[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