I’ve been using Windows Phone for the last three years and I love it. I can’t imagine going back to Android now. But apparently I’m in the (very small) minority who prefer Windows Phone to Android or iOS…
Market share continues to drop for Windows Phone (under 3% of the market now) and there are rumors of its demise. 
Any other Win Phone lovers around here?
Yup - I have an HTC 8X (so Windows Phone 8.0) and I love it.
Previous smartphones were Handspring>Palm>Palm(with Windows 6.1)>Android. I moved away from Android mainly because of lack of standards in the apps and interface - every damn thing had a different style of icon and interface.
I have a Nokia Lumia 920 (so, a couple years old). I like everything about Windows except the inability to stream video. Love the tiles and the way the home screen can be set up.
Oh, and the lack of certain apps. . . for example, my credit union has iOS and Android versions, but hasn’t developed a Windows version, so I can’t do things like deposits online, etc.
The way alphabetic lists are handled and navigated in WP is just beautiful.
I’ve had the Nokia Lumia 928 for over a year and I love it. It’s actually the 920 with a fancy Xenon flash for the camera, exclusive to Verizon. I made the move from Windows Phone 7.5 to 8 when I got it and that made it all the more impressive!
I totally agree about the lack of apps and/or compatibility. The Bluetooth system in my car (Mazda CX-9) has a lot of great features. But I only have limited functionality with Windows Phone and that sucks.
I have an upper-level Garmin GPS system that also has a lot of cool features but some only work for Android and iOS!
But even with the drawbacks, the clean interface and intuitive/logical menus are amazing. I also love how easily you can customize many things.
If Microsoft would put some marketing $$$ behind it, I think they’d see a signficant increase in market share. Everyone who sees my phone talks about how clean and cool it looks and how they love the interface. The vast majority of people have never seen one…
I have used one since Windows phone 7 and love mine. In many countries outside the US the Windows phone has a large user base including many countries in Asia and Europe.
I do take issue with the lack of app support though.
I have a Lumia 820 and am quite pleased with it. I’m not an app person: my most commonly used app is the stopwatch. But it works as a phone. And it’s not bad as a camera.
My wife & I are both long time WinPhone users. I now have a Samsung ATIV S & she has a Nokia Lumia 925. She hated her craptacular Motorola Andriod before.
And I have yet to see an apple or android device that will play nice with exchange, onenote, and Live.com. The rest of my on-premises & cloud infrastructure is MSFT, and devices that won’t interface flawlessly with it don’t stand a chance with me.
But …
My only complaint is that so many business or gov’t apps aren’t available for WinPhone. And lots of businesses are crippling their websites for mobile to drive you to install their app instead.
I think that’s really the crux of the chicken and egg problem Microsoft faces now.
There are plenty of stupid games and social media apps for WinPhone. But when my bank, my employer, the local transit authority, the local grocery store, the local pay-to-park service, etc., all have useful apps but just not for WinPhone, then I’m not getting the value from my device that I ought to get. And THAT’s what will kill WinPhone if anything does.
Count me in as well, Nokia 625. Since the update to Winphone 8.1 i feel the O/S has come of age. I am especially happy with the ability to finally store my apps on a micro SD card, freeing up space and quickening up the phone as a whole.
I’m not a fan of Apple products these days, too mainstream, too expensive and a pita when it comes to copying media to and from a PC.
Peter
920 owner, love it
Changed when the peasants all started getting the iPhone, had to be different
Declan
Yep. Have an 8X now, will upgrade to an Icon in a couple months when my contract gets up, unless Verizon gets another flagship with Qi charging by then.
I have the Nokia 1520, the gigantic phablet (6" screen.) After a year of use, my last phone (Samsung S4) couldn’t come close to making it through the day without a recharge. I got so aggravated with it, I decided to get whatever phone was reported to have the best battery life. That turned out to be the 1520, which can go 2 days of average to heavy use without a charge.
I like the system, but also wish it had more apps.
I’m in the minority in this thread. I have a Lumia 928 and I’m not satisfied with it. I’m on my 3rd phone now; the first had a speaker phone issue and the second had an earpiece problem. Both are build quality issues that reflect poorly on Verizon/Nokia rather than Microsoft; however, there are software problems as well that irritate the hell out of me.
When I play the music player for the first time in a while, it freezes for up to 10 seconds and doesn’t respond to physical or on-screen input. This is a problem because…
As far as I can tell there is no independent volume for ringer/earpiece/apps. Which means that I turn up the ringer so that I can hear it at work, and then when I play music through headphones on the way home I get blasted with the maximum volume. Every single time, I mash on the “volume down” button reflexively, forgetting that it won’t respond for 5 to 10 seconds. I usually end up ripping the headphones off my ears.
Wonky PC connectivity. Sometimes when I connect to my PC it gets recognized, other times it’ll go for hours, over multiple reboots of both the PC and the phone, unable to connect.
Even “professional” apps are stupid. I once spent two hours on a plane annotating a paper in Adobe Acrobat on my phone because my laptop had died. After I finished, I realized that I couldn’t find a “save” button. I searched for about 10 minutes and finally gave up, figuring that if that was the case it probably auto-saved any changes. Nope - turned off my phone for landing, turned it on again, and all of my work was gone.
Why must I scroll in the alarm clock app to select the exact minute that I want to wake up? On my old Droid I could type in the number, which I thought was the whole point of a smartphone…
I was really trying to like this phone; I have a Surface Pro and wanted a high degree of integration between the two devices. I also wanted a very nice camera. However, I’m very underwhelmed and will probably switch back to android when my upgrade period comes.
This is a fair criticism - and there are a few other bits of the WP OS that are similarly annoying, such as:
The ‘accent colour’ you select to theme the phone affects the default background colour of the tiles AND the colour of highlighted text; choose too light a colour and you can’t read the tile labels, choose too dark a colour and you can’t read the highlighted text. No idea if they have made this more flexible in WP 8.1, but I hope so.
It sounds like you might just have wonky hardware (or indeed, be having a run of severely bad luck. I think in general, device stability is not a problem for most people - certainly I’ve not experienced any of these issues.
I downloaded the Adobe Reader app to check this out (hitherto I had only used the built in viewer, as I myself have no need to do more than view PDF docs on my phone)…
While I am typing an annotation, a pale yellow bar appears across the top of the screen with buttons ‘cancel’ and ‘save’ - do you see this on yours?
The number picker, along with the list navigator, are this way just because that’s the style of the Windows Phone API (I guess app developers can choose to circumvent this and implement a text-entry number box, but native MS apps will tend to use the API) - I quite like it - the sliding number picker is very easy to use single-handed, but it’s sort of a quirky, distinctive feature, so I can well understand why you and others might not like it.
I just got a Nokia Windows Phone earlier this year, and I can’t say I’m crazy about it. There are some annoying things about it that I can’t seem to get over:
Every so often, the thing buzzes me with a message “Sync contacts now.” I press on the message, but it just brings me back to the start screen, I have no idea how I’m supposed to synchronize my contacts and stop that stupid message!
It only rings twice before going to voicemail. I’ve looked all over for a setting that will let me increase that so I can run to the phone if I hear it ringing and I’m not right there, but darned if I can find that.
It can never seem to remember my Microsoft Live account. Every time I want to install something (or so it seems), it makes me log in all over again.
I can’t charge the thing powered off. If I power it off and plug it in it automatically turns back on. I’d love to plug it in overnight to charge without the possibility of it ringing, but no such luck.
Since a lot of you seem to like your Nokia Windows Phones, have you had any of these experiences, and/or do you know what I can do about them? Thanks.
I was going to suggest plugging in then powering off, but it also restarts that way. I don’t think it’s possible to charge it switched off - probably by design.
You could switch it into Flight Mode during the night, but that’s a bit of a nuisance.
There’s a feature called “Quiet Hours” that will let you leave it on overnight, but send calls directly to voicemail without ringing. Go to Settings>Quiet Hours and pick the hours you want the phone to stay quiet. It also has breakthrough rules if you want just one or two people to be able to reach you overnight, but not anyone else.
That must be in the latest update. I don’t have that on my non-updated phone.
All you have to do is turn it face down.
This appears to be an issue that your cell phone service provider can change. I found this online: