Features - QOTW: Does Windows Phone stand a chance?

[cameronlite]

It works, sure. But it is all a bit mee-too. I was deeply suspicious after the appalling performance and lack of updates from phone 6 and 6.5, and the adoptors of phone 7 were kicked firmly in the goolies by phone 8.

To overcome those sort of commercial behaviours it does not need to be merely 'just as good as' what people already have, it needs to do something entirely new that no-one else has.

Windows Phone 7/8 is everything but me-too. Android was a me-too response to the iPhone, WP is not. Also, please bear in mind that WP7/8 are not extensions of WinMobile but completely separate oses.

[voxstream]

The windows phone is not bad, but I think MS need to get a little more popular before they really stand a chance.

[The Hand]

Windows Phone could easily become the third big player in the mobile world. IMHO, Apple has plateaued out (even with the possibility of an iPhone mini coming) and a lot of Android users are not too loyal to that platform as many may think.
I don't expect an explosive rise in the customer base, like when the iPhone came out 5-6 years ago, more of a steady increase in the market share comparable to Samsung's arrival into the mobile market about a decade ago.

[TheAnimus]

For me I think it is price. Windows Phone 7.5 should be continued more due to its low cost. I've got an 800mhz device here I'm deving against, it cost £80, brand new, off contract. Sure, it might only have 256meg of ram. But you know what, it works, smoothly. The Nexus 4 is a great device, mostly due to its price tag. Why not really try and force the prices down?

The main difference between it and my 920, is this app I'm writing goes cold to loaded in about 1.8 seconds on the lumia, which I think is network IO bound, on both the 710 and the Omnia 7 it takes about 3 seconds.

A lot of people simply don't care about that. I've needed none of the new APIs in WP8, its the exact same code. Then I'll take about 80% of that code and add in the new 20% for a shell designed for tablets and desktops, before submitting to Windows 8 market place.

I can get a lot of device types, with the exact same code.

Then we've not even got on to the IDE. A friend of a friend who devs for iOS was simply staggered to see the way I write a simple LOB app which is doing a bunch of networkie things. The speed at which I got a bunch of differen't objects representing network events and the speed at which the code ran. This is due to a series of better design choices in the language and the platform. In windows phone you can't make a 'blocking' read to any IO, you have to know how to program syncronously. This ment that not only was it quicker for me to write the code for WP, but it was better performing code than iOS.

Comparing it to Android is really rather unfair, because of fragmentation a lot of the automated profiling tooling I take for granted simply can't be there, the language features and libs are a real "choose the ones you want, don't bitch about whats missing" but sadly, that makes the apps take longer to load.

I can see why windows phone has so many apps, considering how few users it has. I don't think any are missing really. Windows phone 7.x users are getting 7.8, which in theory will bring a lot of the shell features they want. In fact as is the only thing missing from my old windows 7 phones are offline maps.

[Vimeous]

Yes I think the market share will grow and become a much more significant player. However MS promoted the OS with the supposedly best phone (Lumia 920), only for it to be exclusive to a network touting 4G but offering pitiful coverage. MS cannot afford to have their best devices tied to the 4G rollout, the OS is late already, it can ill afford further delays.

Regardless W8 uptake elsewhere will help drive sales if MS can successfully market to interoperability.

[Saracen]

I don't want 500 billion apps. I just need the basics - good GPS / Navigation, Browser, MP3 Player, Cloud storage, Camera and probably 1 or 2 others things. I don't even need games, don't play them ....that's what a desktop PC is for!

If they can get these things right I might make the jump this summer, but I'm starting to get sucked into the Google eco system ....Gmail, Gdrive, Contacts....so we'll have to see, this rather than android or iOS apps library is what will sway me.

Completely agree with the first sentence, though I have a caveat. Personally, I very much disagree with the second.

Second point first, Google as an operation know far too much about far too many people, and as a company that is utterly about ad revenue, I'm determined not to give them any more about me than is effectively unavoidable. Specifically, and personally, I will not, now or ever, be using Google apps where personal info is involved, like mail, contacts, calendar, etc. Not on a PC, or on an android device. But that's me, not the mass market.

I do agree that all I want is a relatively small core of useful apps, not to have the device bunged full or all sorts of drivel that's mildly amusing or innovative for 5 minutes, then a waste of time and space.

But .... my core collection of 10 or 20 "useful" apps will likely be very different to yours, and to many/most people's. I do want a recipe book/database, a decent Sudoku game and one or two others, a personal finance app (with VERY limited permissions granted or a rooted phone and a good firewall), and a few others, but have no interest in football scores and not much in mobile email, can manage without GPS/Satnav, and have no use for a fishing app.

Personally, I'd rather see a select choice of 10,000 apps that have been carefully vetted, than 1, 000, 000 apps where most of it is drivel, or sitting on a borderline between gratuitously invasive of my privacy and outright snooping malware.

A far smaller but more focussed and quality collection of apps is better, IMHO, than the utter morass of a minefield that is Google play apps.

If MS were to manage that, along with a more granular and controllable permissions system, then for me that would be the determining factor. I'm not holding my breath, though.

[Moby-Dick]

I've got a 920 here for a months trial. I need a smaller Sim card, but it does feel nice.

[Myss_tree]

Shame on you Saracen ... as an Admin surely you should have at least one fart app. ;-)

I prefer pay as you go or rolling month contracts, these usually put any high end phone at an exhorbitant price. I like the HTC 8X in blue, it would cost me around £400 on PAYG, thats to much. If it was nearer the price of a Nexus 4 16GB and easily available i think it would sell by the bucketload.

[Gunbuster]

As far as I know the carriers in the states are not happy with Microsoft's acquisition of Skype. That they are replacing Xbox Live Chat and Windows/Live/MSN Messenger with it re-enforces the notion that MS is 100% behind Skype.

Carriers don't want to be reduced to dumb pipes, they value their power. That's why as far as I hear they are actively pushing everything other than Windows Phone.

On its own merits I think WP7/8 is nice, although I personally wouldn't want one. I have more interest in FirefoxOS and Ubuntu for phones.

Unfortunately shoe horning on Metro onto desktops has gotten my back up. I was neutral to Windows Phone, now I find myself wanting everything with Metro on to fail. It's a shame I was happy to have a third player when they came back with WP7. Now I kind of wish Blackberry would come back and own business phones.

[Saracen]

Shame on you Saracen ... as an Admin surely you should have at least one fart app. ;-)

.....

Well, the apps I mentioned were examples, not an exhaustive () list.

[TheAnimus]

Out of interest Saracen, what would you want from a recipe app, rather than a website?

This isn't wanting an exhustive list, just with my code monkey hat on, what is wrong with a HTML website? When cooking I find myself generally in a place with wifi, or at the very least mobile service, so offline isn't a worry?

One of the things I find very interesting is the fact we had a massive HTML hype cycle, App Stores have killed a lot of this.

[Wozza63]

Great news for anyone interested in gaming, Ive just seen a video put up by gameloft saying that they are putting their latest and greatest games on WP8, that includes MC4, Nova3, RF2013, Asphalt 7 and a load of others (12 in total) this is awesome news, I hope to see temple run next

[Gadgety]

No one needs "500 billion apps", but some people may highly value a couple of niche apps that is particularly well developed on a particular platform. .

Exactly. I've got a few of those. Only hoping that the common kernel will entice developers who are eyeing the market, to see that common kernel and hence bring out versions for both the PC and the phone.

[Gadgety]

As far as I know the carriers in the states are not happy with Microsoft's acquisition of Skype. That they are replacing Xbox Live Chat and Windows/Live/MSN Messenger with it re-enforces the notion that MS is 100% behind Skype. Carriers don't want to be reduced to dumb pipes, they value their power. That's why as far as I hear they are actively pushing everything other than Windows Phone.

Not only that. Where I am the carriers are blocking verbal communication over IP, unless one pays an extra high fixed fee. The carriers are also saying that in the future data traffic will not be unlimited, and in addition much, much more expensive. Hopefully there will be work arounds (I know there already are some, but it remains to see if the apps survive).

[Gadgety]

It works, sure. But it is all a bit mee-too. I was deeply suspicious after the appalling performance and lack of updates from phone 6 and 6.5, and the adoptors of phone 7 were kicked firmly in the goolies by phone 8.

To overcome those sort of commercial behaviours it does not need to be merely 'just as good as' what people already have, it needs to do something entirely new that no-one else has.

Windows Phone 7/8 is everything but me-too. Android was a me-too response to the iPhone, WP is not. Also, please bear in mind that WP7/8 are not extensions of WinMobile but completely separate oses.

I'm sure there are bits of both me too, as well as some own innovation. As far as the "me too" I've seen is a) simplify as Apple did b) standardize, as Apple did, c) limit hacking, that Android didn't to the same extent hence part of the success on XDA, which used to be Windows Mobile-land d) abandon the geeky pen and go finger friendly, as Apple did. In their book I'm sure this is seen as a start from scratch, and a move away from the segment they did have. Even so it still involved a lot of "me too" because they went with what gave success to Apple in the market place. That's my understanding at least.

[Zanny]

Carriers don't want to be reduced to dumb pipes, they value their power. That's why as far as I hear they are actively pushing everything other than Windows Phone.

On its own merits I think WP7/8 is nice, although I personally wouldn't want one. I have more interest in FirefoxOS and Ubuntu for phones.

I agree that carriers hate losing power, but they are already gross in how they abuse their ownership of the wireless spectrum for profit anyway. I hope they burn. I don't think they are trying to prevent Windows Phone adoption over it though, because Google also has a competing voice communication platform.

Windows Phone will never be more than a niche because as a devleoper, it sucks to me. I don't use visual studio, I don't want to ground up write an app to a custom phone API, and I don't want to be chained to the way Microsoft wants to sell on their store. It isn't developer friendly, and without market adoption it doesn't have potential profits to attract devs either.

Ubuntu Phone is much more attractive to me - because Canonical is trying to give ground to carriers and OEMs (and are even more open about it than the Android licensing terms) and because they provide first class web apps or qt / qml, apps I write for it can go anywhere, I'm not locked into their way of doing things (I assume it will be as cross platform friendly as Android is now for development purposes, with all the goodness of bundled multi-device emulation as good as Android has it) and I can expect Ubuntu to take some fraction of the market where the vast majority of new entrees will be coming from in coming years - not the high end niche market dominated by ios, but from the cheap $0 upfront contract phone or the $100 walmart smartphone.

Also, since Ubuntu phone can plug into screens and play full desktop, I think it is much more business class than even Windows Phone (I imagine Microsoft will eventually make WP8.5 allow the plugin-get-full-windows experience with Office RT at some point, but who knows when they will get around to that).

Firefox Mobile, for the simplicity, I don't think has a market. Ubuntu is already entering targeting low powered devices, and with native apps it can actually hit that target - running javascript + html5 as the program environment is extremely inefficient and resource constrained in mobile. And Ubuntu phone still has the option to use all the firefox web apps - hell, I bet its default browser is going to be firefox. The same firefox running Firefox mobile. So there is no value proposition in the Firefox Mobile platform, but that is fine, because your web apps are targeting everything ever anyway.

So I don't think Firefox Mobile will get much market share unless Mozilla gets some aggressive contracts, but that doesn't really matter because they aren't trying to create a locked in ecosystem, but are trying to push the adoption of web tech as an application platform. Windows Phone is doomed to being ios without the Apple marketing and polish and without the marketshare. Android can still expect to take the market in even greater leaps and bounds as Google refines it and keeps it the middle of the road proposition between the others. I imagine in the long run, something like Ubuntu Phone has the prospects to go much bigger (I really think the basis of qt as the application platform for everything-ever (it even supports Android through necessitas now) is a great one. I wholly admit I always look for work in qt5, and really think it is a great platform going forward for pretty much everything. The creator and designer are really well implemented development platforms that work everywhere and port everywhere, and it uses the better of recent tech innovations (pervasive json, javascript, and less xml, manual makefiles and ifdefs).

My expectation is that in 2015, the phone market share (barring Apple dramatically cutting prices, Google royally screwing up consumer trust / making Android 5 suck / having version upgrade stagnation again) will be 15% Apple, 70% Google, 6% Ubuntu, 4% Firefox, 3% Windows, 2% Blackberry 10. Google has momentum right now I think most people are underestimating - it is about to, I think, become a huge breakout game platform in and of itself, and the permissive app markets attract developers better than anything else. And Java is a dumb easy language to use.