This is somewhat akin to saying that your favorite James Bond is George Lazenby. People look at you and ask, "who?" Windows Phone is an also-ran, a distant, distant third behind iOS (the operating system on iPhones and iPads) and Android.
I don't care; I love it. It's attractive, versatile, and functional. It just works. I was thrilled a week or two ago when I stopped by my pastor's office to ask about something and saw that she, too, was using a Windows Phone.
Unfortunately, because it is an also-ran, not all of the great apps available for iOS or Android are also available for Windows Phone.
Last week, it was time for me to get a new smartphone. My HTC Windows Phone 8X had been acting up lately. It had a problem where it would periodically overheat, causing it to reboot. To make matters worse, Windows Phone was pushing an update which might have helped the problem, but the 8X was unable to install it. Every morning, I would get a little notice telling me that an update was ready to be installed. And then the phone would try to install it, and fail. The next day, the process would repeat all over again. I went on some online forums and found that the problem was affecting the HTC WP 8X in general, not just my phone.
But I was also having battery problems -- and the 8X was a sealed phone without a replaceable battery. It also had only 8GB of storage and no way to expand that by way of an SD card. Whenever I would try to get video footage of something like the Shelbyville Christmas Parade, I would have to remove apps first, and even then I sometimes filled up the phone.
Also, in reviewing numerous phones for this column, I had discovered that I liked the large-screen smartphones often nicknamed "phablets," because they're somewhere between a phone and a small tablet. This is completely a matter of personal preference; some people dislike phablets and find them too big to be practical.
Microsoft had announced a new mid-priced and phablet-sized smartphone called the Lumia 640XL. I waited for the phone to be released and then for a good time to buy, and ordered mine last week.
Right around the time I placed my order, news was breaking that Microsoft was laying off thousands of people in its smartphone operations. Microsoft bought the smartphone maker Nokia a few years ago. Nokia had been the largest manufacturer of Windows Phone models, and there had been some fear at the time that if someone else bought the company, they might convert it to making only Android models. So Microsoft bought the mobile phone division of Nokia in part to keep that from happening. (The rest of Nokia still exists as an independent company, and it may even get back into the phone business on a small scale now that Microsoft has stopped using the Nokia name.)
Microsoft hasn't been able to get much traffic with Windows Phone, even with its own product line. Plus, the fact that it was making its own phones probably scared off some other manufacturers from making Windows Phone models. So Microsoft is making a tactical retreat, and limiting its future hardware production.
Microsoft isn't getting out of the phone-making business entirely; it will still make a few carefully-selected types of phones, including a high-end flagship device designed to show off Windows, as well as low-priced phones for some of the international markets where Windows Phone has had better success. It will also work harder at marketing the Windows smartphone platform to businesses which issue phones to their employees or use stanardized technology (the so-called "enterprise" market).
The flagship model has served Microsoft well in tablets; Microsoft makes top-of-the-line Surface tablets, which demonstrate the capabilities of the software, but leaves it to other companies to make more-affordable tablets, also running Windows.
Some of the headlines last week were worded as if to say that Microsoft was killing off Windows Phone entirely. That's not true -- in fact, Windows Phone is about to enter a new phase that has some potential for innovation.
Up until now Windows Phone has been a separate product from the Windows software that runs your desktop, laptop or tablet. But the new version of Windows Phone won't be a version of Windows Phone at all -- it will actually be a tweaked version of Windows 10, the company's about-to-be-released desktop operating system. Windows 10 for phones will still look a lot like Windows Phone 8.1 on the screen, but under the hood it will run the same engine as Windows 10 for desktops, tablets and laptops. That, in theory, makes it easier for developers to produce software that can communicate back and forth seamlessly between phones, tablets and desktops.
Windows 10 will be officially released later this month for desktops and laptops, although I've already been running the consumer preview version of it for some time on my PCs at home. This was an open preview; all you had to do is sign up for Microsoft's Insider program and be tolerant of the occasional problem, since this is basically a test version of the software.
I got in my new Lumia 640XL on Friday and played with it over the weekend. But then, on Monday, I took the plunge -- I signed up for the Windows 10 consumer preview for my phone, switching out the Windows Phone 8.1 software that was loaded on it at the factory for a preview version of the Windows 10 software for phones.
The installation was a little scary -- my first attempt didn't work right, and I thought I'd bricked my phone. I was able to revert back to Windows Phone 8.1, and my second attempt at installing Windows 10 was successful. Almost everything seems to be running fine. I had a little bit of trouble with the third-party calendar app I'd been running, but the calendar included with Windows 10 is so much improved I may just use it instead.
Microsoft hasn't yet announced a date for the final release of Windows 10 to phones. Microsoft has to work with the various smartphone carriers, some of whom have customized Windows Phone 8.1 with their own apps and no doubt want to make sure everything can carry over to the new system.
--John I. Carney is city editor of the Times-Gazette and covers county government.
Source: Windows Phone: An endangered species that works well
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