Comment by jasoneckert
10 hours ago
The smooth, tile-based interface of Metro/Modern UI of Windows 8 and the Windows Phone are underrated in my opinion. It was simple, fast, and focused on touch. While I didn't have a touch-based Windows 8 laptop or tablet at the time, I had a Windows Phone, and I enjoyed using it more than any other device I've had since.
I unironically loved my Windows Phone, it was great to develop for too coming from a WPF background at the time
It was amazing. Ran circles around Android on weaker hardware, but because duopoly duo didn’t want to accept competitor it was artificially hamstrung and subsequently killed.
No, the death of Windows Phone was 95% the fault of MS/Nokia.
Pre-announcing that they were leaving all Winphone 7 customers behind for Winphone 8 meant that every retailer/distributor was left with unsellable stock (because they hadn't gained enough traction to sell out initial shipments).
If this was because Nokia made bad/cheap phones that were un-upgradeable or MS being arrogant isn't something I'm remembering anymore but the end-result was pissed retailers and nobody selling WP8.
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I liked it too. But it never was great. E.g., I remember that the calculator had date computations, but the year input was a dropdown going from 1900 to 2100 or something like that.
Look at all 5 of us reminiscing here...
There are dozens of us. Loved the Lumia hardware, loved maybe not that lack of polish in places but the overall UI vision was mostly well executed. Its rigid experience across apps feels quaint now, but if we had this focus now, we wouldn’t be seeing the Light Phone, b/w UI hacks, etc pop up.
Same here. My Lumia 635 was one of my best purchases ever, it was so capable for the price. It's a shame that they stopped believing in it.
The Nokia Lumia 800 remains for me the best phone design I ever experienced. It was flashy, comfortable in hand and felt sturdy
The Lumia Icon/930 I had was genuinely the best phone I have ever used, from both a hardware quality and software perspective. It made the competing iPhone 5 look like garbage.
the Nokia hardware was pretty great, too!
Nokia's hardware managed to prove to me, that plastic done RIGHT, is just as good if not more practical than the metals we have today. They looked fantastic, legitimately didn't require a case, and held up very well.
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Nokias hardware has always been pretty good. Heck, some of the nokia branded HMD stuff is well built for the price
I honestly think that the windows phone development experience is where Microsoft majorly shit the bed. The sheer volume of breaking changes (and the severity of those breaks) meant rewriting a non-trivial amount of your app from version to version. I know multiple developers that just dropped support for windows phone as a result.
Live tiles are nearly universally praised in retrospect, but it might be a case of hindsight bias [1]. The video [2] brings up some problems of the concept and why no other company copied the concept.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection
[2] https://youtu.be/OgXlNaYXRu4
I think if Microsoft had made an easier bridge, faster from Win32 to things like Live Tiles (and the Charms, too) there would have been a lot more people praising the Live Tiles today (and maybe even the Charms). Live Tiles really made their case on Windows Phone 8 where nearly every app supported them (relatively well), that was the only "Notification Center" for missed notifications, and its glanceability became very obvious.
Charms are somewhat similar, too. On iPhone almost every app needs a Share button somewhere and almost every app still has it in a different place today. On Windows Phone 8 it was much more obvious why a dedicated OS-level Share button accessible just about anywhere in any app was pretty great. On Desktop it wasn't seen as helpful as almost no apps supported it (either as shareable things or as apps that could be shared to) because there was no easy Win32 bridge and Microsoft also didn't think to try to integrate with clipboard operations until too late in Windows 8.1 (and then never quite delivered it because most everyone had already written off the Charms by then), as what could have been a potentially easy path to use the existing Windows "share paradigm" to bootstrap.
(You can make cases for the other 4 Charms as well beyond the Share charm, but the Share charm is the most obvious where Windows Phone proved it was a good idea but the Desktop didn't have enough supporting apps to also prove it there.)
Are live tiles universally praised? I see them mentioned positively occasionally, but I suspect they are getting some benefit… like, they are the Windows 8 feature that isn’t immediately obnoxious. Windows 8’s UI just didn’t have any redeeming features, so the element that is merely bad gets brought up as a sort of “see I’m not a relentlessly negative hater, I’m objective” thing, I bet. Is there a name for this trope?
I'm sure there was some meeting where at the end of the pitch deck was some one said:
"...and after people acclimate to them, we'll put ads there! Advertising Directly in the UI!"
The problem MS created was WP7 was a technical dead end: a feature phone OS with a Silverlight UI, which was almost impossible to bypass, hurting third party support a lot.
WP8 was a far "better" OS, but it came with higher system requirements more comparable with Android.
Google never got enough crap on for their stunts with youtube in that era though.
Not to mention that WP7 customers couldn't upgrade to WP8, meant that both customers and resellers had devices they couldn't do shit with.
It's hard to fault Microsoft for doing what they did with WP7, though. They needed to make a statement that they were still committed to phones since WinCE was truly dead. So they made an MVP "Preview" of what the next Phone OS would be.
WP7 was sold to me in more like that language of "this is a quick MVP on the way to the next phone". It was exciting at that time in that way, seeing it as the hail mary pass of "What if we replaced WinCE with all the things we learned from the Zune? How quickly can we do a version of that which will give the right impression and set us up for the next 'real' version?"
Unfortunately yes, it wasn't sold to everyone with that perspective. I think Microsoft may have counted on developer enthusiasm a bit more to get the word across.
Also to be fair, that was still the era where "everyone" bought the new iPhone at launch and iOS compatibility was seen as somewhat equally spotty that if you didn't have the latest hardware you didn't expect the next iOS version to run well and you'd expect to get left behind on apps. It was also the era where Android was often non-upgradeable between versions on hardware (because carriers wouldn't "certify it") and you generally assumed an Android device was version locked to whatever OS version you bought it with. Microsoft may have felt somewhat safe needing a hardware jump between WP7 and WP8 exactly because that was de facto the case with iPhone and directly the case with Android at the time.
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Yeah I agree. It was a little weird without a touch screen, but at that point I was not navigating the start menu visually with a mouse anymore anyway.
Windows phone was great. I think I got it when Android was still growing up. I liked the focus and the speed for sure.
Microsoft's bread and butter is no longer OSes, I think, and it's unfortunately starting to show.
This. The “mobile-ization” of desktop interfaces is a bane on current computing. The metaphors of work between desktop and mobile devices are wildly different.
Obligatory car analogy: a mechanic working in his shop has a completely different set of tools available than if he was going into the field to fix a car.
I really think GNOME is good at making an interface that works well on both, so is KDE to some extent with kirigami
> The ... UI of Windows 8 and the Windows Phone... underrated in my opinion. It was ... focused on touch.
That's why it was rated low. Most people were using this interface on PC's and laptops, without a touchscreen, where a touch-focused interface does not make sense. Maybe it was good choice for Windows Phone or Windows Tablet, but people were not rating it based on that experience. The very idea of using a single UI for both a touchscreen-oriented and no-touchscreen, kbd-and-mouse computers is the most problematic aspect of it.
> It was simple
No, it wasn't simple. There was the simple part, but things not integrated into the simple part were a hodge-podge of previous Windows versions' UI. Now, I like some of the previous Windows versions' UI, but putting a simple veneer on something does not make it simple; if anything, a little more complex.
> It was fast
The fact that an OS UI in the 2010s or 2020s need to be commended for being fast is kind of sad. Plus - I don't believe it was that fast. Did you try running it on, say, a 15yro machine relative to the Win8 launch time? i.e. 1998? Even with a 10yro machine I believe it was kind of sluggish.
I had an Android phone and my friend had a Windows Phone. I wanted to get a Windows phone but by the time I came around to needing a new device it was already killed off. Too bad.