[chiph]

I miss Windows Phone. It was fast, did what I needed, and was easy to use one-handed. The Nokia hardware was good (especially the camera, for the time), except the plastic case & screen collected scratches like crazy.

I would have had no problem paying more for a premium metal & glass case for it.

[juunpp]

I still have my Lumia 450. It looks as great today as it did 10 years ago. Windows phone is probably the only UI/UX Microsoft got right. Sadly, leave it to Microsoft to ruin a product by pulling the plug.

[cromka]

If they open sourced it, it could easily become an actually popular, independent mobile OS to compete with Android/iOS.

[Arainach]

No, it could not.

Ignoring the technical challenges and impossibilities of open sourcing it (Windows Phone 10 is Windows 10, and the Windows Phone 7/8 codebase was its own crazy beast that was tough enough to work with even when you were being paid to do so), mobile operators do not want you running custom code on their stack, and they are the ultimate gatekeepers of what devices are allowed to connect. There will never be a popular, easy to setup open source phone without a complete reworking of cellular service, at least in the US.

[cromka]

So all the alternative Linux open source phones, like Pine, or free (and secure) implementations of Android don’t work in the US?

[justsomehnguy]

> without a complete reworking of cellular service

There is a whole world, besides the US.

But it doesn't matter because there would be no apps anyway.

[cromka]

Apps already existed, it was around the time no one knew which platform will end up being most popular, so many apps had their Windows Mobile version. Not nearly as many as on Android or iOS, true, but they did exist. Especially in Europe.

[toast0]

I don't think Windows Phone 7+ included anything wild on the baseband. It ran on qualcomm chipsets, and I suspect it was just using their modems as-is.

Use an approved modem blob and you can connect. Easy peasey. VoLTE makes it a bit trickier, but not that much.

I mean, yeah, it won't ever be popular. If it's open source, there's no way to sell user data to subsidize the price. And who wants to pay full freight for a phone that probably won't ever fully work... I think I learned my lesson with OpenMoko...

I enjoyed Windows Phone, but I don't see how it would survive without big pockets and a dedicated, focused, and engaged team that can m move mountains. Big pockets alone weren't enough. Good hardware wasn't enough. Microsoft needed to have delivered on their promise of all WP8 devices getting an upgrade to WM10, and WM10 needed to be good on release. Incidentally, what I think was the final build for Lumia 640 was a lot better than the first build; if the first build was that good, the story may have ended differently. Mobile Edge was still garbage on that phone though; Mobile IE was ugly, but Mobile Edge put a queue between the UI and the engine, which meant when the engine was spinning on some page it could barely handle, you couldn't stop it... All your UI commands would be queued up and played later when the engine had finished whatever it was doing... Unless the watchdog timed out and the whole phone rebooted.

[immibis]

You can buy a module that plugs into a Raspberry Pi and interfaces with cell networks. Many years ago someone wrote a phone program for one of these modules and called it the PiPhone.

[asimovfan]

My friend had a folder of photos of peoples laps they all accidentally took when they first handled the phone.

[Sakos]

The WP I had is still the best smartphone I ever owned and used. I've owned both iPhones and Android phones since then and they all pale in comparison even today. It's really too bad how terrible MS was at the whole WP project. Just end-to-end baffling decisions and bad execution.

[pjmlp]

At the time with .NET Native and C+×/CX, with Visual Studio, it was the best development experience among all mobile platforms.

Then after killing the mobile platform, they messed up the desktop experience as well, killing the goodwill among the strongest advocates of the WinRT platform.