The rise, the use and ice age of windows phone in my eyes.

When Windows Phone 7 was announced it was heydays of Windows 7 (by the way the best operating system ever after DOS). It was new like morning newspaper given to the delivery wan driver at 4 am.  It was fresh like a lemon you cut from the tree and cut while in the garden. It was unlike any other like puppet show of Hamlet saving Superman from deep depression of alcoholic fumes in the bar next to Bukowski. I wanted it. The problem I faced was lack of offers by local Canadian carriers and my frugalness. By that I mean I did not wanted to pay full price on ebay and have it without warranty.  I skipped 7.5 by seduced by temptation of Windows phone 8. You know finally you can use dual core and some other goodies. By the way I liked my HTC 8X. It was colorful, fitted in my pocket without unpleasant size issues and it was genuine good phone: design, modern internals, great camera and personality to start with.

I used windows phone 8 for a long time. I even got upgrade to 8.1! It was that long use.   It was nice. 8.1 become bit nicer, however calendar’s weekly view is strange. There are no major changes in software and surprisingly there is no major changes in hardware.

After my X8 meet it’s doom with heating/charging while navigating car in Here Drive, I got Lumia 525. It has lowest end internals in addition to lower grade main camera. It showed no difference in performance compared to old HTC X8. No whatsoever. Some games stopped working. Camera is cheaper and screen is bit more fuzzy (but unless you splitting hairs it not that bad at all). It unable to shoot full HD video or any HD video. My phone lost its ability to sit in my pocket without disturbing pressure when I try to sit down. It nicely decomposes on a fall with miraculous assembly trick: just put battery back and close back plate… you ready to go. My grand experience is mixed bag. I want more, but settled for less. At the time Lumia 830 was mid-tier, but for 500$ it never got a chance considering lousy 400 model chip (quad core from two years before generation).

Don’t get it wrong: it not a bad phone for 150$ price tag. It just very budget oriented.

The problem is I want phone with bit more power oomph and better camera. I not going to talk about clearly shaky software development and associated battery life. I like to have good phone for twice the price with mid-tier internals and nice camera. Camera is important and Microsoft lost it big time. You either have it lowest or high, but nothing in between. There is nothing special like it was with 41Mp pure view cameras of the past.

After I got Surface 3 Pro I had endless problems with device. I not in the mood to pay another premium for Microsoft product. It just may turn sour. I can say” forget about it” for 150, but it hard to do for 800. Plus there is no way I will use their PC doubling feature. I have nice old laptop, I have Surface 3 Pro and there is no point in having phone do the office thing.

Another concern for me is Microsoft attitude: they seem to push half-baked products lately and learn from user’s feedback or rather don’t learn from it. It really harsh to pay premium and serve as guinea pig. Early adopter’s mantra works for company R&D but not for users. I want to use product (not debug it) and windows phone is not a new product. Neither is Surface 3 Pro by the way.

Windows phone 10 and phones based on 10 are not present with carrier support in Canada. I doubt Microsoft can provide proper support just in case it needed (judging by my experience with Surface). They lost Here Drive and that a blow for me. They either high end priced or clearly low end phones. There is not much of the user base outside Microsoft store employees and I don’t think they payed for their phones.

There is lack of offerings and after all my enthusiasm exhausted. Don’t get it like I like Apple product line or Google’s. I think Apple is as non-intuitive as it can get in modern mobile OS and Google showed their luck of quality control the moment they effectively killed my 2012 Nexus 7 with Android 5 update (clearly update was never tested on actual device and slow as snail it become).

This is the summary: There is no attractive feature set for me; there is no special drive to be integrated in the software system; there is no trust in a company commitment to the product or devotion to it. There is no windows phone 10 for me. In addition whoever is in charge of Windows Phone marketing is a moron.