[iforgotpassword]

I agree though. Maybe except the first or maybe second release, these were kinda rushed and really just reskinned Toshiba devices.

Microsoft is surprisingly good at designing hardware and devices, and surprisingly bad at marketing them. Just like with Windows Phone, they were late to the party but acted like they already own the market. (I guess you just can't help yourself if you dominate the desktop OS market that much.) Both times they added unnecessary restrictions to the devices and set the pricing relatively high. You can do this if you're Apple and created the whole market and are generally known as a premium brand, but MS just isn't.

[myopenid4]

Their hardware sucks, just like their software. This is from a person who went from Nokia Symbian, to Microsoft's Nokia and finally the dead Windows Phone.

They somehow managed to take Nokia with their amazing hardware (look at Nokia N9, N900 and Maemo) and turn it into pure garbage (Microsoft Lumia series and their POS Windows Phone 10).

[iforgotpassword]

Completely different experience for me. Symbian was a confusing mess, so much that I stayed with a feature phone for another while. WP8 felt responsive, the UI consistent and surprisingly clean. Scrolling was smooth in 2013 when on Android it had frequent stuttering except maybe the flagship devices. The problem was that it was missing all the important apps and then some. They made sure to set the bar high for starting to develop apps for it and then wondered why nobody started porting to WP.

[myopenid4]

Nokia was in the process of switching from Symbian to Maemo, but Microsoft installed a Trojan of a Stephen Elop and forced the crap that is Windows Phone down Nokia's throat.

[doctor_eval]

Oldie but a goodie

https://youtu.be/EUXnJraKM3k

[addicted]

The Zune was flashy and sexy looking, but the text on the screen was so large that it conveyed a fraction of the information an iPod screen did in a much smaller size. All the backgrounds and all were also distracting.

It was also huge compared to contemporary iPods. From what I remember, one of the few nice features were the sharing capabilities, where you could Zune songs you had bought over to friends, but those only worked Zune to Zune, so to actually avail that feature it had to first become popular enough that you would frequently meet people who also owned a Zune.

The Zune wasn’t a bad device. It was just too little too late. And the iPhone introduced less than a year later (and the obvious iPod touch that everyone knew was coming) meant that it was all over for the Zune before it even had a chance to get started.

[whereistimbo]

Windows Phone was hostile to both developer and OEM though. By comparison publishing apps on Play Store on Android only requires one time fee and Android was free and open source to OEM except with Play Store, which can be free if several Google Apps is preloaded.

[iforgotpassword]

That's what I broadly covered by bad marketing and "thinking you already own the market". Apple could pull it off to be dicks to app developers because they were first to market. You simply had no choice. Google understood they need to catch up to IOS at any cost, so made it as easy as possible for anyone to start mucking around with app development. Sideloading required one change in the settings menu and you could shove as many random apks to your device as possible. For WP you needed to sign up for an account to even just launch the IDE. The included emulator didn't work on Windows Home editions, so you elegantly pissed off the curious teen on their budget PC. Sideloading was pretty much only possible in this dev setup with iirc one app at a time. Microsoft was third to the party and seriously came up with this kind of bullshit. And they wonder why they failed.