[anonymars]

I always say that many of the things we take for granted today came from Windows Phone

At the time everything was app-based: you are looking at a photo and want to share it? Why, of course you should switch over to the messaging app in question and start a new message and attach it. As opposed to "share the picture, right now, from the photos app"

Dedicated access to the camera no matter what you were in the middle of doing, even if the phone was locked

Pinning access to specific things within an app, for example a specific map destination, a specific mail folder, weather location info

Dedicated back button that enforced an intuitive stack. Watch someone use an iPhone and see how back buttons are usually in the app in a hard to reach place. This leaks into websites themselves too

I still miss the way messaging was handled, where each conversation was its own entry in the task switcher, instead of having to go back and forth inside the app

[klank]

Sorry for such a delayed response, life. :-)

But I wanted to agree with you very much. Lots of behind the scenes/tech stuff as well. Some of our protocols and technical approaches have lived on and very broadly. Exchange ActiveSync, for example. One technology that didn't live long (for obvious reasons) but I still had a lot of fun working on was recognizing when a phone was being dropped to automatically seat the hard drive heads to prevent head/disc damage. How else were you going to fit 2GB of mp3s on your phone if it didn't have a spinning drive?