get the impression that the majority of people really care about MS's abusive behaviour or anything like that (even if they should).
If there's any negativity associated with MS, it's more likely to be due to negative experience of Windows (not all of which will be MS's fault, but *will* be blamed on or associated with them anyway, consciously or subconsciously).
Re:It's all about the apps (Score:5, Interesting)
You have no idea what it means to have a truly rich app environment if you think everything is baked in. Does it have a piano keyboard? How about a pitch pipe? A HP48GX emulator that can run HP48 software? A plumb? A spideroak interface? Interactive, real-time weather sat? SquareUp credit card client? Sony camera wifi photo transfer software? Audubon or Peterson field guides for birds? HUD for golf with rangefinder and terrain map? Offline, turn-by-turn mapping/routing software?
That's just a quick flip through my iPhone on stuff that I use on a regular basis that isn't "core" functionality on anything I've seen.
I have an iPhone because, when I switch from WM6, the Apple store had the best range of apps - including a bunch of music stuff that just didn't exist in the Android world. Now it's probably a tossup between Android and iPhone, but with $100-$150 in apps I'm less likely to switch just for the heck of it. I'm certainly not going to take a huge functionality step backwards.
Re:It's from Microsoft and this is Slashdot... (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's not forget the fact that nowadays, what really makes a phone useful is not the "as shipped" factory experience, but the applications.
If you want developers, you need to have either:
1) A well established market ecosystem that makes developers want to jump in, even if there are barriers to entry in the market (Apple iOS)
2) Ridiculously low barriers to entry for a new developer that wants to start producing work for your ecosystem (Android)
Microsoft doesn't have either - They have barriers of entry on par with iOS for developers, but they don't have the market share/ecosystem to entice developers. Not only that, but they seem to enjoy screwing over what loyal developers they may have - http://www.xda-developers.com/feature/enjoying-chevron-say-goodbye-to-your-developer-unlock/ [xda-developers.com]
After decades of Microsoft shenanigans on the desktop, and no evidence of them stopping those shenanigans with mobile - who is going to choose to develop for Windows Phone?
Let's not forget the severe platform limitations WP provides - even now that Skype is owned by Microsoft, Skype on WP7 is horrifically crippled compared to Android and iOS simply due to WP7's fundamental platform limitations. That's impressive considering how bad it is on Android (It's #1 on my battery-draining-apps shitlist.)
Those will make you spill coffee through the nose (Score:5, Interesting)
82. Need to be plugged in to wall charger to sync wirelessly (a funny definition of wireless) [hehehehe]
113. Bing maps need to tap to get voice direction for next turn. [muhahahaha, I imagine the sucker alone in his car]
115. Compass gives wrong reading in the Southern hemisphere due to bad API in the OS. [MUHAHAHA, a first-world compass]
And the list is long. I recon 20% of those are valid for iOS. But the rest is quite epic. Compounded with the lack of apps, I think the OP has his answer...
It's fine, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Additionally, WP is supremely locked down and jailbreaking is not as simple (or, for some phones, impossible) as it is on Android or iOS. This makes a lot of the things we can do in iPhone and Android impossible in WP. For example, it's possible (and very easy) to backup text messages on iPhone and Android. No way to do this on WP at this time of writing and I don't think they get backed up when you sync with Zune. To worsen matters, WP is *still* vulnerable to a two-year old SMS bug that can make a phone completely inoperable (even after a reboot) when it receives a special text message!
Finally, you need to use Zune to sync stuff. I personally hate using a huge software package to sync stuff, and while Zune is pretty nice, it's still a huge step backward from not needing anything at all on Android.
It's not that Windows Phone is bad; it's just that they don't have anything valuable enough for most Android or iPhone users to switch over. It's great for people new to the smartphone world, but that segment of the market has been pretty small for a while now.
Re:poor (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:It's from Microsoft and this is Slashdot... (Score:3, Interesting)
It is totally rational.
If you don't like the presentation in an ad, there's little hope for the real thing. For the simpe reason that an ad will always show the highlights only, brushed up, in a best case scenario. Like how the orignal iPhone ads show it to load web pages in a fraction of a second. Which was technically impossible as mobile data wasn't that fast. Ads are exaggerated, beautified versions of reality. If you don't like that version, not likely you're ever going to like the actual reality version.
And one could even argue that if they can't explain it in an ad (like how Apple showed the complete working of an iPhone in a single 30-second ad), it's far too complex.
Re:It's from Microsoft and this is Slashdot... (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreed. The designer in me goes nuts every time I see text artificially clipped on the right hand edge of the screen. It's just terrible; I hate feeling like the UI designer wrote text for the page and forgot to shrink it to fit in the width provided.
Subjectively, the Windows Phone UI always gives me the feeling that I'm "missing something". I always feel like there's something else I should see, but can't, because it's hidden or on another page. I never know quite where to go to get to something. The fact that tiles are freely arrangeable, and that they don't cover all features on the phone, means that I always feel like the tile screen is a "shortcut" to some magical better user interface that exists somewhere else at the bottom of the phone.
Contrast this to the iPhone UI. I know that every single thing in the iPhone is an "App". I know that I can see all the apps by going to the home screen and scrolling left or right. I know that if I lose track of something, that's how I can find it. Even if it's annoying to have to switch from one app to another, I never have to worry about how to get to something. The value of that reassurance is greater to me than the slowdown it causes.
On the contrary side, the Xbox Live UI is the opposite of the Windows Phone UI. No text is cut off; I never look at the screen and see distorted text or menus. Every single thing is a tile; I know if I scroll left or right I can see all of them. I would bet that over time the WinPhone will have the same UI approaches.
Re:uhhh... (Score:4, Interesting)
The biggest problem with WP7 is those tiles. If you have a moderately busy smartphone with lots of apps, you'll discover that the tiles don't actually help you in using the phone at all, and the application menu, because of the way they had to position the text in a list with too much line spacing, requires endless amounts of scrolling.
They should have called it the "I like flicking my smartphone" phone because that's basically what you need to do in order to accomplish anything on WP7.
Re:Are you serious? (Score:0, Interesting)
You sound like a classic apologist. The summary of this article already happily states that Windows 7.5 is still a immature OS... version 7.5
You say "it takes a little bit of time to learn". Apologists speak for "it is unintuitive as hell but finally after hours of trying, you managed to get it to turn on".
The entire problem with the MS phones is that the fanboys are trying to win the rest over with the same bullshit they have been trying for a dozen or more versions of MS attempts at a mobile OS. If the bullshit hasn't changed a bit, why should we believe the product has?
Lets review, Windows 7.5, the only mobile OS to be single core only. The only mobile OS to be restricted to a single resolution. The list goes on and on. The only people who like it are MS fanboys, reviews are not positive, at best they are "not as bad as expected". The fact is that MS has been producing phones that cost a premium but just can't compete. You can argue whether quad cores are needed or not but charging the same price for a single core is just not on. iPhone does retina displays, MS stays way way way behind in the pixel race.
It ain't cutting edge and it ain't cheap. So why buy it? Because it is MS? As others have said, MS is a negative brand, people AVOID MS if they can because they hate the moments they can't. There are some that are 100% MS and they like it because it stops them having to learn anything else. But the sales are to low to conclude it is just geek prejudice against MS. The sales figures are so low the opposite might well be true, only those with a prejudice against anything NOT MS are buying it.
Umm, I do have one thing to say .. as an Android dev: Android doesn't quite know how to use multi-core processors and it is far from being exactly efficient even with one. Hardware Acc is far less efficient than what I have seen from the team developing for WP, security is laughable at best, not that any of the popular mobile operating systems is secure ( Symbian beats them all there with a 20 inch cannon).
We have several WP handsets here for development and testing and all of us took them for a ride and IU can tell you, while I will hold on to my S2 for convenience reasons, I simply do not see the "can't compete" factor you spew in your post. Lumia 900 does pretty much everything you can possibly want from a smart phone and does it as good or even better than many Android phones on the market today.
Re:They don't work with their own software... (Score:5, Interesting)
If you're working for a small business that's too cheap to pay for a signed certificate, how is it you haven't at least learned about the free signed certificate services that are out there aplenty?
The myth that small businesses need paid third-party certificates for their own email servers is false, destructive, and harmful to security. It's nothing more than Verisign propaganda to generate profit for themselves at the public's expense. I speak out against it every time I see it, and I hope that you can learn the truth, or if not, at least refrain from spreading misinformation.
I am a professional cryptography researcher, but very much a "real world" researcher rather than one of those theoreticians. I know what I'm talking about.
A third-party certificate is intended for the situation where two parties who don't know each other in advance want to authenticate each other's identity for encrypted communications. For example, if you are purchasing something from a public web site, chances are you have never personally met the website operators to authenticate their identity. In this situation, you need a trusted third party, which is what a certificate provides.
For a corporate email server, especially a small business server, you're simply not in the above situation. You own the server and the machine running the server software. You own the client and the machine running the client software. You are authenticating yourself to yourself. There is no unknown entity participating in this transaction. You do not need a third-party certificate for this! Even worse, by relying on a third party, you introduce a new single point of failure: if the third party screws up, an event which is totally beyond your ability to control, then your security is compromised.
In practice, it's even worse. Most web browsers have thousands of root certificates. If any one of those thousands of parties screws up, your security is compromised. (And this does happen in real life: look up Diginotar or Comodo.) So, by using a third party certificate, you've added thousands of unnecessary single points of failure, not just one, and all of them totally beyond your ability to control.
For a large organization, the number of interactions between unknown parties might be large enough to justify the overhead of using certificates. For a small business, certificates are worse than useless; they're actively insecure. They allow the government of Iran to attack you in ways that would not be possible otherwise (which is what happened with Diginotar). The best authentication method for small business email, bar none, is to delete your email client's entire root certificate store and manually load your own email server's self-signed public key into your own email client with your own eyes and hands. There is no authentication technology on the planet that is more secure than your own eyes and hands.
Re:Are you serious? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll bet a lot of people are like my wife: she had a secretarial office job for many years, and of course this meant using Windows (95/98 to begin with, later XP) and Office and dealing with all kinds of bugginess, crashes, etc. These days, it doesn't matter what you tell her about MS products, she remembers all the pain and misery she had with their shitware (esp. Win95/98). She also started out using WordPerfect which she liked, but then all the offices switched to Word and that for a long time was very substandard.
So just like you said, the "Microsoft" and "Windows" brands have negative value in her mind.
Now, for the younger crowd, they generally like stuff that's "hip" and "cool". Well, I don't think I need to elaborate how much MS misses that mark, while Apple hits a bullseye there.
Honestly, I don't think it matters how good or bad WP7 OS really is in technical terms; their brand is so bad that they could make the best mobile OS possibly conceived and it simply won't sell.
That said, I have tried a WP7 phone briefly at a T-mobile store. It seemed easy enough to use, but there was nothing to get very excited about, the app support sucks, and worst of all, it was butt-ugly as hell. I'm sorry, that whole colored tile scheme is just ugly. And unlike Android, WP7 doesn't let you or the handset maker or the carrier customize things in any way, so you're stuck with the butt-ugly aesthetics that MS provides. MS has a long, long history of making butt-ugly things; just look at WinXP. With Android, the mfgrs get to put their own themes and front-ends on it, so an HTC phone doesn't look that much like a Samsung phone. And of course, as others have pointed out, the hardware specs for the WP7 phones suck: no multicore, low-res screen, etc. With a 2-year contract, you can get a far more nicely specced Android phone for free these days.