ohsweetbasilFever dream phone. Also, no apps.
I had a Windows Phone and I loved it. Fight me.
Fight me.
No, you already have some strange inner demons you apparently need to fight.
Counterpoint: Windows back then wasn’t as reviled as it is now. I also wonder how many of the people upvoting you ever even put their hands on one
Counter counterpoint: Windows back then was Windows 8.
The problem with windows 8 is that with the initial release they wanted everything to be a mobile OS, even your desktop.
“Metro Design” lol
But it seemed decent for tablets and phones.
It was actually pretty great for phones, but in true MS fashion they fucked that all up
altkey (he\him)The idea of unified interface layout itself wasn’t bad, that’s the implementation. It felt like they both didn’t have people testing desktop UI at all and didn’t have any idea how to leverage that idea on a desktop.
Things they could do:
Let it be an ecosystem where every new Windows device can be an opportunity multiplier. Like how KDE Connect makes my phone a media remote or a mouse+kb, and my PC a handler of recent photos I took with my phone today, no cloud involved. With their huge marketshare they could’ve pushed anything they wanted onto hardware producers as a demand and put Apple out of game entirely.
Instead, we had horizontal scroll in Start menu, fullscreen Calc app, no third party desktop app bothering with Metro interface, everything being like a worse Win7 and the only living reminder of Metro phase ever existing being rectangular squares in w10 Start, now retired for MacOS copycat. GG WP M$. It could’ve been your turning point going into smartphone age, but you had too much money and yesmen to care.
ScubusCounter point: uh, yeah they did? A couple years after windows 8 came out they stopped supporting windows xp and 7. Afaik they dont support the latest versions of directx either, so there is literally no way way to run a modern game on anything prior to windows 8. Even windows 8 is no longer supported, meaning it doesnt get new antivirus updates and merely connecting it to the internet is a security risk for the device and the home network. Theres a reason you can right click on any program and select “run in compatibility mode” for legacy systems. And most of the time that compatability mode doesnt work either.
Could be wrong on any of this, im on a computer scientist as a hobby. Feel free to correct me and ill update or delete the post.
dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️Support for Windows 7 (SP1) was not pulled until January of 2020 for ordinary users. Extended support contracts ran until 2023.
For reference, Windows 10 came out in 2015. Users could, and absolutely did, completely skip Windows 8 entirely. Windows 7 was supported throughout essentially all of 8’s viable lifecycle because nobody wanted to use 8, and five additional years into Win10’s lifecycle.
I think windows 8 got more hate than it deserved. Having cross platform metro apps was a genuinely good idea. Smaller OS size was a genuinely good idea.
Windows store and a bunch of changes to settings menus fucked it up along with questionable aesthetic changes.
Removing the start button was a bad idea.
It had an interface that was supposed to be compatible with desktop and tablets at the same time, and as a result it wasn’t good at either.
The power off button was hidden behind the settings menu, which in turn was hidden behind some corner gesture menu. They seem to have taken the wrong lessons from Vim.
Eventually the worst things were fixed with 8.1, but that was too late to repair the reputation.
I sold phones in that era and had a coworker that loved them. I’ve been a tech guy the whole time, so I thought they were ok, but I didn’t trust Microsoft to not fuck it up. Stalman is always right and all that jazz…
Are you aware that every windows update pushes a fraction of its user base to Linux/osx? Windows was Def always reviled. I personally quit after XP SP3 and first glimpses of Vista.
Nice. The first computer I had all to myself had Vista, it thought me how to fix my own stuff after random crashes. I ditched Windows shortly after the end of support for windows 7, after having entirely skipped 8, and then witnessing Microsoft themselves skipping 9 for the shitshow that was 10.
BananaSame
It was a good phone
IMO Microsoft made a decent mobile OS. I will give them that.
You know what else kicked ass and died too soon? Zune.
I really think both these were only bad because not enough people got them. Trying to enter a saturated market that already has two really big, established players is not easy.
Microsoft just really can’t go against Apple or Google.
I had a Zune. It was a phenomenal product. It was just priced too high and trying to compete in a market flooded with cheap MP3 players.
I think the video player functionality wasn’t as big a selling point as they thought it would be to the average user since you either had to purchase films from the store …or acquire them in other ways and convert them to a supported file format.
FenrirIIII’ve still got my HD…best MP3 player made
Fucking loved the Zune.
\[DUMBASS]/Nah those phones were cool, they just needed more apps, I loved my one I had untill I broke the screen.
HubiThe hardware was way ahead of its time. My 950 had USB C, wireless charging, a OLED WQHD display and a removable battery. You could even run the desktop edition of Windows 10. And that was in 2015!
Snot FlickermanYou could even run the desktop edition of Windows 10. And that was in 2015!
If I recall correctly that was called “Continuum” and was a big goal for MS at the time. It’s why they kept the Windows 8 tiling style for the phone and kept the option to use the tiling style in Windows 10 early on because they wanted every version on every device to functionally work the same. That way, whether you were using a tablet, a phone, a laptop, a desktop, or some other as-of-yet-not-defined form factor, you’d have a “continuum” of experience that was unchanging. The goal was to have a phone you could plug into a keyboard, mouse, and monitor, and use just like a PC.
I never had a Windows Phone, but I messed around with a friends, and I have to say, I never understood why they dropped their plans, it was ahead of it’s time and would have been a literal game-changer in the PC-use-space. I actually had really high hopes for the whole program at the time and was quite disappointed that they bailed on their plans and stopped developing the Windows Phone entirely, and by extension, their plans for Continuum. To this day that’s still my dream phone, one that’s essentially also a desktop computer in disguise.
Samsung toyed with this idea with DexDock and there is support directly on some modern phones with most USB-C docks.
I just tried this out on my Pixel 8 Pro…“Enable Desktop experience features” in Developer Options, reboot, plugged in Dell dock…got an android “desktop” on two monitors. They were mirrors of each other, but they were separate from the display of the phone, and they were in the monitors native res. Keyboard and mouse worked. Ethernet off the dock worked, too. It didn’t use the USB webcam I had plugged into the dock.
The UI could use some polish. Android doesn’t really have great mouse support or really any keyboard shortcuts, and the apps themselves are built for a handheld, touchscreen experience.
For example…Firefox for android…pages would default to mobile view, text scaling would be way high (can’t pinch-zoom to make it smaller) and well-known shortcuts like Ctrl+MouseWheel, Ctrl+L, Ctrl±, etc wouldn’t work.
It could be great.
I would personally love for my “desktop experience” to be a low-power, silent, cool-running system (especially nowadays, with Moonlight and Steam streaming and various “cloud gaming” services getting to be pretty damn decent if your network can handle it…and being docked means not needing wifi).
I would love to have my laptop experience be nothing more than a dock with integrated keyboard/touchpad/screen.
I would love for these to be the same system.
But it’s not there yet.
Oh yeah, it’s unfortunate how far behind Android is on this when Microsoft basically had it ready to go nearly 10 years ago and then dropped it because they were losing money on their phone department and not capturing any market share.
I honestly think Android isn’t cut out for it to begin with, because it was always a mobile-first OS.
They had a pretty okay thing going with ChromeOS and now they’re killing it in favor of moving Android to their PC line… which I personally think is the wrong move, but hey, I’m not that smart so what the fuck do I know.
LainTrain
ragingHungryPandaI literally haven’t had wireless charging or an OLED screen since my windows phone. Man, I miss it
Magister
TomMaszZune HD was amazing too
I had this Lumia 1020 and loved it.
No fighting here.