What do you think of smartphones running the Windows OS? I can get one cheap for travel in Vietnam, but I have heard that there aren’t that many apps available.
I have one and I like it a lot. The app market is smaller than other platforms, but this isn’t a big deal for me.
I switched to WP because Android’s complete lack of UI consistency was driving me crazy.
You can check if the apps you want are available before you buy - https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/store/apps/windows-phone
There are a lot of apps available, but chances are you’ll run into the situation where an app you want isn’t available. I was on Windows phone for several years, and I really liked the platform. That said, I went back to the iPhone for a few reasons:
- Microsoft is gaining no traction with the platform, and is now acting like they’re resigned to their fate,
- Windows 10 mobile seems to be undoing a lot of the things I liked about the platform, and
- CarPlay has become incredibly useful to me and Microsoft has nothing like it on their roadmap.
Oh, also, I hate Android.
The thing with apps, is that they’re fun and all, but for the most part, I, and others I know, really only use a handful.
As such, I would never base my phone purchase on availability of apps.
See which ones you think you’ll want, then see if they’re available.
I’m a WinPhone user / believer.
The largest issue for me is the lack of special purpose apps. My bank has an app … for iPhone & Android only, not Windows. My broker has an app … for iPhone & Android only, not Windows. My insurance company has …, etc., etc., etc.
You don’t need all 10,000 versions of Sudoku that are available on iPhone & Android; one will do. Winphone has a few dozen, so still more than enough.
It’s the lack of branded commerce apps that leave me frustrated at times. I also suspect that if you need the latest hottest social media twit/chat/snap/blab app those will tend to be late, or half-featured, or lacking altogether.
Other than that shortcoming, I have nothing but good things to say about the OS, the cloud integration, how well it plays with Google’s or Apple’s cloud or anything else about the device and factory apps.
Thanks for all the feedback; sounds like it would work for me.
My brother in law is an engineer with Microsoft. He stopped using his free MS phone and went to an Android phone solely because of the lack of apps. No issues with the rest of it, it just has a fraction of what’s available for Android or iOS.
I love my Windows phone, though I’m on 8.1 (haven’t gone to 10 yet). I had iPhones before this and yeah, they definitely have more apps, BUT there are some pretty great ones for WP. I like the start screen customizability; maybe I should take some screenshots to show what I mean. The start screen uses “tiles”, but they can serve as application launchers (duh), “widgets”-type things, shortcuts to specific things like a favorite playlist or a contact.
And I recently got a Surface 3; the two work fantastically together (similar to iPhones and Mac computers, I’d imagine).
Amusingly, this is the exact same problem that made Macs fail in the 90s. They were a superior computer system if you factored in the default apps and the basic desktop user experience. But you very frequently couldn’t get crucial applications that you needed in order to make money to afford macs, which were very expensive, to run at all…
I think that if you are going to get a smart phone then you need to ensure you will have the apps available that you really want (otherwise what is the point of a smart phone?) I have no experience with recent Windows phones but if you can get the hardware you want at the price you want and with the apps you want, I say go for it!
Classic Mac OS was a hilariously unstable piece of shit.
This - and I frankly don’t care that my bank doesn’t has an app. They do have a mobile internet site, and that’s quite enough.
I think this is the only annoyance for me too. With reasonable certainty, I know that when I see the words "download our App!', there won’t be one for WP.
My bank has one, and it’s good, but I did have to wait for it to be released. For most of the other apps I use, there is a small choice of quite high-quality offerings - for example, Tides - which is highly functional and very beautiful.
I’ve been using Windows Phone since Feb 2011, about three months after WP 7 was released. I hate Android and I refuse to buy any Apple product solely on principle. I won’t buy anything that I can’t upgrade or repair myself (hard drive, battery, RAM, etc.). So I gladly jumped on board with Windows Phone when it hit the market.
Windows Phone 7 and subsequent versions (7.5 & 7.8) were very good and I was pleased with the performance, features and the interface. Windows Phone 8 and ultimately 8.1 blew me away and I consider 8.1 to be the closest thing to a perfect mobile OS that exists. I may not have a few apps that I would like to have, but I have all the apps that I actually NEED. It’s never been a problem.
My main frustration is lack of premium/upscale phones available with WP! I’ve been using a Nokia Lumia 928, which was the Windows Phone flagship from Verizon for a while, for almost three years. The HTC One M8 was/is available with WP, but the M9 is not and I would kill for it.
You won’t regret switching.
I’m on the WM 10 fast ring and I’m loving it.
As has been repeatedly said you don’t get every app in the world but I have every app I need, ymmv
Ok, I took a screenshot of my start page. I’ve kept this layout ~6 months, but I change it up every so often.
There’re small, medium and wide tiles. I have tiles for phone, email, messages, calendar (on days I have any appointment/event, it’ll display them on the tile itself if it’s medium or wide). There’re utility-ish apps (calculator, flashlight, qr code scanner, weather tile, SoundHound) and useful-but-also-for-time-wasting apps (two different web browsers (IE and Surfy; I have a UC Browser tile that’s a bit farther down I can scroll to), Poki (an amazing WP app for Pocket Reader), Wikipedia, an (unofficial) YouTube app, Tapatalk and podcasts.
The “people” tile is essentially my contacts, but it also pulls in the Facebook and Twitter profiles if they have them. The tile is a “live tile” that switches up the contact profile photos that it displays by flipping tiles every few seconds. The two clocks (dial and binary) are also live and update every minute. The Cortana wide tile updates throughout the day with breaking headlines from various news outlets (don’t blame me for the Fox News ;)). The Trivia Buff tile pulls tidbits from r/til and changes several times a day.
Also, I have official apps for Twitter, IMDB, Netflix, Photobucket, Comedy Central and more. Interestingly, Cracked and xkcd have apps, too.
I quite like my Nokia Windows Phone. It has fewer apps, but it has the apps I want, and most importantly, integrates with Microsoft Office 365 (Outlook mail, contacts and calendar; cloud storage, online Word, Excel, etc.), making it easier for me to work on the road without having to pull out my laptop, and without having to fiddle about synchronizing between different platforms.
In a perfect world, I would like my business entirely in the cloud, with local site redundancy, and a small hand-held that I could simply plug in to peripherals as need occurs. There’s nothing on the market like this yet, but Microsoft’s Windows Phone and Microsoft’s Surface Book are moving in the right direction.
[Total Hijack]
Holy crap*!* Fred Thompson died*!* Weird way to find out…
I know! I said the same thing right as I took the screenshot! 