Windows Phone Market Share Sinks Below 1 Percent (theverge.com) 288
Tom Warren, reporting for The Verge: Worldwide smartphone sales increased by nearly 4 percent in the recent quarter, but Microsoft's Windows Phone OS failed to capitalize on the growth and dropped below 1 percent market share. Gartner's latest smartphone sales report provides the latest proof of the obvious: Windows Phone is dead. Gartner estimates that nearly 2.4 million Windows Phones were sold in the latest quarter, around 0.7 percent market share overall. That's a decrease from the 2.5 percent market share of Windows Phone back in Q1 2015.
You mean Windows phones are rare as unicorns? (Score:5, Funny)
OK, now I want one.
Re:You mean Windows phones are rare as unicorns? (Score:5, Funny)
Watch [youtube.com]. And then decide if you really want one.
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I never thought the day would come where hipsters would buy Microsoft products.
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Real cutting-edge hipsters are beginning to consider traditional Apple hipsters as poseurs. Retro Windows products and old mimeograph machines are so hot right now.
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In other words, hold on to that Zune, it's gonna be worth something in a bit.
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Give me a sec I am squirting out another brown zune as I type.
Interesting autocorrect changed zune to sine, and then to zone before allowing zune.
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Now if you could only get an old version of Ubuntu to run on it.
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No....no, it's not. Never.
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Let's just say that Clippy is hot shit right now in all the hidden coffee/hookah clubs in north Tacoma.
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Mimeograph? Pfft. Lamestream. Real hipsters use Gestetner [youtube.com] machines. Cutting a stencil is so much more tactile, plus you can get high from the correcting fluid.
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Mimeograph's use ammonia. Very little will get you as wasted as a nice bit of ammonia being aired out as it dries.
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Spirit duplicators [wikipedia.org] used alcohol based solvents and smelled good, much better than mimeograph prints. Spirit duplicators typically used purple ink.
Re:You mean Windows phones are rare as unicorns? (Score:5, Informative)
Watch [youtube.com].
What the fuck did I just watch??
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Yeh.. we need /. counseling support group.
I'm going to have 'Unicorn Unicorns Happy Happy Happy Happy Happy Death' running though my head all day
How rare again... (Score:2)
If there were 2+ million new unicorns trotting around the U.S. every quarter, we'd be issuing hunting licenses for them.
you can't put 10 pounds in a 5 pound bag (Score:2)
and Windows is too fat, too full of legacy code, and too slow to put in a pocket.
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Hipsters will fight each other to the death for the honor of carrying one.
"This? It's a Windows phone...you probably never heard of it."
Re:You mean Windows phones are rare as unicorns? (Score:5, Informative)
As a current Windows Phone user, no you don't. I started on Windows Phone 7 and I'm still here in WP10, the experience has pretty much gone down hill. With the Exception of WP8.1, that was halfway decent. Everything else has just..... sucked. Microsoft hid the date applications were last updated in their app store because many of their apps have turned into abandon ware. Android and iOS are so far a head in features and functionality, I really do get envious when I pick up an iPhone or a mid to highend Android device.
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We're all unique rebels here.
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I'm not.
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Shh!
no surprises here (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: no surprises here (Score:2, Insightful)
EVERYONE, including Nokia, knew this.
2+ million does not seem like dead... (Score:5, Informative)
I don't have a Windows phone, and don't know anyone that has one...
But even though percentage wise the share is small, 2+ million phones in a quarter sure seems a fairly long way from dead, especially given Microsoft's motivation to maintain at least a foothold in mobile.
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Highly niche, maybe, but not dead.
Re:2+ million does not seem like dead... (Score:4, Informative)
I don't even know if niche is quite the right word - if you figure people replacing a phone every two years, selling two million a quarter means a base of something like a 16 million user base! That's a lot of people with a wide range of uses (you would think).
Would we call any website with 16 million users a niche? Or even any other kind of computer hardware?
Just because there are a LOT more people using other devices does not have to mean that sixteen million people stop mattering in what they do.
Now that number may go down over time, but I would have thought the number was a tenth that already - at this point it sure seems like anyone inclined to move away from Windows Mobile would have already.
Re:2+ million does not seem like dead... (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe this will be the year of Windows on mobile.
Re:2+ million does not seem like dead... (Score:5, Insightful)
Right but where ecosystems are concerned its really all about the size of the pie slice.
If the ecosystem is highly fractured and you are a developer you will want to write the most cross platform-least-common-denominator thing you can so that you have a broad enough customer base to make it worth the time.
When the ecosystem gets a down to a few players you start doing a version for each. When one of the "big three" is only a percentage or so, well you have enough revenue for the next big two that your probably just ignore that part of the market. Its a death spiral situation, from there on out. Application developers stop supplying for the also ran people quite buying them, the market segment gets smaller still, more devs end support/supply....
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Exactly. It's what killed Blackberry, and it will take down MS. I know Redmond is trying to push its cross-platform solutions, but I doubt anyone is going to care. Android and iOS so thoroughly dominate the market that the most MS might see from it is extra development tool sales. Why bother even compiling your app for Windows when the likelihood of a sale is so low that it probably won't justify the testing that needs to be done when porting.
I saw a similar phenomenon in the mid-90s as IBM desperately trie
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The difference is, because of Android and iOS, there is already a need to maintain cross-platform tools. And MS bought popular ones as opposed to developing a competitor inhouse.
Size of the pie not as important as it would seem (Score:2)
The revelation that there may be a stable base of some 16 million Windows Phone users makes it MORE likely I'd develop for Windows Phone, not less.
That; because everyone else has the same pie theory you do, whereas everyone is ignoring the "tiny" slice of Windows pie. But after a few hundred thousand of your developer friends have slashed that "large" slice into ribbons, how much of that can you realistically get? Meanwhile there are many fewer people building apps for Windows Mobile. You could charge 10
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It depends on how much your company is spending going after that market, on development costs, on ongoing costs to maintain your products in that market and service those customers, etc.
If you have a niche product with 16M users, and you're some smallish company and this userbase is giving you a handsome profit, then great.
When you're a behemoth company like MS trying to compete in a huge market against entrenched players, and you're spending billions of dollars trying to stay in this market, then no, 16M u
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16M is absolutely enough for MS if they figure they will eventually expand, which they seem to still believe wholeheartedly. 16M is enough to provide for some decent funds to pay for further R&D to at least keep apace, though not enough to jump ahead of anyone...
MS is in it for the long haul. If it were a Kin kind of thing they would have been gone long ago.
Re:2+ million does not seem like dead... (Score:5, Interesting)
As I waited in anticipation for what I hoped would be some ground-breaking software innovations in 10 and fun/useful hardware features to give them life, I was at first in denial, then dismayed, next angry, and finally in acceptance (the ecosystem is diseased, after all) that MS entirely dropped the ball and screwed it all up. I'm no fanboy, but I really did hope for a strong third alternative. Once it was clear that my 1520 wasn't going to physically survive the last time I dropped it, I moved to a Nexus 6P, and I've been very pleased with the experience six months in.
So long, MS - it's your fault that you lost someone who was willing to be a loyal customer if you had shown some competence in the mobile area. I work in IT for a hospital, and can report there were four other people in the department who owned one a year ago, and don't today, so I'm willing to lay odds that you've lost not one, but five. I suspect that 2 million and change will continue to slip downward.
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My wife and I both had Samsung Note 3 phones. Hers was constantly fucked up. I was forever having to straighten it out. Eventually she bitched so much I swapped phones with her. Now her phone is fucked up all the time. Want to guess why? It's simple really, some people are not technologically adept. My wife is smart as shit at some things but give her a piece of electronics and it'll fuck up. This includes direcTV remotes and the CD player in the car and....everything.
Re:2+ million does not seem like dead... (Score:4, Insightful)
I currently have a Nokia 920 running Windows Phone 10 insider.
It has been working like a champ for a long time. I think the Windows mobile UI is very elegant and not prone to clutter.
I have thought about going to Google or Apple but neither choice appeals to me very much. As long as the phone continues to work I will keep it. However, my next phone... I don't know... perhaps Ubuntu...
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Apart from all those apps that have been removed from the Windows app store. You probably don't use your phone for such things as on-line banking, do you? OK, you might, but not many banks actually support Windows phone today.
There are lots of reviews that show that apps for Windows phone either don't exist or don't work as well as their Android and IOS equivalents, so let me suggest that you haven't seriously researched the competition.
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The big question at this point, given that Microsoft has yet to make a mobile platform that sufficient numbers of people are interested in to justify its existence, is will anyone give a crap when Windows 10 mobile is released?
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The few people I have known who have actually used a Windows phone actually really liked them. I seriously considered one on my last upgrade. The only thing that kept me with Android was the uncertain future of Windows phone support and MS's tendency in the past to abandon its products. I buy a phone for the longer-term (I usually only upgrade every 5+ years or so). So I didn't want to buy a phone and have MS bail on me a year or two in.
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I looked at some windows phones out of curiosity and I have to admit they seemed okay. I didn't care much for the layout but I'm sure some of that is the fact I've been using Android. That said though, I hate microsoft so I'd never buy one even if it was like "the shit." I like iPhones better than Android and wanted to buy one but no SD card and no battery access is a deal killer so I've always used Android in spite of having Mac computers.
Re:2+ million does not seem like dead... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Not anymore. This used to be true at one point. Even Joel has figured that out a couple of years back.
Want to run old MS-DOS games? You are better off using DOSBox than Windows. Heck even old Windows games often require loading Windows XP in a virtual machine so they can be playable. Same thing for several applications. Microsoft hasn't cared much for backwards compatibility ever since Vista came out.
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Are you even vaguely aware of the history of Microsoft's mobile platforms. It's been one abandoned platform after another.
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Don't forget "PlaysForSure" which they abandoned when they came out with Zune.
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They make a lot more from the sale of Android phones than windows phones. They should just give up and start making apps for Androids. They're a fucking software company after all. A shitty one but a software company. Maybe they should stick with what they know.
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They have - they bought Xamarin. You can build Android apps from Visual Studio now. Office is there now too (and free, I think). They are at least trying.
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What motivation?
For the last year or so it's been pretty clear that all they've been trying to do is keep the lights on in the phone side of things while biding their time.
The fact is that Windows 10 Mobile is a disaster. The devices which shipped with 8/8.1 and have been upgraded via the insider program are buggy as hell, and the few devices shipped with it built in have been even worse.
There seems to be a hope that a future
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especially given Microsoft's motivation to maintain at least a foothold in mobile.
Which they've been doing for the past what, 20 years? Look what came from it!
Re:2+ million does not seem like dead... (Score:5, Interesting)
I had a windows phone for a while and it really was not bad.
I had a super cheap Lumia and it was still a good device. The OS was also really good.and was very responsive.
The problem that WindowsPhone had for me is the same problem that Linux on the desktop and OS/X has.
I could not get the applications I wanted to use on the platform.
People are not going to write apps until you have enough users. You will not have a lot of users until you have the apps.
The lack of Google apps for Windows phone was a real issue for me.
If you look at how it breaks down it is really interesting IMHO.
1. IOS has all the Apple, Google, and Microsoft apps.
2. Android has all the Google and Microsoft apps.
3. WindowsPhone has the Microsoft apps.
Frankly I think it is a real shame because Windows Phone is a good OS and the Lumia phones are good hardware. If Microsoft can help Intel get x86 mobile SOCs on the market or get developers to compile Windows Desktop Apps for ARM, or Microsoft can create a really good X86 to ARM JIT then the unified OS project might really pay off.
In the same way Blackberry is not dead. (Score:2)
Windows phone now has the same market share as Blackberry.
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It seems like a lot, but is it really? Considering the costs of developing these devices, and the amount of work Microsoft has put into developing yet another iteration of its seemingly endless family of mobile operating systems, it strikes me that shipping just a fraction of the number of phones your competitors can manage, to the point that it's likely Microsoft's "Android tax" probably generates more revenue, is not sustainable.
Blackberry is literally going down the tubes, and for of that time in its col
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But even though percentage wise the share is small, 2+ million phones in a quarter sure seems a fairly long way from dead
There are many reasons why you are wrong but I'll just pick on one. Where is the trend line going?
Harder still for people who can't even login (Score:2)
It's you that apparently have trouble with math; do you know what two times four is? Obviously not; the answer is eight, and in absolute terms if you are selling eight million of something per year you can probably keep doing that indefinitely if you wish.
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Not if you're not making money on them. Of course microsoft can afford to lose money just about forever so I guess in a way you are right.
Billion is bigger than million (Score:4, Insightful)
> if you are selling eight million of something per year you can probably keep doing that indefinitely if you wish.
Not when you're spending BILLIONS and selling MILLIONS. Just Nokia alone cost Microsoft $7.9 billion. They officially asmitted that 95% of that was wasted money when they took a $7.6 billion charge against their assets. The total cost of their mobile efforts is of course a lot higher. When you spend $30 million to make a few million back, you're in trouble.
$30 Billion, damn it (Score:2)
When you spend $30 BILLION make a few million back, you're in trouble.
YO (Score:4, Funny)
Re:YO (Score:5, Funny)
No problem, I just threw it across the room. It was very mobile for a few seconds, then it crashed. Windows Mobile died as it lived.
3rd Party Developers (Score:2)
Re:3rd Party Developers (Score:5, Insightful)
No, that's the biggest symptom. But Android was new once too. It got past that because it was the most open platform available. Open is better for developers because the barriers to entry are lower. Open is better for buyers because all the competition keeps their prices lower.
The biggest problem with Windows Phone is that they are trying to fight an established competitor with no new genre-busting capabilities and a less Open product.
Good (Score:2)
Can we now drop the idea that your DESKTOP OS, you know, the one that you're famous for and that used to be your cash cow, has to run on a fucking phone? And turn it back into a DESKTOP OS?
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Mostly because you didn't have to run it on a DESKTOP.
Sounds familiar... (Score:2)
Didn't someone predict that Windows phone would lead the market in a few years?
too bad really (Score:2, Insightful)
In my work, I use iOS, Android, and Windows Mobile 10 (and before that Windows Phone 8.x). Windows felt like it made the best use of the hardware. Even a sub-$50 Windows phone ran smoother and had better battery life than a $400 Android. The Visual Studio development environment is light years ahead of Xcode, Eclipse, and Android Studio (imo of course).
But the first-mover advantage of iOS and Android was too much to overcome (yes I am ignoring Windows Mobile 6.x and earlier because that was an totally diffe
Turned Win7 into Win 8 for 1% (Score:5, Interesting)
Hipsters will buy them.. (Score:2)
Now all of the hipsters will want one. Or are they using Moto StarTAC? I have a hard time keeping up with what they want..
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Oh StarTAC? Is it on that nifty PrimeCo network I've been hearing so much about too?
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What's the cause? (Score:2)
According to the stats (direct link: http://www.gartner.com/newsroo... [gartner.com]), Windows share fell by 1.8% across a single quarter. However, iOS's share fell by an even greater amount: 3.1%. Android's share increased by 5.3%. This could be because of a new market coming online, or China or India's growth in smartphone purchases (which would consist mostly of low-end Android phones).
The important statistic is the percentage in North America, which is responsible for the vast, vast percentage of app purchases. i
Blah Blah Windows Phone Blah Blah (Score:2)
Blah Windows Phone Blah Dead Product Walking. Get an Android yeah it's Google but it's the biggest on the planet in terms of smartphone OS. Why? eventually the EU and the US will say "monopoly" and they'll make Android break away from Google. Win! Win!
Microsoft, do this: (Score:5, Interesting)
We know that the NT kernel developed by Dave Cutler has a POSIX emulation layer. This kernel runs the Windows app store, and it's perfectly capable of running Dalivk/ART in a variety of configurations - it does so already with Bluestacks and Google's emulators.
Take the NT kernel, and use it to replace Linux, leaving the Android userland as intact as possible.
To this "windroid," add the required javascript execution layers to allow the Windows app store to run on the same platform.
(Re)implement all of the extensions for Dalvik that are provided by Google services.
Reissue Windows phone as a unified Dalvik/Javascript mobile app platform, allowing Play apps to seamlessly move to the Windows store. Maintain enough control over the platform to provide security patches, and "windroid" could fix many update problems that Google seems incapable of addressing.
The NT kernel exists because it was able to mimic ms-dos. It could do so again with Linux.
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Why would anyone want to replace a perfectly good free/opensource kernel with a Microsoft one? All you're doing is adding lock-in to Microsoft, along with the prerequisite closedness, weak security, built-in data mining and unecessary extra complication.
To me that is going in exactly the wrong direction, and furthermore I would never buy a monstrosity like that.
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The NT Kernel has far fewer security advisories than does Linux. It was more carefully planned, it is far more successful on the desktop, and the complete code has already leaked for those who really cannot resist seeing the source.
Microsoft's normal pattern is embrace-extend-extinguish. Android's BSD userland is uniquely vulnerable to this, and any action that Microsoft takes will likely improve general OS security, even if the data mining ramps up.
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>> The NT Kernel has far fewer security advisories than does Linux.
Sure because Microsoft doesn't make them public very often, whereas all of Linux's dirty laundry is open for all to see.
>> It was more carefully planned,
Thats just ridiculous. Consider how much effort, (even just in broad brush terms of numbers of engineers, different companies and universities are working on it) hav gone into developing Unix, and are continuously happening on the Linux kernel, compared to NT kernel.
>> it i
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Dave Cutler had previously headed the coding teams for RSX-11 (PDP), and VMS (VAX), before departing DEC with his last team and the PRISM source to build what became NT. Cutler had FAR more experience than
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Why would anyone want to replace a perfectly good free/opensource kernel with a Microsoft one?
My guess is because of a head injury.
I didn't know it was above 1 percent... (Score:2)
Betamax (Score:2)
Shoot give me a cell phone on Desktop (Score:2)
If only those of us who are afraid of change had to run cell phones on machines that were not cell phones would have me and the rest of slashdot just dying to run to get a Windows Phone! Boy, that is the ticket
No sense of urgency started with Ballmer (Score:2)
Good company (Score:2)
Factor out M$ employees... (Score:2)
I'm wondering about users who are *not* employed by Microsoft and obliged to use it for some reason.
Factor those out, then factor out any work-only phones running Windows because they were part of an 'enterprise' purchase and cannot change without messing up the whole 'enterprise solution'....
I doubt you'd have even .01%
Windows Phone is not dead... (Score:2)
My Windows phone works just fine (HTC One M8). Just wish I could get Win10 for it now. It is a bit frustrating with the lack of apps, but as far as the phone itself I couldn't be happier.
Battery life is awesome. Can go two days without a recharge. Phone is very fast and responsive as well.
Re:Ass-rape (Score:5, Funny)
I'd rather be ass-raped with a dildo covered in fish hooks than use Windows on my phone.
I admire your resolve. But given a choice between the two, Windows phone sounds pretty good to me.
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Hell yeah, between those two options, even ass-raped with the Windows phone is the better choice.
Re:Ass-rape (Score:5, Funny)
I'd rather be ass-raped with a dildo covered in fish hooks than use Windows on my phone.
I admire your resolve. But given a choice between the two, Windows phone sounds pretty good to me.
the dildo won't send your credit card info to hackers
you can cancel your credit card. if you cancel your asshole you have to shit in a bag
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I'd rather be ass-raped with a dildo covered in fish hooks than use Windows on my phone.
I admire your resolve. But given a choice between the two, Windows phone sounds pretty good to me.
the dildo won't send your credit card info to hackers
I would give those hackers a signed power of attorney to prevent being ass raped by a dildo covered in fish hooks.
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I thought I hated microsoft. Apparently I just hold them in mild dislike.
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If all that's left is Android then I'm going back to a dumb flip-phone.
Re:Get rid of iPhones, too (Score:5, Insightful)
I had a flip phone for a long time. A simple tracphone that was indestructable. I still have it in a drawer but sadly I was seduced by a quadcore arm processor with a 1080p screen and 4g LTE data. I stuck a 64gb card in it and I have endless entertainment everywhere I go. I can sit for hours now in a hospital emergency waiting room and never be bored. Fuck, I hardly ever call anyone, it's a portable computer that makes calls occasionally.
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I can sit for hours now in a hospital emergency waiting room and never be bored.
Hours in emergency waiting rooms?! Who TF are you, Evel Knievel ?
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Most android phones are outdated, can't be patched, are security nightmares, and overall suck.
But this is Slashdot, where we're smart enough not to buy those phones, right? Right? *taptaptap* Is this thing on?
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I hate microsoft but really, if all you want to do is talk, text, browse a little and do a little email it really don't make a shit what you use.
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I guess Steve Jobs was wrong about Microsoft "being McDonald's" after all.
People still go to McDonald's.
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Windows phones long predated Win10's anti-features, and were never that popular.
MS has never figured out how to connect with consumers (except for the XBox business unit). They seem to think consumers buy like businesses do, using the same cold, cost-driven rationale, which just isn't true. Consumers make purchase decisions based partly on emotion and excitement, something that all MS product lines (again, excepting XBox) completely lack.
Part of this is that Microsoft's bread and butter is still business
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The general consensus seems to be that Microsoft has not actually broken even on the Xbox division, and is unlikely to anytime soon. There are still people out there who actually wonder why MS even went into the business of game consoles at all, the general theory being that they could use it as another route to prop up that other great long-term failure; the Microsoft online portal. That's probably even eaten more money than Xbox, and they've ended up with Bing.
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Yeah, that is a lousy analogy. You can eat a burger from anywhere, and it doesn't lock you in or out of anything. Buy a Windows Phone locks you out of most of the apps that people want to use, and has the added danger that it won't be supported for long if MS abandons it prematurely. With a smartphone, continued support is important, and for most people apps are too. Buying a smartphone that has no apps is like buying an PC OS that has no apps (remember BeOS?).
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I got mine in the hope of using it for synchronizing a bunch of data between my phone and my Win10 PC. Now that I have the phone, the only thing I sync between the two devices is OneNote (both are logged into the same MS account).
At least that is handy. Type a grocery list into OneNote on the PC, moments later, ta-da! It appears on my phone!
Other than that....no other redeemable quality other than speed and battery life (mentioned below). App availability sux.