Mine was unusable until I installed Android, at which point I bought an Android phone a quarter of the thickness and mass, and better screen resolution (and likely better radios as well).
I too bought it because I thought I'd hack around and "maybe contribute" which quickly turn in "why am I wasting so much time on something that will probably never work".
For most people "quirks" are unacceptable in their mobile phones. Normally one can't afford to lose a call or to have the maps application crash when you're trying to get around.
Give FOSS phones the same media coverage of the iPhone, possibly including its ad induced reality distortion field, and they will sell like candies.
Seriously, once the software is ready, 30 seconds of any popular celebrity showing one would make it sell hundreds thousands in a week. Problem is the small manufacturers couldn't either pay for that level of advertising or satisfy the demand without turning themselves into what they're fighting against now (venture capital, investors etc. don't come free), so I welcome numbers as small as 13k or even much less if that means the product isn't polluted by the typical corporate mindset (close as much as possible to protect intellectual property, make it obsolete sooner to sell newer models, etc).
Oh and by having an unusual phone I can also play the elitist bastard with friends:*)
Interesting point. I have seen some friends happily using Windows phones but most of them were/are either Microsoft employees or working mostly with Windows software, so I guess they needed the deepest integration with the Windows ecosystem, which is understandable.
As for other users, it is possible that Windows phones had either some limitation compared to other platforms or they lacked the killer app that would make it appealing to other userbases.
Having never used one, I can only speculate that MS wanted to change too much too early by making an user interface very consistent with the one they introduced on PCs but hard to digest just like that one, and this could have brought users away both from the PC and mobile devices. I have always found in the past very hard to migrate non technical users from Windows to Linux, but the adoption of the new interfaces from Windows 8 onward made some people I know so furious that it became really easy to convince them to try Linux; in some cases it was them who asked me to install it. That would be unthinkable before Windows 8. In the mobile world I guess it was even harder to grow an userbase since the alternative was already mainstream.
They probably should have copied or mocked a mainstream mobile interface, that is, offer something an user from either Android or iOS would not find alien to use, then offer something more, say free Office apps, then after the userbase had grown start to build the rest.
It was working, but Microsoft didn't have the patience to wait, and wasn't willing to be number 3 for a long time. If Microsoft had continued the project they could have continued to be a distant third place making enough money to keep the lights on in that division - but it would never be insanely profitable and they were not willing to settle for that.
I too bought it because I thought I'd hack around and "maybe contribute" which quickly turn in "why am I wasting so much time on something that will probably never work".