[monstermonster]

This will probably sound like a troll as I understand windows phone isn't popular here but my Nokia 630 lasts over 48 hours of medium usage EASILY on a tiny 1830mAh battery, has a perfectly sized 4.5" screen, has navigation that doesn't shit itself in the countryside and costs £99 SIM free off Amazon.

The camera is shit but I tend to lug around a DSLR anyway if there's anything worth taking a photo of, so the phone is used for taking photos of where I parked so I can appeal tickets. Less pixels (480x854) means less power usage and I can't say I notice the difference that much compared to the wife's Moto G.

But everyone goes "fuck windows phone" and walks away from such things...

[psbp]

If I only wanted to use the core functions of the phone (browsing, calls, etc.), I would definitely buy a Windows Phone. It's just lacking a lot of fun, useful apps.

[monstermonster]

To be honest I only use Here Drive, ebay, weather and the built in apps (which are fantastically good) so you may be right however all the major names are there now. The mail client and search destroys all other devices if you ask me.

[Synaesthesia]

Love the keyboard too, and there's a really good Soundcloud client. Yep Windows Phone 8.1 is pretty kick-ass

[monstermonster]

Yep. I miss key a lot less than my old android. Plus I just found out you can download mp3s straight to storage and play them in xbox music.

I'm selling the kids' iPhones and getting them winphones so I don't have to deal with itunes.

Super happy.

[selectodude]

I'm sure your kids will be thrilled.

[monstermonster]

Is that sarcastic? Can't tell on here ;-)

[mikelward]

I considered the Nokia 630, but only having 3G is a deal breaker for me.

I just got the Sony Z3 compact, which is smaller than the 630, has LTE, and a bunch of other advantages (better specs all round, front-facing camera, etc.).

[monstermonster]

They do a 635 with LTE as well.

I've owned a Sony android device (Xperia SP) Never again. Total bag of crap. Sold it and got a Moto G which was crap too. Neither devices could handle more than three tabs open without losing one and refreshing. The 630 can with half the RAM. I think NT scales down better than Android on handsets.

I'd have got the 830 if I wanted a camera phone but I lug a Nikon D3100 around.

[mwcampbell]

> I think NT scales down better than Android on handsets.

Any idea why? My only guess is because so much of Android is built on a garbage-collected, JIT-compiled environment (Dalvik), whereas much more of the Windows Phone stack relies on manual memory management and reference counting, and even .NET apps are AOT-compiled on Windows Phone. In that case, the new Android Runtime (ART) might address half the problem.

[monstermonster]

These reasons stick out for me:

1. NT is very small. A 66MHz / 24Mb system can still throw up a desktop.

2. The UI is entirely hardware accelerated WPF.

3. You're right about the AOT which is done off the device. It still does GC on the device for most apps which are CLR based but core WinRT stuff is manual management. NT doesn't do overcommit or mmap stuff either. Also the CLR GC runs concurrently.

4. The ecosystem isn't fragmented making centralised compilation and optimisation a reality. There are very few hardware combinations to support.

5. Better native type support in CLR. There are better unsigned and binary types in the CLR making micro-optimizations possible.

Comparing to android, Dalvik is damn slow. It seems to defer all GC until an inconvenient time and suck up lots of RAM in the process. If they get that ART compiler in there then it might be getting somewhere but I suspect from my experiments with my Moto G that the compiler has a different set of performance penalties.

[mwcampbell]

> 1. NT is very small. A 66MHz / 24Mb system can still throw up a desktop.

On what version of Windows? NT 4?

[lstamour]

If people knew that Google finally works under IE mobile in version 8.1, I think they'd re-consider Windows Phone. But that's not necessarily the HN crowd pleaser here ;-)

[monstermonster]

It has done since WM7.5 for ref.

[lstamour]

Right. If you like looking at the ugliness that is pre-iPhone Google search for mobile: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/google-search/5b...

Even in their own app!

We did not get proper, modern-looking iPhone-style touch-optimized mobile search results from Google for well over 20 months while Windows Phone 8 was fully capable (thanks to not using IE6) of displaying such touch-optimized CSS. I know, Googling or using Google services was IMPOSSIBLE on my incredibly modern Lumia 920 in January 2013. They just never bothered to optimize for any touch whatsoever and treated the platform as many companies did, like Windows Phone 7, and not something modern and new.

It wasn't until Windows Phone 8.1 that IE11 began pretending to be an iPhone -- and oh look, search finally works (design-wise) if you use other providers than Bing! I re-tested before performing the 8.1 upgrade -- to this day, they still think Windows Phone 8 has not evolved from Windows Mobile days.