Comment by isolatedsystem

Metro design being amazing, refreshing, beautiful and delightful is a hill I will die on.

It was Microsoft who had the courage (and, admittedly, need) to come up with a bold new design language. They said, you know what, most people are digital natives these days, let's not infantalise them with fake paper notepads and fake leather textures for their digital calendar. Instead, let's make text itself the highlight, the star, and strip out all the rest.

They had a User Story thingy where their ideal users were busy people wanting to exist in the real world. MS wanted that the ideal user takes the phone out of his pocket, glances at it and instantly recives the information he seeks, and quickly puts it back in his pocket to move on with his life.

Hence Live Tiles. Hence the first widgets. Hence their lovely and ill-fated People app where you could go to one place and handle your Facebook feed and your LinkedIn feed etc. Hence the discarding of endless unicorn rainbow vomit of icons. Nah. Here's a simple text interface in black background for AMOLED battery life. The phone is not an extension of personality. It is a tool. Use it. Put it away.

Lumia phones ran amazingly well on nothing specs because they didn't try to be too complicated with graphical stuff. Battery life was always god-tier. And, though I've never been able to confirm it, around the time of Lumia 710, the MS touch keyboard actually let you type letters in the wrong order and would correct them for you. For example: "atcually". I remember at that time that Android wouldn't. It would only handle near-misses: "axtually".

I fucking loved Windows Phone. Rest in peace.