[breckinloggins]

I've played with the Lumia at Best Buy a few times. It's a solid, attractive phone and I wouldn't be ashamed to carry one at all.

I'm an iOS guy but as far as Windows Phone goes, I have to say it doesn't suck. I'm not saying that Microsoft's phone and tablet businesses will become a resounding success in spite of all current evidence, but I will say it would be a mistake to dismiss them.

[mattmaroon]

I'll give them credit. If you would have told me before Windows Phone launched that I'd be frequently reading iOS users saying it doesn't suck, I wouldn't have believed you. I feel like at this stage of the game that's a win. I'm still probably not switching though.

[guard-of-terra]

Maybe it's part because of psychological politics.

The market leader (that is, Apple/iOS; the numbers are irrelevant, they feel they're the leader today) is usually hostile to number 2 but friendly to number 3. While number 2 is usually hostile to number 3 - look how Google tries to bully WP.

(For example, MS used to bash Linux but kind of threw a bone to FreeBSD)

And this translates from companies to companies' customers.

[diminish]

A lot of Apple users praise the WPs since a couple launches here. Could this mean that Microsoft finally lures away a lot of them to their platform?

[lmm]

That's the thing. MS has actually produced a really good product, better than any of the alternatives. But it's not going to be enough, because they're too late to get the app developers.

[ChuckMcM]

There is late and there is staying power. When Google's G1 came out people said "Has promise but the iPhone has too much of a lead." People said that Apple would never be compelling in the personal computer business again. People said RIM was too entrenched to be dislodged from the Enterprise. It goes on and on.

Time and time again, making a good product, sticking to the mission and making it the best it can be, has resulted in success for that product. So if Windows Phone is a solid product, and Microsoft sticks to it, they will have a very good chance of becoming a force to be reckoned with.

[AnthonyMouse]

>When Google's G1 came out people said "Has promise but the iPhone has too much of a lead." People said that Apple would never be compelling in the personal computer business again. People said RIM was too entrenched to be dislodged from the Enterprise.

In each of those cases the new product that gained ground offered something significant that the existing product didn't. Android offered comparable quality for less money. MacOS offered a significantly better user experience than desktop Windows and also leveraged a higher level of consistency in user interface between mobile and desktop for the new generation of iOS users. And iOS did the same to RIM from the other side.

None of those are simple cases of comparable products gaining ground against intrenched competitors, they're cases of superior products gaining ground. And that's Microsoft's problem. They've produced something comparable, not something superior. Where's the killer app? The UI is neither abominable nor spectacular. It doesn't run desktop Windows programs. It isn't any cheaper than Android. What should make me want to buy one of these over Android or iOS that makes up for the lack of apps and the training cost of learning a new UI?

[pmelendez]

> MacOS offered a significantly better user experience than desktop Windows

I have both system and I just got a Mac to be able to code for iOS. I don't find your statement true at all. Actually I have a better experience with Ubuntu (as buggie as it feels) than MacOSX. For instance, in my case, I never got used to the Dock / Exposé way to switch between windows. Maybe I am just too used to the task bar but whatever the reason is, I suffer a lot anytime that I need to work on a Mac.

[rayiner]

WP8 is not better than the alternatives. It's good and has some cool features, but it was buggy on release and still suffers from being brand new and all of the lack of polish that comes with that.

There's also, ironically, giant gaping holes in the app/feature selection for business users. No Citrix, no VPN, no app that lets you get to OWA mail if ActiveSync is disabled on your Exchange account, etc.

[FireBeyond]

Yes and no... on one hand, I'm at times frustrated by the app selection, on the other hand, every day I look at the Marketplace, some other app is there (and I realize I miss less and less yet another app I had on my iPhone).

On the /third/ hand, I find myself more and more tempted to download VS2012 every day and do some development of my own.

[Blara]

There are plenty of .NET developers so I don't think that will be an issue.

[AnthonyMouse]

Isn't that like saying "there are plenty of Java developers so I don't think that will be an issue" when talking about RIM?

[Blara]

Not really, I think that WP will have a bigger userbase than RIM and I think that a better to compare against Android. I also assume that "phoneapps" will work on desktop/tablet windows 8 as well... But again, this is just my thoughts.

[AnthonyMouse]

>I think that WP will have a bigger userbase than RIM and I think that a better to compare against Android.

I think you're being extraordinarily optimistic. The latest numbers I could find quickly[1] show RIM with more than double the share of Microsoft, and with both showing a reduction in share vs. six months prior. You might be able to claim that people are abandoning RIM faster than they're abandoning Windows Phone, but even that is arguably because RIM is falling from a higher initial position.

The other problem is that .NET makes no sense for mobile apps, because neither of the two largest mobile platforms have good (if any?) support for it. Everyone who is not some kind of Microsoft evangelist is going to support Android/iOS first, which means they're not using .NET and are not going to worry about a Windows port unless Windows Phone gets enough share to be worth worrying about.

[1] http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/30/comscore-android-us-marke...

[DigitalJack]

I wonder if developing with ClojureCLR is possible for WP8.

[rayiner]

That's pretty much exactly how I felt about mine (before I returned it for an iPhone 5). It does indeed not suck. But you just can't shake the feeling that "this will be better two revisions from now."

Take an exceedingly simple example: load up Hacker News, then look at the screen as you rotate the phone from portrait to landscape and back. On an iPhone 5, the rotation is smooth. On the Lumia 920, you see flashes of white as the screen is repainted in the new orientation.

Yeah, this is window dressing, but it part of the user experience. This kind of attention to the user experience is missing throughout WP8. For example, the user interface relies heavily on glyphs (minimalistic icons), but doesn't use them consistently. In the Camera app, to get to the Photo Roll, you click an arrow icon. Does an arrow make me immediately think of my other photos? iOS uses a thumbnail of your most recent photo.

And I think Nokia made a huge mistake with the form factor. Over the weekend I was trying to surf HN while feeding my baby, and I thought I was going to drop the phone on her. The extra weight (60% heavier than an iPhone) makes it that much harder to rely on friction to keep it in your hand. There is no way it would be a comfortable fit for my wife or my mom. The Lumia 820 is probably a better "appropriate for everyone" phone, but with a low-res screen, etc, it's not positioned that way.

[pmelendez]

I think you are being a bit too used to the iPhone experience. For instance, for me the example on the camera app is very intuitive, specially because the image animates out of screen in that direction so it looks pretty natural to me.

I came from iPhone 3G, and an Android 2.1 before having a Lumia 900 (which I lost) and now a Lumia 920. I have to say that the windows phone experience was the most pleasant to me. Probably since I had worked with all them in a daily basis before that I am not specifically attached to anyone.

I am agreed that 920 doesn't feel like a mainstream phone because the form factor, but it is good enough for the "experiment"/bet that they are doing. If this generation would sell decent I think we would see a lot of 92x where people would choose the model that fixes better to them.

[rayiner]

Some of the stuff is familiarity, I'm sure, but a lot is immaturity. Things aren't worse just because they're different, but at the same time just because things are different doesn't mean they're not worse.

Consider the following issues:

1) In the text message app, the keyboard leaves way less room for seeing the previous texts in your conversation than on iOS. Is this not worse?

2) IE10 shows more artifacts in the process of rendering than Safari. E.g. the aforementioned visible re-rendering during orientation changes instead of the smooth transition. Is this not worse?

3) I'm not sure whether this is the fault of WP8 or the specific apps I used, but chat apps seem to restart each time you switch to them (showing a splash screen), instead of being re-hydrated from memory.

4) When you select a drop-down dialog in IE10, it takes up the whole screen. In iOS it takes up only part of the screen so you can maintain some context by still being able to see part of the page. Is this not worse?

5) Abandoning skeuomorphism makes it harder to figure out what the active parts of the screen are. I think my mom would find the "People" app downright confusing with how it blends bits of the next screen into the current one. It's like a point-and-click adventure game--not always obvious what things are touchable.

6) The ordering of items in the settings menu is, as far as I can tell, totally random.

7) Live tiles can chew through battery life if you're not careful, diminishing their utility.

8) On initial release, the Lumia 920 and WP8 were objectively buggy. Most reviews, and my initial impression, mentioned bad battery life, but those largely went away with the Portico update and a few cycles of discharging the battery all the way, along with turning off NFC. Not exactly the way to launch a highly polished, come-back product.

[felideon]

> Over the weekend I was trying to surf HN while feeding my baby

Hopefully that's not a habit. Enjoy your baby!

[rayiner]

The first feeding of the day both you and the baby want to bond. By the fourth, the baby just wants to download milk from the bottle into her tummy as fast as possible and you want to veg out on the Internet. :)

[malkia]

And when he/she grows up, your phone would be lost forever... in their little hands :)

[jkat]

I've never even seen a windows phone (maybe they aren't popular in Asia?)...I remember when they first came out, most reviews seemed to agree it was very superficial and in need of a lot of polish. Has to story changed?

[freehunter]

WP 7.5 added an almost-perfect level of polish to WP7. WP8 could use the same treatment. I haven't seen anything really show-stopping, but there are some minor annoyances that pop up.

I don't recall seeing any reviews saying it needed significant polish beyond the fact of some missing features that were added in 7.1 and 7.5. Some of the inconsistent behavior has been cleaned up in 7.1, 7.5, and 8 (although 8 introduced some of its own). I don't regret running Windows Phone for the past two years. The only thing I miss is VPN support. The positives over Android and iOS vastly outweigh any of the negatives.