[orf]

I take it you have never used a Windows Phone. The Lumia's Nokia make are well designed and high quality, WP8 isn't that bad at all and will undoubtedly get better in the future. Everyone I've met with a WP device (Which is a lot, a fair percentage of my coursemates own one) is happy with it.

And so to escape MS will have to back out of their deal entirely, go back to designing phones and PC OSes separately, and given MS' ingrown bureaucratic insanity there that seems less than likely.

Why would they ever want to go back to designing them separately? How would that benefit anyone in any way? In case you hadn't noticed phones are computers now, integration is the future.

[Ives]

I bought a Lumia 800 as my first smartphone and I'm not quite happy with it.

- It lost at least 60% of its value in less than a year (price for a new one dropped by that much)

- MS wants me to pay them if I want to build an app to use on my own phone

- And after I've paid them I can only put three apps that aren't published on there. If I publish them in the app store and would like to use them myself I have to buy my own apps. So basically just give them money.

- No significant software updates

All in all, it's a good dumb phone, but it's not a great smartphone.

[harrytuttle]

Well you got screwed then. I just bought an 820 SIM free for £179 (Can buy three for the price of an iPhone 4S here). Buy a new car, lose WAAAY more than that in 6 months. Only Apple devices hold their value and I don't understand that as the market is saturated with them.

You don't have to pay them to build for your own device. Just register it as a development device and you can push your own stuff to it. I just did this with WP8 and it's fine.

Not published an app yet so can't comment.

No significant software updates (compared to Android that is). That's a good thing. The platform is pretty stable and consistent across all vendors. It's a shit trying to push an app to 5 different versions of Android.

The only PITA is to do WP8 apps, you have to use Windows 8 which I really don't like. It's bearable with Start8 though.

To be honest I've owned iPhones, Android handsets (Samsung, HTC) and the only thing I don't want to throw across the room due to stupid problems has been WP8.

[midnitewarrior]

That is to be expected from a first generation device unfortunately. Windows Phone 7 was Microsoft toe-dipping into the mobile space with the Metro UI to see if it could be viable.

While WP 7 was a huge success in this regard, the hardware / platform wasn't designed with a long roadmap set for its future, as in order to advance Windows Phone to WP8, the hardware specs of all of the WP7-generation devices was to be abandoned.

I just upgraded from my HTC WP7 device to a Nokia Lumia 1020, and the phone is amazing. I use Android on my tablet, but I prefer Windows Phone on my phone. FYI, the camera on the Lumia 1020 is as amazing as all the reviews say it is.

[orf]

It costs like $19 to register an account on the WP dev centre (or free if you are a student), that's less than Apple and Google charge. For that you get Visual Studio and Blend all set up to develop with and can publish apps to the store.

[cbr]

    less than Apple and Google charge

What your parent wants to do, "build an app to use on my own phone", is free on Android.

[Aaronontheweb]

It's free to build an app and deploy it on your own Windows Phone(s) too - you only have to pay if you want to distribute it through the Windows Store.

[yulaow]

It just changed some days ago

Since there, you CAN'T deploy a personal app in your wp8 because you need to unlock it first and to do that you need to have a developer account.

[Ives]

Yeah, it used to be much more than that. It is $19 a year though.

[pmelendez]

1) Somebody already told you this, only iDevices hold the value, everything else would value peanuts after a couple of months. 2) This happens with Apple too. 3) I don't have that problem, did you check that? Maybe is a problem in your end. 4) My 1 years old LG android 2.3 got stuck with that version for good. On the other hand, WP8 doesn't even have a year.

I had been used 4 platform (ios, android, BB and WP7 & 8) And my Lumia 920 is my all time favorite smartphone and it is a pleasure to develop for it in comparison with Android and iOS. So I guess is a matter of taste

[rbanffy]

> I take it you have never used a Windows Phone.

I have. In fact, it's a perfectly good phone - works well, makes and receives calls with good quality, does not experience loss-of-signal too frequently and both browsing and e-mail work as expected.

But that is the feature set of a featurephone. Coincidence or not, former featurephone users are the only demographic where Windows Phone is growing.

"It doesn't suck" is not competitive these days. Certainly, there are iOS and Android and Blackberry devices that do suck, but there are plenty others that don't.

[camus]

"not that bad" doesnt mean it's good when compared with the competition , "not that bad" is not enough today. A mobile OS must be excellent , not good , to compete. That's the problem of WP Os, it is just "not that bad"

[orf]

I think WP8 is excellent, I meant that it is not as bad as he seems to think it is. Its also not all doom and gloom for WP, my employee (a large multinational company, thousands of employees) is switching all its employee phones from Blackberry to WP8. Even if its consumer market isn't that big you have to remember that a lot of the business world runs on Microsoft's software and it all ties together very nicely with Windows Phone.

[tomflack]

The only way that Windows Phone ties to Microsoft's enterprise offerings better than iPhone is the name. Literally everything else can be done on iOS, often better.

[orf]

At three times the price. You don't need any additional software to manage them (if you use System center that is) and it "just works" (tm). When your company runs on Microsoft it makes sense to go with Microsoft.

[freehunter]

Is the iPhone version of Office better than the Windows Phone version? At least the WP version doesn't require Office 365.