What if...: Windows Mobile.

[SenKa]

Let's pretend for a second that Windows Mobile didn't have a bunch of random crashing issues, that it had 0 dev support and that they picked questionable partners to produce their phones. Look at the OS at face value and imagine...

 

This is what I wish would have happened with Windows Mobile, and I hope MS is bringing it back in some form (rumored they are).

 

Small changes:

A cloud based sync-to-desktop system like iOS/macOS integration (and just as smooth). This is probably the biggest flaw in Windows for those of us who use their phones as tools rather than toys.

Non-Tile UI. It was always horrid to look at or use, reminds me of Windows 8... Eugh...

A DeX-Style docking ecosystem, but with less proprietary-ness (more on this below) that allows proper continue-what-you-were-doing, which MS currently implements with android but it doesn't work very well...

 

Bigger changes:

Re-Do Windows Mobile to X86 with ULP Atom processors (or SD 855, now that Windows 10 on ARM is a thing.). This would nullify the need for apps to be supported on yet another OS, and would simply require apps to scale to a ~7" screen. The only app I know currently with stubborn scaling is the Discord desktop app. This would have nullified the largest issue of Windows mobile.

Aforementioned "DeX" would just drop you on a lightened Windows 10 desktop with full X86 app support. Performance would be similar to that of a Surface 3/Surface Go/GPD Win. Not fast, but perfectly usable.

Phones would be marketed towards the rugged/business market. Devices would be thicker with larger batteries, all-day-ish battery life. utility orientated feature set (dual SIM, SD card expansion, removable batteries. Maybe Mag-style to avoid breaking clips on a back cover? This would likely be too thick with current battery tech...)

 

 

Any other ideas? Its this blatantly stupid and/or improbable? Leave your comments down below!

[Princess Luna]

5 minutes ago, SenpaiKaplan said:

random crashing issues

It never had any of this, Windows Phone was the lightest and fastest and most reliable OS for phones on it's time, yes it was superior even to iOS.

 

The sole reason it didn't take off was because every one boycotted it, the lack of Applications and Flagship Phones using it is what killed it.

 

That simple, I had a Nokia Lumia myself with Windows Phone and honestly I used it up till recently when I got gifted a new phone.

[SenKa]

1 minute ago, Princess Cadence said:

It never had any of this, Windows Phone was the lightest and fastest and most reliable OS for phones on it's time, yes it was superior even to iOS.

 

The sole reason it didn't take off was because every one boycotted it, the lack of Applications and Flagship Phones using it is what killed it.

 

That simple, I had a Nokia Lumia myself with Windows Phone and honestly I used it up till recently when I got gifted a new phone.

Those were my experiences with it. My ex-boyfriend had a Nokia something or other that always crashed and rebooted at annoying times. And you also quoted me by saying that poor app support and phone partners were 2 causes. So we only disagree on one point, which you know better than me as I only used one very briefly

[david.lesicnik]

I used to own a Lumia 830 for a few months (screen flicker at minimum brightness made me sell it) and I loved Windows Phone 8.1 for what it was. Yes it didn't have apps and yes it was quite locked down. But what it did do, it did oh so well. Super smooth scrolling (I sometimes feel that it was smoother than my current OnePlus 6), super smooth animations, good battery life and a very distinct visual style (that I quite liked).

I never did put Windows 10 Mobile on it (sold it before that), but from what I've read just about most of the positives I mentioned before were nullified by W10M. Chippier, worse battery life and a more "traditional" visual style (hamurger menu, app bar up top, etc).

 

I really wish they stuck with what they had with 8.1 and worked on that.

[GoodBytes]

Sorry. But Windows Phone didn't have crashing issues.

It failed because of multiple reasons, such as:

• Microsoft treated smartphones as a fad. No real resources was given to the team, and the team faced with many sticks in their wheels internally.
• Internal battle during Windows Phone 7 creation on using the aged old Windows CE or desktop Windows kernel (Windows desktop kernel was used first, then manager, resulted to switch to Windows CE mid way, which ended up with this incomplete OS where you can could not change the ringtone. Later it catches up... but too late. Windows Phone 8 scrap everything and re-used Windows 8 desktop kernel due to manager change again and saw that Windows CE (1996) was indeed too old to make a competent modern OS. This resulted in a phone which again lacked many features compared to the competition.
• Microsoft wanted to control the hardware too much, which forced basics likes screen resolution and limited SoC options, and limited the phones to the med-range market in terms of specs. So the premium Windows phone was more about build quality, camera, screen technology, etc. But not better SoCs which made them, well lower priced, but no halo product to build excitement, and considering that Android was cheaper for manufacture than Windows Phone, you ended up with better phones for the money going Android.
• The OS was not customizable in any way. This, and the point above, made it harder for manufacture to differentiate themselves.
• Microsoft was selling its OS to carrier. (hence the cost difference compared to Android). This resulted in lower margins for manufactures which made the phone less interesting for them. In addition, mobile carriers where getting no bonuses or little ones to selling the phones, while Android phones had large ones, especially from Samsung. This has made carrier store sales rep to just push away Windows Phone to the consumers, even those interested, with false statement like "Oh it gets viruses" or "Oh it has blue screen error all the time..." type of responses, which pushed false information to the product (which hurt the product image), and of course, the consumer is not buying the Windows Phone they wanted to get in the first place, and leaves with an Android one.
• Microsoft could have have (and still an issue today, although much better) have a proper store system. Google and Apple had not only a great store experience, but for devs it featured many security features like app encryption (which banks liked a lot), and detail reports of their sales, trends, and so on. Microsoft was very basic until now.
• Microsoft bought Nokia phone division, and as a result they were getting Windows Phone OS for free. So manufactures were like "WTF?!", and well, they stop supporting the OS as it would be impossible to be price competitive with Nokia.
• No constant updates. While Android and Apple were constantly releasing updates to their phone OS, Microsoft was following the old desktop model, where you needed to wait 3 years to get an updates. Sure it had service packs style updates that added things here and there, but not enough features and not enough of these updates. No to mention that unlike PCs, if you bought a Windows Phone soon after it was released, you basically paid for a phone for less than 3 years of support, as the new version of Windows Phone, was not backward compatible with the old one. Microsoft tried with Windows 10 Mobile, allowing Windows Phone 8 users to upgrade, but their limited resources broke their plans, and only select few got it.
• Driver support from manufactures was lackluster due to the OS lack of interest, and Microsoft limited resource given to the mobile OS.
• "Ads? HAHAHHAHA What's an Ad?" - Microsoft (paraphrasing Microsoft behavior)
• Google had serious programs to help startups app developements on their platform, with serious bonuses if they are highly rated and downloaded, and they evaluate the app for quality as well. Microsoft had none of it. Towards the end they kinda had something, but very weak, and could easily abused which only promoted poor quality apps as it was not a proper program. Again, no resources given to have things proper. This is the big issue why Microsoft could not get app dev support (and the weak ass store back-end and front end didn't help)

 

This is why the phone failed. It's not the OS itself per se. It is, rather, the terrible managerial decisions. It is also the CEO that was completely disconnected from reality, slow to react, lacked vision, took 0 risks, didn't want to invest in anything, let alone spend on marketing for anything. From my source, who worked in the industry in a company that is for hire for startups and any company that wants to have a mobile app: The ONLY time that that Windows Phone was mentioned by the client or by them when assessing the requirements, it was when Windows 10 Mobile was released, due to the potential of UWP app platform (as the app would also run under Windows 10), and the store started to have a series of big apps that were more complete from the likes of Netflix, Spottily, Facebook, Twitter and so on)

[SenKa]

Just now, GoodBytes said:

Sorry. But Windows Phone didn't have crashing issues.

" Those were my experiences with it. My ex-boyfriend had a Nokia something or other that always crashed and rebooted at annoying times. "- Me, 41 minutes ago.

 

As for the rest, I agree. I just really didn't want to type out every single reason the OS failed because:

 

A: Not the main point of the post

B: As you can clearly see (since you wrote such a massive post detailing it), there were many.

[GoodBytes]

52 minutes ago, SenpaiKaplan said:

A cloud based sync-to-desktop system like iOS/macOS integration (and just as smooth).

Windows 10 Mobile has this. Now Android users can enjoy this to with Windows 10. See: Your Phone app under Windows 10 to get started, and use Edge web browser on your phone (it uses the OS phone web browser, not actually EdgeHTML back engine, so its good)

 

52 minutes ago, SenpaiKaplan said:

Non-Tile UI. It was always horrid to look at or use, reminds me of Windows 8... Eugh...\

You are the first that says this. The tile base interface is still ahead of the time. Android response was widgets, and Apple well... the calandar app shows the current date now.. and heumm.. numbers on apps on the corner... But in the end it depends on what you perfer:

 

 - Apple design is the in-and-out approach, like aged old phones design.

 - Android is notification base. Everything is notifications

 - Windows Phone is about being discrete. Notifications is only on important things, and the rest is at a glance from the tile screen.

 

52 minutes ago, SenpaiKaplan said:

A DeX-Style docking ecosystem

Continuum. Windows 10 Mobile has this. In fact Microsoft helped Samsung with its DeX (probably Samsung paid some patents to MS for this)

 

 

52 minutes ago, SenpaiKaplan said:

Bigger changes:

Re-Do Windows Mobile to X86 with ULP Atom processors (or SD 855, now that Windows 10 on ARM is a thing.).

No. Atom is super slow and very power hungry compared to Atom. Remember that chips like the Snapdragon series on phones and tablets are SoC (System-on-Chip), Atom is just the CPU. So manufactures needs to add modem, wireless card, audio chip, north/south-bridge, and so on. All consuming power on top of the CPU itself.

 

x86 support sounds great, but take your favorite app and scale it in the phone shape, and now imagine using your big fat finger on it. Good luck.

This also ignores the fact that many x86 Win32 programs have minimum size window define which might not fit in the phone window.

 

Oh and, x86 programs assumes laptops with big batteries and desktop with infinite power... not phones. Developer don't optimize their apps for battery life. It's not even in their mind.

 

[david.lesicnik]

1 minute ago, GoodBytes said:

The tile base interface is still ahead of the time.

I loved just looking at my WP8.1 start screen and seeing the little tiles flip around and move about. It looked so clean and yet showed me just the information I needed.

[GoodBytes]

9 minutes ago, SenpaiKaplan said:

" Those were my experiences with it. My ex-boyfriend had a Nokia something or other that always crashed and rebooted at annoying times. "- Me, 41 minutes ago.

Faulty hardware phone is not the fault of the OS.

Shit happens, the phone should have sent to be repaired.

No one goes:  "Android is shit, the micro-USB port broke after plugging it in for the first time". Manufacture error happens.

 

 

[david.lesicnik]

1 minute ago, GoodBytes said:

Faulty hardware phone is not the fault of the OS.

Shit happens, the phone should have sent to be repaired.

No one goes: "Android is shit, the micro-USB port broke after plugging it in for the first time". Manufacture error happens.

 

 

Believe me I sent it to the service center over 5 times. They kept sending it back saying they didn't find anything wrong with it. The last time I sent it in I sent it in a more legal way to which they had to offer a proper reply. They said screen flickering at lowest brightness (or in WP terms, "low" brightness option, with that set to as low as it can go) was "normal for the phone's operation".

 

After that I was done with the phone, done with the service center (official Nokia service center for my country) and down with using a crappy loaner phone from my carrier, so I just sold it and got a Nexus 5.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, SenpaiKaplan said:

Let's pretend for a second that Windows Mobile didn't have a bunch of random crashing issues

Never had any.

1 hour ago, SenpaiKaplan said:

that it had 0 dev support

Don't think that would help. Windows Phone 7 (and prior builds) I used were rock solid, and performed better than iOS at the time. (Androids were in their rightful peasant place back then)

1 hour ago, SenpaiKaplan said:

and that they picked questionable partners to produce their phones.

Nokia was pretty questionable. They also had few partners - it was very exclusive and that lead to the downfall of Nokia really. 

1 hour ago, SenpaiKaplan said:

Look at the OS at face value and imagine...

Its not too bad, but lacked any app support, you couldn't get snapchat etc. Social media sells phones well, 

[scottyseng]

I'm going to have to disagree about not having a non tile UI. I think it's one of the best features of windows phone. You don't need to choose between Widgets and App icons like on Android (Yeah, I know there's launchers on Android for windows phone UI). I have tiny tiles for features I don't need live, bigger tiles for weather to see it, and medium tiles for e-mail.

 

Also I have had some crashing, but fair chunk of the reason was due to my failing battery. I'll probably just keep using my phone until it dies (Also because I'm too cheap to get a new phone, would rather put more money down on PC parts).

 

I think app support and lack of phones killed it.

[SenKa]

10 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

Faulty hardware phone is not the fault of the OS.

Shit happens, the phone should have sent to be repaired.

No one goes:  "Android is shit, the micro-USB port broke after plugging it in for the first time". Manufacture error happens.

 

 

I was unware if it was a hardware or software issue, but I remember him not being the only one that had those issues. May have been a minority, but as they say. First impressions last a life time. As for the rest of what you said in your other post:

 

I had meant to type (but it doesnt work very well) on my point of cloud based sync. Which, in my experience it hasn't. I did not know W10 mobile had that feature, however.

 

The point of Tile UI is totally opinion based, I hated it personally. If the average Windows Mobile user loves it, then I would not change it.

 

I never heard a good thing about Continuum either. Seemed to have died as fast as it came. Weather this was the fault  of it being a poor concept, or poor software optimization I do not know.

 

I'd imagine you meant "Atom is slow and power hungry when compared to Snapdragon". Which, I should have clarified that point with "and optimizations to the atom architecture to make it useful." I did also add (or SD 855), which addresses your point.

 

I touched on the minimum size thing with the discord app comment. It is the only app I know of with a very stubborn minimum size. As for X86 app scaling, I agree it may be weird on some apps and may require them to load a "mobile version" UI for non-docked operation. Which... come to think of it would lead to the same issue as Windows Mobile already had of little to no software support. Good point.

 

EDIT: @scottysengand @floofer's points also addressed in this post.