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On Windows Phone, because I need to justify my brand loyalty to myself
At some level, at some point, I'm sure someone will be intersted in a peek into the mind of someone who is looking into getting a Lumia 950 two years after it was released. And is looking into getting it used, because even bloody Microsoft has given up on their smartphones, going by their online store around here.
There's this comparison that I somehow haven't seen a lot, which I honestly find strange: Windows Phone is like the Xbox that flopped. It's a product that let Microsoft carve their niche into a market split between two other actors, even though they're not really supplying anything new? I mean, given that I've never touched an Xbox in my life and last played a Playstation in 1997. If MS could move into the console market by supplying a machine for playing the same titles already available for the Playstation, logic says that with their home computing monopoly it should be child's play to get a similar foot into the far more vital smartphone market.
There are levels of irony to this story beyond what my eyes can see, but one of them is of course that Windows Phone was supplying something new, compared to iOS and Android. I wonder if that might in fact have been their downfall? If we carry on with the consoles as our comparison, it certainly fits the pattern. You'd think the fanboy wars would be happening between the two camps with substantial differences (Sony/MS vs. Nintendo), and yet. The smartphones went down the same path: Android fanboys went to war against the Apple empire, and like Wii was for little kids and your grandma, Windows Phone was the one sleazy store employees pushed onto your parents who never had as much as touched a touchscreen before.
Windows Phone had an image problem right from the start. I have the distinct impression that a lot of people using macs these days are iphone stans who turn up their nose on the rowdy masses using Windows, but lord only knows that your average Android user never ran Linux. But Windows Phone was still uncool, was still unthinkable for the fanboys, and back before the app gap was far from as critical as it is in 2017, and I've never been able to figure out why.
My relationship with Windows Phone does not start with Windows. It starts back when Lumia was Nokia Lumia, back when the world was young and the mountains green and I was boicotting Apple as a matter of principle, and had a little Android tablet that I didn't use for much. I'd been using Nokia phones for years, and would very much like for my first smartphone to be a Nokia too, but Steve Jobs had entered the stage for real, and Nokia had started falling behind. So they made the in retrospect unlucky decision of partnering up with Microsoft, who very much wanted in on the smartphone market but probably didn't have the hardware division for it. Nokia ditched Symbian and started running Windows Phone, which was kinda fugly back then, and this was the main thing keeping me from diving in. Please remember that I'm a nineties kid; phones with changable shells was real important for us okay. The WP layout of tiles was colourful, sure, but I wanted something you could put anime pictures on.
But curiosity won out, and my first smartphone was, indeed, a Nokia Lumia running Windows Phone. And there were apps that let you make your own design on the tiles of a lot of apps, and along came Windows Phone 8 with its transclucent tiles and I had all I ever wanted. Yeah, the apps were fewer, but there were fewer apps back then. We came from a time when a phone was used for taking pics and playing music and maybe really simple games. No, WP didn't have all sorts of novel writing integer calculating film editing sky mapping comic creating stuff, because NO PHONES had that stuff in 2012. And until Pokémon Go, there was nothing I missed on my phone. I had an app for playing Go [no I never learned it decently], I had a little piano thing to help find the correct notes during choir practice, I had a really great GPS app. For everything else, there's your laptop.
Let me devote a little aside just to this, to how I got my first tablet because it came with a stylus you could allegedly draw with, and how I never since felt that my life was lacking for my lack of a tablet. It isn't that I don't see how tablets are more intuitive in usage than the traditional computer layout (desktop, mouse, keyboard) is; hell, I still struggle a bit switching between my Surface and my non-touch-screen work laptop. But I side-eye tablets and I have ever since the first period jokes were made about the ipad. I'm viewing it all through a highly subjective angle, brought on by my personal history with digital technology, and maybe I shouldn't, but what can you do?
I made those drawings. My first real venture into fannish activity was to use Paint to draw the characters from some French teenage soap opera that ran after school back when I was twelve-ish. The second was through a class in HTML coding, which I parcticed for making a little ditty about Sunset Beach - and then two years later, about Pokémon, and my search for images brought me to this big Team Rocket website in 2000. I'd been writing stupid soap opera romances saved on floppy discs since I was maybe twelve; moving onto fanfic was natural, and I practiced my art, I made more shrines - fuck it all, I was really doubtful about the move over to LJ because the whole social setup felt stifling compared to the open landscape of following blogs and shrines and forums and mailing lists. There's this one tumblr I'm following that is mostly into meta discussions about the anti movement, who repeatedly has stated that Web 2.0 is probably to blame for a lot of these issues. Truth, or at least the aspiration towards it, dies at the place where social posture is more important than the quality of the content.
I loved blogs but I've always been leery about social media, maybe because I'm so abysmal at being social, maybe because I could see, already back then, that baby pictures and youtube comments would eclipse the web that taught me so much about my own capacity to create. And tablets, by their sub-par input technology and hardware, the lighter software, are made for consumers, not creators. Smartphones are fun, for sure, but the few creative apps I've downloaded to my mum's hand-me-down Android phone have not been of particular use for the act of creating, for my part. I still need my computer to write; I still need a pen or a stylus and a surface of some considerable size in order to draw. The only part the smartphone has made easier was taking my drawings online, without having to go through a scanner or a camera to my computer.
But at the end of the day, what most people create for entertainment is the physical kind of creation that can only be shared online by way of facebook photos. That I personally am not bothered by no Snapchat buggy Insta the best pomodoro app is just fugly does not speak for what most casual users want out of their phones these days. Windows Phone started out behind and just... didn't ever catch up, in a field that is growing ever more important.
It's the importance of that field which is the reason I just can't quit it. I'm pretty sure Windows Phone in its current form is moribund, but the future is the mobile market, and I have big trouble seeing Microsoft give up on it. Continuum is one attempt at using their software empire to capture the hardware of the future. Desktop computers are getting obsolete as the TVs are getting smarter and laptops cheaper, and I'm typing this on a Surface - laptops and tablets are merging and praise the lord for that. When Apple and Google both are producing tablets that are essentially oversized smartphones, the natural move is of course tablets with the full functionality of a laptop. Enter Surface and the tablet mode, and good luck with designing phones that interact with the tablet mode of the desktop computer with the same ease and iPhone does with the iPad. They're going to have to cough up something completely new because being an alternative has failed, but they're to big on the OS front to let the mobile market get away.
And the final irony is that I'm not at all sure I'll be jumping at whatever it is they come up with to replace Windows Phone, because it's not Microsoft I'm a fan of. It is Windows Phone that has kept me buying Windows Phone, beyond the point of sanity.
I don't think I'm biased in saying that it's a pity Windows Phone never made it. Serious tech blogs have applauded the OS on its own, and it's not just a matter of finding it as good but honestly finding it superior, and finding that back before everyone had smartphones, the fanboys refused to try it because ewww, Microsoft. Which is hypocricy of the finest order all the time I'm exactly the same about iProducts, sure. In 2017, I question my own sense of critical thinking when I'm buying another goddamn Windows Phone, and I buy it anyway because it's so comfortable, it's so pretty, it's so simple and so much less fussy than the android phone I got an extra SIM for in order to play Pokémon Go and use it for mobile payment because it might be my Lumia that has the NFC technology, but that never took off here and the bloody bank discontinued mobile payment support for WP this summer.
ETA: So let's talk about the further irony of the timing of this post, and let me add that my Lumia 950xl arrived yesterday and it is a marvel in all ways. It even has a real xbox Go app.
There's this comparison that I somehow haven't seen a lot, which I honestly find strange: Windows Phone is like the Xbox that flopped. It's a product that let Microsoft carve their niche into a market split between two other actors, even though they're not really supplying anything new? I mean, given that I've never touched an Xbox in my life and last played a Playstation in 1997. If MS could move into the console market by supplying a machine for playing the same titles already available for the Playstation, logic says that with their home computing monopoly it should be child's play to get a similar foot into the far more vital smartphone market.
There are levels of irony to this story beyond what my eyes can see, but one of them is of course that Windows Phone was supplying something new, compared to iOS and Android. I wonder if that might in fact have been their downfall? If we carry on with the consoles as our comparison, it certainly fits the pattern. You'd think the fanboy wars would be happening between the two camps with substantial differences (Sony/MS vs. Nintendo), and yet. The smartphones went down the same path: Android fanboys went to war against the Apple empire, and like Wii was for little kids and your grandma, Windows Phone was the one sleazy store employees pushed onto your parents who never had as much as touched a touchscreen before.
Windows Phone had an image problem right from the start. I have the distinct impression that a lot of people using macs these days are iphone stans who turn up their nose on the rowdy masses using Windows, but lord only knows that your average Android user never ran Linux. But Windows Phone was still uncool, was still unthinkable for the fanboys, and back before the app gap was far from as critical as it is in 2017, and I've never been able to figure out why.
My relationship with Windows Phone does not start with Windows. It starts back when Lumia was Nokia Lumia, back when the world was young and the mountains green and I was boicotting Apple as a matter of principle, and had a little Android tablet that I didn't use for much. I'd been using Nokia phones for years, and would very much like for my first smartphone to be a Nokia too, but Steve Jobs had entered the stage for real, and Nokia had started falling behind. So they made the in retrospect unlucky decision of partnering up with Microsoft, who very much wanted in on the smartphone market but probably didn't have the hardware division for it. Nokia ditched Symbian and started running Windows Phone, which was kinda fugly back then, and this was the main thing keeping me from diving in. Please remember that I'm a nineties kid; phones with changable shells was real important for us okay. The WP layout of tiles was colourful, sure, but I wanted something you could put anime pictures on.
But curiosity won out, and my first smartphone was, indeed, a Nokia Lumia running Windows Phone. And there were apps that let you make your own design on the tiles of a lot of apps, and along came Windows Phone 8 with its transclucent tiles and I had all I ever wanted. Yeah, the apps were fewer, but there were fewer apps back then. We came from a time when a phone was used for taking pics and playing music and maybe really simple games. No, WP didn't have all sorts of novel writing integer calculating film editing sky mapping comic creating stuff, because NO PHONES had that stuff in 2012. And until Pokémon Go, there was nothing I missed on my phone. I had an app for playing Go [no I never learned it decently], I had a little piano thing to help find the correct notes during choir practice, I had a really great GPS app. For everything else, there's your laptop.
Let me devote a little aside just to this, to how I got my first tablet because it came with a stylus you could allegedly draw with, and how I never since felt that my life was lacking for my lack of a tablet. It isn't that I don't see how tablets are more intuitive in usage than the traditional computer layout (desktop, mouse, keyboard) is; hell, I still struggle a bit switching between my Surface and my non-touch-screen work laptop. But I side-eye tablets and I have ever since the first period jokes were made about the ipad. I'm viewing it all through a highly subjective angle, brought on by my personal history with digital technology, and maybe I shouldn't, but what can you do?
I made those drawings. My first real venture into fannish activity was to use Paint to draw the characters from some French teenage soap opera that ran after school back when I was twelve-ish. The second was through a class in HTML coding, which I parcticed for making a little ditty about Sunset Beach - and then two years later, about Pokémon, and my search for images brought me to this big Team Rocket website in 2000. I'd been writing stupid soap opera romances saved on floppy discs since I was maybe twelve; moving onto fanfic was natural, and I practiced my art, I made more shrines - fuck it all, I was really doubtful about the move over to LJ because the whole social setup felt stifling compared to the open landscape of following blogs and shrines and forums and mailing lists. There's this one tumblr I'm following that is mostly into meta discussions about the anti movement, who repeatedly has stated that Web 2.0 is probably to blame for a lot of these issues. Truth, or at least the aspiration towards it, dies at the place where social posture is more important than the quality of the content.
I loved blogs but I've always been leery about social media, maybe because I'm so abysmal at being social, maybe because I could see, already back then, that baby pictures and youtube comments would eclipse the web that taught me so much about my own capacity to create. And tablets, by their sub-par input technology and hardware, the lighter software, are made for consumers, not creators. Smartphones are fun, for sure, but the few creative apps I've downloaded to my mum's hand-me-down Android phone have not been of particular use for the act of creating, for my part. I still need my computer to write; I still need a pen or a stylus and a surface of some considerable size in order to draw. The only part the smartphone has made easier was taking my drawings online, without having to go through a scanner or a camera to my computer.
But at the end of the day, what most people create for entertainment is the physical kind of creation that can only be shared online by way of facebook photos. That I personally am not bothered by no Snapchat buggy Insta the best pomodoro app is just fugly does not speak for what most casual users want out of their phones these days. Windows Phone started out behind and just... didn't ever catch up, in a field that is growing ever more important.
It's the importance of that field which is the reason I just can't quit it. I'm pretty sure Windows Phone in its current form is moribund, but the future is the mobile market, and I have big trouble seeing Microsoft give up on it. Continuum is one attempt at using their software empire to capture the hardware of the future. Desktop computers are getting obsolete as the TVs are getting smarter and laptops cheaper, and I'm typing this on a Surface - laptops and tablets are merging and praise the lord for that. When Apple and Google both are producing tablets that are essentially oversized smartphones, the natural move is of course tablets with the full functionality of a laptop. Enter Surface and the tablet mode, and good luck with designing phones that interact with the tablet mode of the desktop computer with the same ease and iPhone does with the iPad. They're going to have to cough up something completely new because being an alternative has failed, but they're to big on the OS front to let the mobile market get away.
And the final irony is that I'm not at all sure I'll be jumping at whatever it is they come up with to replace Windows Phone, because it's not Microsoft I'm a fan of. It is Windows Phone that has kept me buying Windows Phone, beyond the point of sanity.
I don't think I'm biased in saying that it's a pity Windows Phone never made it. Serious tech blogs have applauded the OS on its own, and it's not just a matter of finding it as good but honestly finding it superior, and finding that back before everyone had smartphones, the fanboys refused to try it because ewww, Microsoft. Which is hypocricy of the finest order all the time I'm exactly the same about iProducts, sure. In 2017, I question my own sense of critical thinking when I'm buying another goddamn Windows Phone, and I buy it anyway because it's so comfortable, it's so pretty, it's so simple and so much less fussy than the android phone I got an extra SIM for in order to play Pokémon Go and use it for mobile payment because it might be my Lumia that has the NFC technology, but that never took off here and the bloody bank discontinued mobile payment support for WP this summer.
ETA: So let's talk about the further irony of the timing of this post, and let me add that my Lumia 950xl arrived yesterday and it is a marvel in all ways. It even has a real xbox Go app.