Tens to be disappointed as Windows 10 Mobile death date set: Doomed phone OS won't see 2020 Microsoft has formally set the end date for support of its all-but-forgotten Windows 10 Mobile platform. The Redmond code factory said today that, come December 10, it's curtains for the ill-fated smartphone venture. The retirement will end a four-year run for a Microsoft phone effort that never really got off the ground and …
Just to put numbers in perspective, if just 0.1% of a billion smart phones were running Windows then that makes a million phones... as far as I can tell (just a quick bit of searching online) the values for total number of smart phones in use and the percentage which are Windows phones are higher (obviously Windows is not showing up in new phone sales, but these days people use their phones longer - gone are the days of yearly or two-yearly replacement).
But hey, lets classify people who actually like the way Windows phone does things (me included) as just "tens"...
ets classify people who actually like the way Windows phone does things
Everybody I know who uses a Microsoft phone hates it with true zeal. To be fair they didn't buy them, they were forced to have them by idiot IT & procurement teams who thought they could choose the most appropriate solution for an enterprise phone on price. Microsoft sold very, very few phones to retail customers.
I'd guess that the number of users who bought a Windows phone and like the way it works are a very small number - perhaps a few tens of thousands globally.
Looking at this from a "glass half full" perspective, I suppose that's at least enough to start a small cult?
"...Everybody I know who uses a Microsoft phone hates it with true zeal."
I found it depended on the audience. People aged 40 or under, or those who saw that exec's had an iPhone instead all hated WM. More "mature" people (that don't run their lives via 'apps') or those who didn't have it put on them as a visible second best option seemed to like it.
I loved my 920 and 950XL, they were ahead of their time in many respects, and the value proposition was through the roof compared to iOS at the time. If it had the apps available I would still be flying the flag to be honest.
My mum loves her 950XL I gave her after I moved to a S8 in Dec 17 (and a Mate20 Pro which is epic from Dec 18). Annoying Lloyd's don't have their banking app anymore, but she's more than happy having the Web page linked on her "start screen" as a workaround.
Even my grandad is rocking a 640XL. He had a Galaxy A series that's about 4 years old and even in "Simple mode" just could not get the hang of it at all. (After countless hours of training, printed notes on how to do certain tasks).
Gave him a 640XL 2 years ago and after a 30 minute training session I've only had a single question (after his MS Password reset and he didn't know how to update the password on the phone).
Still maintain there could have been a profit in MS carrying on in the low / mid market as a dumb smartphone. Bit more spit and polish on the OS is all that was really needed, as long as the expectation of apps was managed.
100% agree with what you said.
Recently moved from my 950 to mate 20 pro.Gave up on my 950 as the battery was dead in it and didnt want to buy a new battery for it, as support would be dropped for it soon. I had it bought via work and have had it since it was released, before that the 920. So i was due to for a new phone long ago at work.
I do miss the interface on the windows phone, far more consistent than android (well 8 was better in that respect than 10). What i find compared to windows phone is in android, the interface is cluttered, requires you to keep moving from top to bottom over and over again on the screen to get things done. You need 2 hands to do it. Windows everything for input at the bottom, just 1 hand a thumb (again 8 was better than 10 with that, they moved shit up to the top left for some reason).
Chrome is annoying on android, to enter a new url, drag down, click top, type bottom. Windows phone, click bottom type bottom.
Just small things make it feel just not thought out on android.
"idiot IT"
Yes of course they are idiots for only paying £80 for a smartphone capable of using Microsoft Exchange and saving the company tens of thousands of pounds per year (I wanted the Blackberry Q10 in everywhere, thankfully noone agreed and I was over-ruled).
At that price who cares if someone drops it (Because they will), its not a £500 jesus phone, they were easy to repair (Normally the Digitizer would crack, 15 minute job to replace for a few quid).
More down-thumbs than up, mate... That's because people have a choice in this world and don't like being belittled. Just because YOU and everybody you know didn't want to use a Windows Phone doesn't mean they were no good.
I actually love my Windows Phone "with true zeal" - but then again, you don't know me. I chose to buy a Windows Phone in early 2014 - a Lumia 520 with WP8.1 - which was great. I only upgraded to my still perfectly reliable Windows 10 Mobile 640XL Dual Sim phone because I needed a larger screen to watch the football on Flash Sports - a still-operating and fantastic Microsoft Store app.
I for one will actually really miss my Windows Mobile, and I especially hate the thought that I will now have to be like all the other mindless plebs in the world who just followed everyone else and gave up on WP.
This was not my choice...
I quite liked my windows 10 phone too right up until the updated a couple of apps that made it run out of memory constantly it caused it to become sluggish. Real shame as the camera app was really good.
When I went back to Android the home screen looked cluttered in comparison (after I'd added a couple of icons for apps that I use). I thought using a phone and laptop that both ran Windows 10 would make life easier and it did, up to a point. Cortana, Edge and Xbox nonsense on both drove me mad though, why they keep pushing games nonsense on their users, no matter how much you try to turn it off is very frustrating especially Minecraft.
Windows 10 on my laptop was just a complete nightmare though so now I'm using Linux again.
I really likes WP. But the lack of support in apps killed it for me. It's simply no good if the few apps I need don't exist. ViewRanger being the main one. But it was fast, efficient and not resource hungry (oddly the opposite to the way its big brother can behave sometimes).
But hey, lets classify people who actually like the way Windows phone does things (me included) as just "tens"...
I am by no means a Microsoft enthusiast/supporter/whatever. But it seems that even WITH the control MS to exert over their operating systems, you *still* had more flexibility and personal control with WInPhone than you'll even gave with the nailed-shut Apple and Android ecosystems. And I'm an Android user at that (suitably pissed off at the ever-increasing lock-down in Android).
Let's put it all into perspective here....
Micro-shaft **RUINED** the Windows UI for their "One Windows, Everywhere!" campaign.
And now, the *ONLY* reason that a 2D FLATTY McFLATFACE FLATSO "The Metro" "Start Thing" CRAP INTERFACE exists AT ALL (in Windows) in the FIRST place, is being taken out to the woodshed and SHOT!!!
And, let the abominable horror of THAT little factoid sink in for a bit...
'WIMP' interface RULES. FLATTY FEELY interface *STINKS*. Except for phones and slabs. And they all run Android and iOS. And a WIMP interface needs 3D SKEUOMORPHIC THINGS on the desktop.
MICRO-SHAFT GET A FREAKING CLUE AND FIX WIn-10-nic's INTERFACE BACK TO LOOK LIKE 7!!!
I'll keep my 640XL to the end too, which for my phone is July 2019 as it couldn't get the final update.
I purchased it in July 2015 so it will have received monthly security updates for four years. I expect it will be hard to rival that with whatever replaces it, especially when you factor in that it only cost £122.22
I expect it will be hard to rival that
Yes, it will be hard ... somehow, MS software keeps needing patches, and patches, and yet more patches ... every other month Edge has a remote exec bug, as does IE, the only other company that I know of that comes close is Adobe.
All software needs patches, sure, just MS software simply tends to need monthly patches ... come on, even their Windows 10 semester updater gets patched every month ... and still fails on one of my boxes. I followed instructions from every MVP I could find in the forums, no luck ... the mediatool creation thingy failed with "We're not sure what happened" <---- sign of bad coding!
Satnav Nuttella royally messed up with Windows Mobile strategy and execution. If anyone has actually used it the Win 8 mobile version, they’ll appreciate that it was a really simple yet effective OS. My other half used it and for the past year has struggled with iOS because it’s become very awkward and surprisingly not intuitive at all.
I'm not so sure tiles was the main factor to the demise of WM. I think, the power of the use anything else, just because crowd mislead everyone in to believing Android and Apple protected our privacy, were safer and weren't greedy as the main reason and then the app gap began. History has proven, no phone is invincible to failure.
I mostly agree with you, but I think it was more a case that Microsoft had a chance to differentiate their phone from the others by making it clear that theirs was going to respect users' privacy. Unfortunately they took the opposite approach and decided to slip in as much privacy-invasion as they could get away with. As a consequence, they really needed a decent app store to compete, and that didn't materialise either. So its demise isn't surprising.
Couldn't agree more had 3 win phones tiles were ace, could find things easily swipe right scroll list of apps hate the droid phone I now use feels like such a backwards step...
Also makes me laugh how much press samsu g got for doing the phone Dock thing a few years after ms did it, true I used it once and then just used it as a charger but I loved being able to reply to txts from win 10 notifications etc...
The Tiles were the thing that made the UI the best of the phone UIs.
On the desktop, though, the tiles were, and continue to be, crap. I've never used a Windows phone (don't read into that; I've never even held a smart phone of any variety), but the thing that really was obvious during the post Windows 7 PC releases was that a Jack of all trades was master of none. From what I understand, the Windows phone based on 7 was still too PC-centric for the phone market, but it obviously was/is popular on the platform for which it was intended primarily.
The Windows 8 phone was supposed to be the best of the bunch on mobiles, but Microsoft's insistence that it had to be one UI to rule them all meant that its touch-centeredness made it awful on desktop PCs, the vast majority of which are not and will never be touch-enabled. Touch is not a good match with devices with non-handheld screens, where holding one's arm out in front to use it will soon become tiresome. The ergonomics are terrible!
Windows 10, of course, was just a retry at what Windows 8 had attempted, but this time with the PC to Phone slider moved a bit more toward the PC side of things, making it somewhat better, UI wise, on the PC, and from what I have read (YMMV), worse on mobile (but still pretty shitty on the PC end). That's just the UI, of course; MS also chose to put in all kinds of other poison pills to make sure that the product was as painful to use as possible on PCs, especially those in the consumer sector.
They have the monopoly to force people to accept crap in the PC market, but it was always going to be a tough slog for MS when Apple and Google both have established app marketplaces that MS could only have wished for. For MS to forsake its desktop PC dominance (they can force the issue as long as the monopoly holds, but monopolies that are fully weaponized against their customers don't tend to last very long) to try to get into the game with Apple and Google seemed like a foolish gambit doomed to fail from the start, and I had hoped that when it did eventually fail, MS would no longer have the incentive to try to make millions of PCs look and behave like phones, but that hasn't happened. MS is out of the mobile business, but the phone look and hopelessly ugly and functionally gimped UI for PC Windows are still here, and are still being expanded.
Personally I think that Windows 8 did help to bring down Windows Mobile to some degree. MS were hoping to force a tiled interface on Windows so you'd see a Windows Phone and immediately see familiarity (thus helping sales). It probably had the opposite effect. People hating their Windows 8 laptop saw a Windows Phone and immediately dismissed the interface as the same hated crap that they saw on their laptop without realising that the interface actually wasn't that bad on a phone.
"People hating their Windows 8 laptop saw a Windows Phone and immediately dismissed the interface"
Exactly what happened in my case.
However, what killed it for me was the rather undifferentiated tiles. Once you're over 40 vision tends to get a little bit iffy, and a few clearly differentiated icons per page is much easier to handle. W8 was just too busy.
Personally I think that Windows 8 did help to bring down Windows Mobile to some degree.
Agreed, Windows 8 by the time it became 8.1 was actually pretty good on a touch screen device (I had a Gen 1 Surface Pro back then) but was awful in either 8 or 8.1 versions on a non-touch device.
The live tiles were one of the best features of Windows Mobile for me though, and I also really liked the way info was displayed on the lock screen. The lack of apps never really bothered me, it was lack of battery life on my old phone that led me to switch to Android.
Yep. I hated the desktop Win8 UI but really liked it on the phone.
If MS had really invested and worked on it they could have made a real killer secure usable business phone to replace BB which was going down the tubes at the time.
But they were clearly obsessed with chasing the iPhone shiny. Despite it being pretty obvious to everyone that MS will never be shiny. It's like trying to make a washing machine sexy.
They should have seen it. Make MS Phones tools but the best damn tools out there. But they didn't.
The Tiles were the thing that made the UI the best of the phone UIs.
Methinks there's not much difference between a tile and a plain-coloured square icon ...
There aren't many ways that one can envisage of constructing a convenient UI for a device like a phone, and Microsoft at least did their best to make theirs look distinctive. It was a good UI for a phone (though not, I would say, significantly more so than either Android or IOS) -- but only for a phone. Microsoft's big failing was to try to do the same thing on their desktop platform, and that was such a poor fit that everyone blamed the UI itself and rejected it everywhere.
Had a tech friend who purchased the Windows Phone 8 and I thought he was having an orgasm when he was telling me about it. I had assumed from looking at it, that was why we were lumbered with the METRO GUI. Make the selection of icons easier on the device for those of us (well me actually) who don't have computer sights on their thumbs.
I was just about to type, "How could MS cock up a device that was liked and appeared usable" when I suddenly became conscious and remembered that it is Microsoft. DUH ME!
My daughter had a Nexus 6P that died from a common fault that couldn't be fixed or replace and was offered a Nokia 8 as a replacement. Nice phone so I ended up researching Nokia, along with 3 other manufacturers, when I needed to replace my wife's and my phone. Ended up with a Nokia 6 and a 6Plus. No bloatware and was Updated to Pie as soon as it was released. Reminds me a bit of the Nokias of old.
Yep... Well not so much difficulty in writing apps, just a massive faff and needless extra effort having to rewrite apps which already existed. I wrote some corporate WinPhone apps. First on Windows 8, then had to completely rewrite for 8.1 as it was practically an entirely new OS and they weren't compatible. By 10, the company had become bored and ditched the platform (not that we had downloads in any great number compared with the iOS or Android equivalent anyway - it was more of a box-ticker).
It's a shame, really. It was a decent platform. It ran excellently on low end devices as well as high end, and had the potential to be a strong third option in the phone OS space. But MS totally fucked up the concept (releasing 8, rewriting and calling the next one 8.1, the total disaster that was RT after hyping up the "one OS, any device" concept), the marketing, the Nokia acquisition... Pretty much everything, actually. It was a huge wasted opportunity.
More than just 7-8-10, Windows Mobile 6.5 with the excellent HTC HD2 and HD Mini were some of the best devices on that platform and had MS's first app store, but they killed that when they went to "Windows Phone 7 Series", and by the time 10 support was killed off they'd been through Visual Studio and Xamarin as well as announcing and then withdrawing the bridges for porting Android, iOS and Web apps to Windows Mobile. Plus universal apps would also require a re-write to support continuum.
Given the projected user base even if it had taken off, it's hardly surprising most companies left their devs focusing on Android and/or iOS.
certain exotic features, such as backing up and restoring your contacts, should you wish to migrate to another phone OS, are apparently not available, and a preferred MS solution on "how to do that", is, if I remember correctly: "Users don't need to do that". Great system, like I said.
p.s. yes, you can apparently download an MS app to achieve this backup / restore, but you must set up an account with MS first. Or log in to your account, letting MS add another trait to your tracked profile.
Conclusions? Fuck them. And fuck them for W10 too (which I inspected first time ever last week). I can't believe come people, en masse, have given away their privacy so easily, this OS is practically a spyware system in every user aspect :(
> features, such as backing up and restoring your contacts, should you wish to migrate to another phone OS, are apparently not available
I have migrated multiple family members from old Lumias to Android and Apple and from my first hand experience this is nonsense. Migrating to android I can get contacts and text message history, to Apple I can only get contacts because iOS won't import texts (not WPs fault). In both cases WhatsApp message history can't be imported (although that may be possible with hacking iOS backups and some database work) - but again that isn't WPs fault, it's WhatsApp that refuses to backup and restore across OSes.
In every case, and for everything we needed to migrate, the Lumias provided readable backups - and to the SD card, not to the cloud.
My only problem is what to migrate my phone to when it either dies or I finally get fed up of providers removing their apps and simultaneously changing their web sites to not-work on WP. Because, having seen the other two choices that I have migrated the rest of the family to, I like neither :-(
the phones are great.
the " tiles " can be re sized, re pleaced, re positioned as you want. they can be set as folders to include whatever icons you want.
the batteries last all day ( or can at least be swapped out during the day)
i have an iphone from work and a galaxy s8, both are compilcated and slow in opperation
the only "apps" i have not been able to get are the stupid ones like Mrs Smiths Nail bar at the end of the street. Why would I want such a thing.
it doesn't come cramed full of adverts like the android and i doesn't require a second mortgage like an apple.
the real reason the windows phone didn't catch on is that it came way too late to the party
people had allready bought a phone and were used to that format...
Killing off winphone just because it _only_ had 3% of the market has to be one of the dumbest things I've seen msft do... and I do include win8 in that statement.
<FirstWorldPropblems>I was forced to move to an android last year. I really hate the stupid thing, sure I could get a better bit of hardware, but its still going to run android and thus be stupid. ... and for some reason I just can't get past the gag reflex of passing the door of an apple store... What to do. </FirstWordProblems>
I still dont understand why Nokia took this predictable one way dead end, all of Microsofts previous partnerships with mobile phone companies had failed. How many people lost?
Too big egos and a dreamy headfuck vision, back handers, promises, threats, what was it all about?
Nokia were bleeding money like a ripped open anal sphincter by time Ms came a sniffing....it was take MS cash n run or implode, nokia were not the huge comms bemoth they once were in most of their markets by this time. Hell how many of us supported Nokia VPN UTM/Gateways back in the day.
Tbh one of the smartest things Elop ever did, grab cash and GTFO, he saw that Android and Apple had them licked and they were going the way of R.I.M lack of quality apps = dead platform.
Elop and his inner circle probably sat around the board table rubbing their eyes and saying, hold on Ms want to GIVE US the 5.4 BILLION euros, head accountant are you SURE its not the other way round?
No? sell dammit sell!
best bit is the prophetic quote of Ballmer on the deal. Still makes me chuckle.
"Today's announcement is a bold step into the future," said Ballmer. "For Microsoft it is a signature event in our transformation."
Yup, you sure did well there slaphead! Transformation into an even more mediocre company than previously thought achievable...look at them now..../giggle
if its available to you, check the following youtube link to the bbc doc about the rise and fall of Nokia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDYedU7COEQ
Nokia took itself out.
And I say that as a Nokia fanboy who still has his 5130, C3, 5180 Music, and Lumia 920, all still working. And that doesn't count the four other CDMA carrier-locked handsets (one is analog only, from 1998 or so) that are still lying around.
Nokia, like Blackberry, was a fantastic cell phone manufacturer. But when the iPhone dropped in 2007, the market ceased being about phones with computer features, and became a market for portable computers with phone features, and neither Nokia nor Blackberry were prepared for the switch.
Sure, there was Meego, which was always two or three months away from being ready, and all sorts of other Hail Mary pass fantasies, but there was never really a realistic plan for a consumer friendly touchscreen smartphone with the usability of the iPhone.
S60 was an engineering marvel, and the usability of the interface was tolerable when there was nothing to compare it against in 2006, but once the iPhone showed up, Nokia lost the usability race, and they needed something different.
Whether they switched to Tizen, Android, or Windows Phone, Nokia was pretty much reduced to being a minor player. They could have switched to Android, but they didn't think they could compete with Samsung, and they were right. Switching to Windows Phone, they figured they could win that market, which they did. The problem was that they won a market that really wasn't worth winning.
*Symbian, the framework* was an engineering marvel for running low-powered devices in the early 2000s. However, during the latter part of that decade, the huge Symbian company, S60, and the conflicts of interest between it and Nokia, prevented any true OS innovations from within Nokia from seeing the light of day.
Devices like the Surface GO with LTE seem to be the future. Why does Microsoft just not add the W10M telephony stack to regular x86-64 Win 10 and let the future Win x86/ARM laptops with 4G make phone calls?
Not convenient to carry in your pocket but with voice calls less and less these days, would be the evolution of MS telephone aspirations. It might even be successful.
It's over, it's done, it's finished, now make the damn desktop work like a desktop again. Get rid of all the "touch optimized" crap in Windows and make it work best on a computer with a keyboard, mouse, and upright screen ... which is where 99.9999999% of the Windows installations are being used.
"It's over, it's done, it's finished, now make the damn desktop work like a desktop again. Get rid of all the "touch optimized" crap in Windows and make it work best on a computer with a keyboard, mouse, and upright screen ... which is where 99.9999999% of the Windows installations are being used."
Oh wait, I bailed and got a Mac a decade ago ...
I'm actually sad that I'm going to have to inevitably say goodbye to my perfectly good and trustworthy 640XL Dual Sim phone, which I bought in 2015 to replace my Lumia 520. If you're not a 'sheeple' and can think for yourself - i.e. you don't have to keep up with the Joneses or blindly follow the rest of the (IT) crowd - there is absolutely nothing wrong with Windows Phones, especially if you have an actual life and don't need to ever use one to simply play games. You can still use 'TwitFace' on them, or whatever those social sites are called, and as another user pointed out, if an app's not available in the Microsoft Store, it's not that difficult to set the URL as a live tile. I've done that with both my bank accounts, since my banks refuse to acknowledge my choice of phone, yet amazingly I can still do internet banking - who'd have thought! The screen on my 640XL rivals my partner's iPhone Max, and my favourite app, "Flash Sports", lets me stream ANY live sport for just $4 a month. I have NEVER had an issue with this phone - yes, I'm even using it to type this - and as a 52 year old guy, I was happy to embrace change and learn to adapt to Windows 10 on both my mobile and PC. The fact that everything syncs seamlessly between the two is ideal to me, and I just hope another phone will be able to provide that same ease of use. For those of you missing your Windows Phone, why did you ditch it if you didn't HAVE to use Android, iPhone, etc? As with most people I've talked to, it was because "everyone else did". Well, aside from the fact that the author of this story facetiously refers to the faithful as "tens" of people, there are in fact still a large number who stuck to their guns and didn't just follow the other lemmings. Just sad that there were so many lemmings that a whole platform had to suffer because of them. RIP Windows 10 Mobile...
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