Windows Phone 8

[GradnerLives]

Work predominantly with salespeople/designers/developers at a company that makes a web-based CRM. Not really "Businesspeople" persay. They choose their own devices, no managed devices or company requirements, we just set them up and help them when they have problems.

You don't really take a smaller store ecosystem as a serious concern until there's something that you want and can't have. You might not be concerned right now, but there are many things that I've found integral to the work that I do or, at the very least, huge time-savers in my day-to-day. Your needs today may not match your needs 6-months from now and we're literally talking about an exponential increase in app availability going over to android or iOS.

"Security concerns" are for blackberry luddites. Androids, iPhones and WP8 are all relatively secure if you don't click everything without reading. Not really a selling point in any of their favour.

iOS is really smooth. In my opinion, this is doubly true for people who don't install a lot of apps and basically just use the device vanilla. It's lame talking to your phone but Siri is a huge time saver and considerably more advanced than what my android offers. Contact card merging is done really nice, and calendar/note-taking/media-playing all have much more care/consideration put into their UI design. I have an android full of duplicate contact records and calendar events with no real way of reconciling them save for doing it manually. Poor native app design in an area that is used far more in my day to day than anything else on my phone. Wireless music/photo/video synching out of the box and you can turn on local storage access if you prefer to drag and drop.

Come on dawg, be real. What are you using if not iTunes? Winamp? WMP? VLC? Anything BUT iTunes is the DEFINITION of clunky.

The settings are much more understandable, there's standardization across hardware platforms so, in general, software issues are quicker to be fixed and deployed along with more frequent updates.

With android there certainly is a disparaging gap with not much of a device "Middle Class". The low end is garbage with terrible cameras, terrible custom UI tweaks, weak native apps and usually outdated OS versions with little plan to offer updates when future android releases are made available. Running said updates is a nightmare and the settings menus can deviate from the standards quite a bit which can make troubleshooting and getting support for the device that much tougher.

On the high end, androids are great. No complaints. Good hardware, good app availability, better pricing and certainly easier to troubleshoot and customize.

Just like Knuckle, I see a small number of WP8 devices due to the tiny market share, but when I see them, people are generally unhappy with them. I'd say it's about 50/50. The most common I hear are poor build quality and poor UI design in native apps. There's no arguing against apple in terms of straight build quality. Even compared to an S4 or HTC one the post 4 iphones look/feel better and they absolutely last longer.

Smaller marketshare matters. It directly affects everything from a support standpoint. Issues are less likely to get fixed since there's a smaller pool of bug reporters. Service providers are less likely to be able to help you, troubleshooting forums are less likely to have the answers you need, stores are less likely to carry accessories, and you're going to have a harder time doing anything you can't figure out for yourself.

Like knuckle, I prefer a bigger screen, and I also prefer the more open app environment since apple blocks a lot of innovation just because it overlaps with existing device functionality or doesn't conform to their rather tight imposed standards. I use a nexus 4. I don't like apple products, but iPhones are pretty undeniably the best built devices that are available right now and, as I said, using the device with no apps straight out of the box, they offer the best user experience in both my opinion and experience with customers.

TL;DR : No troll, no windows hate, no apple slant, buy an android or an iphone.

[mnemonikos82]

@GradnerLives

Thank you for that information, that will be immensely helpful.

[mnemonikos82]

Originally Posted by Knuckle [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

No actually I put facts in, you've already proven you want the windows phone you just want reassurance, not reality. If my criticism offended you that just means you've already identified yourself with the phone as yours.

You can have the most widely adopted facts in the world, but when you present them to me in a vehemently negative filled rambling like your first post I don't care. You want people to listen to you, write it in a way like GradnerLives that is objective.

[mnemonikos82]

Originally Posted by GradnerLives [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

What is it that you dislike about iOS?

On the iphone/ipods/ipads that i have used (I had an ipod touch and have an ipad and have worked on an iphone for a job) I really hated the feel of the OS, the lack the lack of menus and the ease of changing settings. I always felt on my touch and ipad that if I wanted to do something not quite what was prescribed by the software I couldn't. Everything seems so dumbed down on IOS, so that there's no depth.

What I loved about android was that I felt I had the ability to what I wanted, how I wanted. But with my last three android phones I found that after the first year they all started to crap out and become unstable. I don't click on random things, I'm tech savy enough to know how to keep my devices safe, and I've never been an app hog. I've got my core apps that I like and I really don't mess with anything else.

The other thing about Android that is turning me off of them is that Android has umpteen million handset manufacturers and they all put their spin on the device and have to do their own updates (unless you have vanilla), so as soon as a new update comes out if you phone is over a year old it's never going to get it. I am interested in WP's consistency accross handset manufacturers.

[Knuckle]

Windows is not consistent across platforms yet, that is their goal though, wait at least 3 or 4 years unroll the new CEO gets to make a solid inhouse designed phone that can more fully streamline the whole Xbox computer phone idea.

More windows more problems, keep windows on the computer:

http://m.digitaltrends.com/mobile/wi...ne-8-problems/

[GradnerLives]

Originally Posted by mnemonikos82 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

On the iphone/ipods/ipads that i have used (I had an ipod touch and have an ipad and have worked on an iphone for a job) I really hated the feel of the OS, the lack the lack of menus and the ease of changing settings. I always felt on my touch and ipad that if I wanted to do something not quite what was prescribed by the software I couldn't. Everything seems so dumbed down on IOS, so that there's no depth.

I know that feel but still have to say that, despite a lack of configurability, their native apps are designed better than the competition. It's quite restrictive but it's kind of a comfort zone thing. A lot of apps work the way they work, and expect you to work the way they work, but the way they work is not typically fundamentally bad (Save for reminders, wtf were they thinking with iOS 7 reminders...) just different.

Originally Posted by mnemonikos82 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

What I loved about android was that I felt I had the ability to what I wanted, how I wanted. But with my last three android phones I found that after the first year they all started to crap out and become unstable. I don't click on random things, I'm tech savy enough to know how to keep my devices safe, and I've never been an app hog. I've got my core apps that I like and I really don't mess with anything else.

Should always get in a process of backing up data so that you can wipe and restore every so often. It'll be a necessary process when new builds of the OS become available and any OS is going to get shaky with time. With an up to date device and the ability to restore in times of instability, you really shouldn't ever have to live with that kind of stuff.

Originally Posted by mnemonikos82 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

The other thing about Android that is turning me off of them is that Android has umpteen million handset manufacturers and they all put their spin on the device and have to do their own updates (unless you have vanilla), so as soon as a new update comes out if you phone is over a year old it's never going to get it. I am interested in WP's consistency accross handset manufacturers.

I agree, but that's still definitely more of a symptom on the low end of the market. I'd steer clear of Motorola, LG and HTC for the same reason, all of them tend to include quite heavy customization and bloatware. That being said, a Samsung Galaxy S or Note or a Google (LG) Nexus are really quite standard across the board and have the distribution of updates managed much better than any of the other manufacturers. The Nexus 5 is probably going to be your ideal choice in this regard as it pretty well comes vanilla and google makes sure that the Nexus devices stay current well beyond their reasonable lifespan.

I guess my point with the previous wall of text was that there are distinct advantages that come with either iOS or Android. There's a lot of things that are uniquely convenient and positive about both. There really isn't anything that I can think of that makes me think "Oh man, I wish I had a windows phone so I could _______". There isn't really ever anything that a customer has shown me that I've found intuitive or better in any way. They suffer from their fair share of negatives as you see with iPhones and Androids, but don't really have any counterbalance to those problems like iOS and Android offer.

iOS 7 has added a lot of android functionality they were missing like notifications and multi-tasking (I think you can long-press for context menus in a lot of places you couldn't before as well, but not too sure, don't own one) and google has caught up quite a bit in terms of UI design and app availability in the last year or two. Microsoft is scraping by with essentially the bare minimum offerings you get from either of the other manufacturers at the same cost with little hope of real tangible advantages coming about unless you're looking out 2-3 years (and you absolutely don't want to own any device that long these days).

Can you even Candy Crush on a windows phone?

[mnemonikos82]

I think if Candy Crush was missing that would be a positive. I hate that game lol.

[Kazi]

There have been a lot of times I wished I had a win phone camera. No app can beat that low light utility.