Features - QOTW: Does Windows Phone stand a chance?

[Phrontis]

Yes it does and I will buy one as soon as they make a phone I want. At the moment there are no Windows 8 phones with a 1280*768 screen, removable battery, microSD slot, NFC and 4G. First one out of the door gets my money.

Phrontis

[crossy]

Unfortunately, for most people, the primary reason they have a smartphone is so they can bang on endlessly about features and how it's better than xyz other device.

Funnily enough I don't know anyone who does this. Everyone I know who has a smartphone (which is pretty much everyone these days) picked what they got because of a particular feature. In my case (S3) I liked the large screen because I do a lot of maps and browsing - both better on a larger screen

By far the most popular smartphone operating systems are iOS and Android and both are utter garbage because they prioritise features and gimmicks over battery life, reliability and working as intended.

Utter tosh. Heck, Apple's been roundly slagged off because the latest iOS revision didn't add a lot of features (and removed GMaps). Samsung's PR also makes mention of "power saving mode" that their kit has.
And as for "working as intended", I'd prefer "working as I expect". And my S3 suits me fine in this respect and I'm sure someone else will say the same for their iPhone.

I don't blame the companies for doing this either. They produce a product that sells and the masses are so stupid that they would rather have a device that doesn't work properly in that it is unstable, often does stupid things that you wouldn't expect and has short battery life. Provided it is thin, has over 150,000,000,000,000 apps (whether they have a use for them or not) and has OMG quad core 2GB RAM specs or "don't you love it when it just works" smugness even though it simply doesn't "just work"

Now here you've got a point. I get quite annoyed that the sheer size of an app store is taken as evidence of it's goodness (or otherwise). An app store with 10000 fart apps or screensavers is obviously less useful than one with a mere 100 decent apps.
And as for size, I despair that manufacturers seem to be pushing a "Reductio ad absurdum" approach to design - thinner is NOT necessarily better. I suspect most folks would prefer that any thickness saving in components was used to include more battery. I've got to wonder if the end game (especially with flexible batteries and screens) is something A4 paper size and thickness that you can fold and unfold exactly like a bit of paper.

Getting back to the question - yes I can see Windows Phone having a chance. I can't see it displacing iOS/Android but with the right amount of marketing (and some very decent devices) I could see it taking a very honourable third place. Personally I'd probably take a Lumia 820 or 920 over an iPhone5, but that's just personal preference.

[Saracen]

.... and has a decent camera, ....

Add "for a phone camera", and I'll concede that. Otherwise, we clearly have different definitions of "decent", or different expectations of a camera.

[Saracen]

@ 3candy and cameronlite .... re: SIM card removal, interesting, and thanks to you both.

[3dcandy]

@saracen just had another play, in the interest of fairness and the calendar app works, but it does like to check online as I use google calendar as well. I hazard a guess and think if the accounts are tied it would work just fine. Camera, alarm, note taking, e-reader apps are fine (except kindle which checks for your purchases, throws a fit then works) and on the whole I'd say a good 90% of my apps work. The ones that don't absolutely require a network connection to function. So, I'd say, on the whole, a half decent smartphone *could* work for you if you wish and not use the whole caboodle. Re: the camera, it's functional, lightweight and much more portable than my DSLR and the photo's are decent if a bit flat, but then again I tend to use instagram for it's filters or another app to add filters.





Obviously not to everybody's taste but a couple of examples...

[Saracen]

Nice photos, as in subject matter, framing, etc. But .... low-res examples, Jpeg'd, quite a bit of noise, etc.

Very good for a smartphone, but against even a half-decent compact, let alone a DSLR?

But we're going to end up way off-topic if we go there. I guess the point of a camera in a phone is that you've probably always got it with you. For what I'd regard as snaps, that's fine. But for anything I actually want to photograph, I'd want to step up a notch or two. I have both 35mm and digital compacts, for those times when the SLR or DSLR aren't appropriate. How's the optical zoom on your phone?

[3dcandy]

They're not low-res, instagram adds filters. Those examples have noise, contrast and blur filters applied. My point is that I personally use them creatively. But yes, there is a point in all this, as this app is NOT available for WP yet. It's an app with a vast amount of traction which is sadly missing. And I see your point about no optical zoom as well. But, the photo's are also GPS tagged, so I quite often take a quick snap which then gives me the ability to gps tag my other photos in one quite simple step. Taken at the same time, just for comparison...

[Saracen]

640 x 480 is hardly high-res. I could see they were processed, but that hardly makes easy to assess what the camera is capable of. One of my digital compacts has a GPS chip and geo-tags images .... with 14MP, and a 16x Leica lens, among a host of features, many of which I'll probably never use. SLR it ain't, but it's pretty decent for a compact.

It won't make phone calls, though.

[kamobe]

I just bought one - very impressed so far.

[3dcandy]

640 x 480 is hardly high-res. I could see they were processed, but that hardly makes easy to assess what the camera is capable of. One of my digital compacts has a GPS chip and geo-tags images .... with 14MP, and a 16x Leica lens, among a host of features, many of which I'll probably never use. SLR it ain't, but it's pretty decent for a compact.

It won't make phone calls, though.

I chose that size from flickr simply to show what could be done. Instagram also resizes them I'm afraid so it's a bit of a moot point but it's not all about the photo's, it's about a huge app (user base wise) bought by facebook that currently appears to have no date for release on this platform - possibly the most glaring missing app as far as I can see. Yes others might disagree, but I use it a lot, and for this reason at this time I don't think WP is fairing too well in the grand scheme of things. Mileage of course might vary, and of course the best camera you have is the one with you etc. etc. but it appears that a large majority of apps are slow to appear on the platform so far...

Back to the main points though, I've got a range of apps that I use and like, most of which appear to have no direct replacement if I was to move from Android at this time. I got my phone on a decent contract at a decent price, something at that time I couldn't do with a WP phone. Also at that time WP8 wasn't released and the decent Nokia's were also in short supply. I really couldn't see any reason to wait or change my mind and on the strength of people seeing my phone I now know at least 10 people who have bought S3's. 5 of these were iPhone 4 users, a pretty big swing you'd agree. So, for me, it does appear that currently WP8 is too little and too late for me personally. However, if things continue to improve I'd imagine it would and possibly should overtake Blackberry in time and then be the 3rd choice OS

[TheAnimus]

By custom API, I mean learning another Android API. I already know that one, and would rather not spend weeks or months figuring all the finalities of another platform out. The point of Ubuntu phone is that if you have a qml UI for it, you should be able to use the native qt functionality that already abstracts platform to avoid writing to a custom API. And I'm curious what platforms your project targets, because if you target Android it has an entirely different build procedure to go against than a desktop Java app. I would absolutely expect anyone trying to make a multi-platform app to have a cross platform base with API and UI glue on top, I'm just saying I'd rather spend as little time as possible on that glue.

ah you mean learning an API other than Android? That doesn't really bother me, because I despise programming in Java now. It was fine 10 years ago, but nothing has evolved since then, its like C++ but without the performance benefit.

Which comes to my point, most apps (well good apps) today are not API + GUI.

Model - View Model - View is one of the better ones, but MVP/MVC are common too.

In this its only the model which is completely common, the view models, will have some reuse, but its entirely SOLID style or sometimes AOP. So ultimately the View is going to have to be re-written a lot for different uses.

Right now I've got something which is Desktop Windows (Vista or later), Windows Phone 7.5 up, Windows 8 Modern UI, and iOS.

iOS is a complete bugger. I hate developing against it, I've tried to do as much using .Net to keep the development time down, but it is still ghastly syntax and slow.

I haven't looked at android due to the cost of fragmentation, I've not evaluated xamarin yet, but from what I've seen it doesn't solve the problem. There are plenty of Apps which aren't well made, had little money behind them on Andriod that just don't work on say a Nexus 7, despite how many they sold.

I'd say the worst thing about Skype is that it encrypts the binary and has no documentation or easy way to tell what its sending over the network, and has a proven track record of allowing wiretaps and foreign spying on calls. I never took issue with the qt based interface on Linux - it isn't very intuitive, but that is the fault of the designers more than anything. The Windows interface is rubbish, but that is Microsoft's doing. Haven't had experience with the Mac one.

Most people don't care about wiretypes, I don't consider skype any more private than I do a PSTN. I would say its a mix of designers and interface, I would also wonder why Microsofts doing has anything? The new Modern UI one is rather good for my Mum, if there was a cheap RT tablet my gran would have one, as it stands she can't work skype on Android herself.

I like Google Docs, Google Drive, Dropbox, the new Mega is ok, Youtube has some nice features, and they are all web apps. The native clients Google uses are wrapper apps they have had for a while, but web apps are still first and foremost websites you just treat like applications. html5 has plenty of potential, I just don't think it's inefficiencies make it viable in a lot of application domains.

None of these really do anything powerful thou, I mean the google docs is sluggish enough on my Nexus 7, and it is just sifting files. Compared to say SkyDrive which is a native app (and has MUCH better TOS than Google!).

Which is the issue for me, HTML5 just isn't viable.

A lot of the things you do on small touch screens you do on big hardware devices. Read email, read websites, compose emails / twitter, watch video, upload / share pictures. If you have a bluetooth keyboard, you can compose documents fairly well on a mobile form factor if you don't misspell a lot so you don't have to constantly read the document you write. Even then, 7 - 10" tablets are the perfect size for document reading I think, with really high PPI at least. That class of applications encompasses 99% of the use cases of an average joe consumer, and having one base app that has two interfaces, on a powerful enough mobile device to just plug in or miracast into displays / keyboards / mice / headsets / etc for productivity, will almost certainly be the only computer 95% of the target audience of consumers will want computing devices for. For business, having one device works really well too, you can get one phone computer from the company that allows communication anywhere, you can take your work with you, and plug into any terminal in the office to actually do work. The point is that on one device you can preserve environments and workflows across the form factor fold. The difference is that Windows RT (and 8) don't try to discretize a mobile and working UI, because you can run apps on either, for either, and it makes the fullscreen force touch nonsense rubbish on the destkop and the traditional workflows rubbish on the go. The reason I like Ubuntu phone is that (I hope) you don't run the desktop apps when you don't have a desktop environment, and vice versa. To run any application in either, I hope Canonical mandates different interfaces to fit different use cases.

The problem for me is I don't see much of Ubuntu Phone in a real world working environment. By this I mean its not there yet, it can go either way.

I'm not sure I understand the problem enough. As is with a surface you can nicely hook it up to a KVM it works rather well. The main issue that gets me is that the TFTs I have aren't touch friendly. That becomes limiting. The more I study people with limited computer use, the more I think it will become touch screen + mouse/touchpad. People before used to treat them as an exclusive or. I don't think people will.

For me I just don't get the benefit of having a phone physically interface with that, drive all that, at least not for the next 5 years.

I don't trust the cloud, and many people don't. Internet speeds aren't good enough to keep everything remote. They might be, but I see device power and data density getting much higher faster than the US can overcome the monopolistic mess that is American networking. This is coming from someone in the US, though - the internet here is awful, so I can't use the cloud. Sadly, while I would wish the rest of the world would move on and leave us in the dust, we still have way too much influence in hardware adoption to let that major shift happen without us getting our crap in gear and opening up wireless spectrum and laying some fiber lines.

So how about an NFC transfer of state. Bonk your phone and boom everything is there, bonk back or slow cloud sync if you forget too?

Trying to make the phone a jack of all, to me just adds cost and complexity. I mean after all you'll need a keyborad, a screen, a mouse. All of these are big things, it would be very cheap to put a computer in. Hell my TV in my bedroom has more computing power than a phone from just a few years ago.

I just think the platform is a good idea. It is where computing will be in 3 - 5 years, people won't look at laptops anymore

Completely disagree.

I will never want to work on a phone, unless we have some kind of amazing folding technology, I'll always have a laptop sized thing, for a keyboard and a screen. Sure it might be even more wafer thin, have more battery life, but I can't rely on where I end up having a 'dock'.

[NitrousX]

wheres the demographic for windows phone worldwide. You can't rely on one continent that figure you shown for the UK is there a link? In my opinion i believe they could increase their market share only if they keep partnering with popular apps and get exclusive access to new apps first before the other mobile platforms.

[Saracen]

I chose that size from flickr simply to show what could be done. Instagram also resizes them I'm afraid so it's a bit of a moot point but it's not all about the photo's, it's about a huge app (user base wise) bought by facebook that currently appears to have no date for release on this platform - possibly the most glaring missing app as far as I can see.

.....

Well, except that our discussion about the camera was specifically about the camera, and whether it was "decent", or just decent for a smartphone.

As for Facebook and all that entails, I will admit to a militant disinterest in everything Facebookite. Don't use it and don't see that ever changing, not least because I'm not prepared to give them the info their t&c's require, and don't see why I should bother to make up stuff just to join, or to be honest, the point in joining if you do.

So I have no view on anything to do with that.