Chips & Cookies
The Kafkaesque practice you get when buying a Windows Phone flagship
Last summer my LG Nexus five had become unusable. The power buttons displayed serious signs of wear and sometimes put my phone in a reboot loop. The battery didn’t last longer than a few hours and the phone usually died on me with more than 30% battery remaining. Evidently, these are normal problems for a one year old Nexus Five…
I was growing tired of the energy draining and inconsistent Android platform, so I determined to get a Windows Phone. But which one? At the time Windows ten Mobile should have been less than a month away so I limited my choice to the models that were going to get the upgrade at launch.
The x30 series were already about a year old, but Microsoft determined to not launch a flagship phone on the x40 series. The ‘best’ fresh phone was a Lumia six hundred forty XL but that phone wasn’t meant to be a flagship so I figured the Lumia nine hundred thirty was my best choice and went for it.
I was well aware of Windows Phone’s famous app gap. A lot of Android & iOS apps don’t have Windows Phone counterparts but nonetheless I found everything I needed in the Windows Store. However, as Windows Phone’s market share further declined, so did the apps. A lot of companies stopped updating their apps or simply eliminated them from the store. Some of them even substituted their native apps with crappy hybrid apps.
But hey, Windows ten Mobile was coming. At least, that’s what most of us thought before Microsoft shoved the launch back a duo of times. I didn’t want a less-than-optimal practice so I didn’t become a Windows insider. Today, the latest Windows ten Mobile Insider Preview still isn’t where it should be in terms of quality as fairly some Lumia nine hundred thirty users are reporting that movie recording is still cracked in the latest build on the slow and release preview rings. They can only record movie without audio. That’s just one of the numerous issues.
Most app developers did become Windows Mobile insider and commenced developing Universal Windows Platform apps. That’s good and all but you can’t install those on Windows Phone 8.1.
So while the app gap is enhancing due to companies discontinuing their apps, fresh apps aren’t even available because Microsoft still hasn’t released Windows ten Mobile. Going to the Insider previews also doesn’t seem to be a viable option for me as I’d like my movies to have audio. I bought a flagship phone because I wished a flagship practice, not a buggy one.
Microsoft’s latest flagships, the Lumia nine hundred fifty and nine hundred fifty XL, are chock-full of bugs, random reboots and dropped calls (usually if you connect the device to a Bluetooth headset or car). I don’t have to give you all the details as Jan already did.
Don’t come telling me Windows Phone isn’t dead. It’s been kind of dead for a while now. Microsoft kept it alive (and kept losing money on it) and that was fine. You could still get a flagship phone and Microsoft made sure you’d get a flagship practice. The app gap has always been there, but it wasn’t that big of a deal. That isn’t the case anymore today. You can’t get a decent Windows Phone/Mobile device today. You’d have to live with the bugs, apps becoming unsupported or unusable…
I’m not moving to another platform today. But I can assure you I’ll never buy a Windows phone again. I’ll keep using my trusty Lumia nine hundred thirty until it’s falling apart. And until that time comes, I’ll keep loving Windows Phone 8’s clean interface, the amazing battery life and camera quality, the outstanding stability of the OS (big contrast compared to Windows ten Mobile) and the beautiful display.
In case you have any further questions, remarks or suggestions about this post, feel free to drop me a tweet or an email! You can also find me on Slack on the Xamarin Talk. I go by the username sam_d.
About the author
Sam is a C# developer who builds mobile (cross platform) apps with Xamarin. He’s been a certified Xamarin mobile developer since 2016. Sam likes to experiment with all kinds of programming languages and software frameworks. More info
© Samuel Debruyn 2013-2017. All rights reserved.