The first reviews for Microsoft’s latest flagship smartphones are coming in, the first device with Windows 10 for phones. This is going to be the big one, right? After several false starts and restarts, this was finally going to be it, everyone told us.
In the mobile world, Microsoft is way behind Google and Apple, and has what many would say is an insurmountable deficit to make up. It could have pulled out all of the stops and produced a phone that was visually impactful, wildly innovative, and truly riveting compared to anything else to make up lost ground.
The Lumia 950 is, unfortunately, none of those things. Sure, Microsoft put some newer guts in it, and Windows 10 has some interesting features, but there’s nothing really here that would drive anyone but the most die hard Windows fan to buy it.
It feels like the Lumia 950 is a proof of concept that might help Microsoft get momentum for its new strategy. But I can’t recommend buying a $600 proof of concept. For now, your phone stays… A phone.
And Ars Technica:
If the Lumia 950 were more keenly priced then it might be easier to get excited about it. Along with its bigger brother, it fills a glaring gap in the Lumia range and does at last offer an upgrade path. For Windows Phone fans (and I am one), this phone, or its bigger brother, is much needed and very welcome. But this is not a phone that is likely to win over new converts. It does its job, and it keeps the platform ticking over. The struggle to attract new users, however, remains.
Way too little, way too late. Windows Phone is done.
Windows Phone is just beginning. The current clock started when Nadella came to power. While Microsoft should have been here in 2006, that wasted decade is a sunk cost, and so it doesn’t factor into Nadella’s current plan. The show will go on!
Msft had 14% of the market in 2006.
Peak phone for them was 2008; it’s been all downhill from there with the exception of a brief period where market share approached 5% and then started declining, which continues now.
Msft had 14% of the market in 2006.
There were no iPhones or Android phones sold then.
You think those platforms are what killed Windows CE 6.0?
They didn’t help WM 5/6 either.
Yeah, they only have blackberry and nokia against them, they just don’t count….
Oh wait….
Nokia and Blackberry have got wiped out as well.
Things looked kind of sort of promising back then, even with the somewhat flaky Windows on phones. They had this rather misguided notion, and they still do, that because people use Windows desktops they would automatically use Windows phones. When this didn’t follow you could see them get very confused.
However, the iPhone and then Android totally wiped them out. Apps are a huge problem. It took Android some time to catch up to iOS in the range of apps available and arguably is still a bit behind. There is no way developers are going to support a third OS in all of that. The fact that they’ve dropped Android compatibility means there really is no way for them. Even if they got Android apps working, how do they then get people developing for Windows? Otherwise they’re just following Android development and features.
It’s over.
It’s beginning since… 2010?
On reflection, I now realise how delusional I was in the late 90’s as an Amiga fanboy, and how silly I must have sounded to everyone else.
Windows Phone is dead. Please, just let it die in dignity.
Holy shit, you’re right!
The posts from the usual MS astrotur/fan base do really read like the desperate, completely detached from reality, posts in the Amiga usenet groups back in my youth.
The difference with the Amiga was that it was actually ahead of its time. A lot. The problem was they just didn’t realise what they had nor did they get software development going around it. Opportunity missed.
Windows Phone is just simply……pointless.
I’ll bring the beer if you pick up the popcorn.
Are you Nelson, or the shadow of nelson?
Yer, where is Nelson these days?
He seems to have stopped posting, right after MS announced cuts in marketing.
Its just selling the majority of their units at the “sweet spot” of $100-$150 USD, as is most of the Android phones.
Mark my words now that the USA has ended phone subsidies you’re gonna see these “flagship phones” sales plummeting across the board, as before they could hide the true cost of the phone from the users and now the users have to see what it REALLY costs.
I know in my area the number of people carrying phones at the $100-$150 range like BLU and ZTE has exploded, as have the number of folks switching to no contract carriers. MSFT won’t be selling many of these but then again nobody (other than Apple, whose fans are so loyal they’ll buy a phone and then accept “they’re holding it wrong”) else will be selling $600 phones, those days are past and the future is $100-$200 USD phones.
Sales marketshare went from 3% worldwide in 3Q2014 to 1.7% worldwide in 3Q2015.
They are done.
https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3169417
The question is if it matters at all for Microsoft. They lost some of their smug with Satya Nadella and realized that they can sell far more Office 365 subscriptions by properly supporting Android and iOS.
Edited 2015-11-21 06:50 UTC
I don’t believe Gartner numbers, given how one can “sponsor” such reports.
What I know for a fact is that here in Germany, I have slowly started to see more people carrying Windows Phone devices.
Similarly when I am travelling around Portugal, Spain, Greece, Servia, Bulgaria, …
Maybe those people will go back to Android if Windows Phone really dies, but I doubt they will buy iPhones.
Apple is it barely profitable without carrier subsidies of USD400 per phone.
IMHO the “sweet spot” will be <USD50 by 2017 and <USD25 by 2020. Today I saw an Alcatel 4.5″ quad core running Lollipop 5.1 for AUD69 (USD50).
Edited 2015-11-21 10:44 UTC
Price warfare counts only with android really. iPhone users will pay even when some worry about the price. The ones who defect are edge cases.
That’s exactly what Apple fans said in the late 80s.
The problem is that those defectors quickly become so numerous that iOS marketshare plummets. Then new apps arrive on Android first. Then iOS share drops further. Rinse and repeat.
Really?
There are some markets that are very different to the US one. None of the people I know with an iPhone are on Carrier contract. They own their devices and use contracts such as one month rolling.
The US market is hardly representative of the whole world. Apple is very profitable without the carriers tricking consumers into thinking that they are getting something for nothing.
The biggest Carrier subsidies I’ve seen in the US were for Samsung Galaxy devices not iPhones.
The iPhone subsidies is equivalent to the 2/3 of outright purchase price of a high end Samsung.
so you are saying that apple makes no money on the phone that I bought retail from Apple? (not in the USA I hasten to add)
What are you smoking? The cost to make an iPhone is far less than the retail price. Apple’s gross margin is 30+%. The carrier subsidies can’t cater for that.
Apple makes money on every phone it sells. If it didn’t then there is no way that they can make that much gross margin.
I’ll say it again, the USA isn’t the whole world. What happens and is common practice in the US does not apply to the rest of the world.
And even in the USA we have a few smart people that don’t get tricked by carriers. I bought my iPhone 6S Plus outright, and I’m happy with it. I’ve no carrier contracts to mess me about, and I don’t have to resolve annoying issues with the operating system on a weekly basis like I did with every Android phone I had before.
Apple has a minor percentage share in every market except the US. Carrier subsidies are the main reason for the high US uptake.
Not really. They still subsidize your phone. They just jump through different hoops now. You can still go out and pay 100 or 200 dollars for a 600 dollar phone and pay it off over the life of your contract. No different really then how they did it before other than semantics.
I don’t own an iPhone, but in my opinion it’s still delusional to assume that all hundreds of millions of iPhone users are loyal fans. That would be one hell of a fanboy count. Is it really impossible to think that some people really like iPhone for the price..? I love my $200 Android slab, but it’s not really the same.
Of course. But you see, we didn’t pick their platform of choice. Therefore we are crazy and must be forcefully converted back to the correct path.
Decidely untrue.
both Apple and google need each other to be strong competitors. Otherwise the spcetre of US Anti-trust starts looming for one of them.
Then there is the topic of development
for years Nokia etc did very little to move phones towards what most of us use today. Then along comes this upstart apple and really set the cat amongst the pigeons.
Competition is good for us consumers. Do the fans of either platform really want to see their choice be the only choice? Perhaps some do but IMHO those are the ones who are unable to learn from the past and are probably doomed to make the same mistakes.
There is space for both major platforms.
The 950 and 950XL look like great phones, but they are too expensive for me to even consider upgrading from my 1020 or 1520. I just don’t understand how people can justify paying more than a couple of hundred Euro for a smartphone. Maybe I am just a cheap, penny-pinching Dutch guy.
(I got the 1020 as a Christmas gift and bought a couple of 1520’s in Japan for 150 Euro each)
From what I can see the 950’s offer what the other highends offer + and – a few things:
+ Removable back / Battery / SD-Card
+ Continuum (interesting, but weird)
+ Iris Scanner (interesting, but weird)
+ Hardware camera button
+ Great battery life
– no fingerprint scanner (the 1 thing I miss on the 1520)
– no gorgeous design (although a new back can fix that)
– apparently in benchmarks it performs poorly, but in real life it is extremely fast???
So the hardware is basically up there with all the other highends and expensive phones
How about the OS?
I have been following the Insider track for the last few months. For a while it looked really bad, then suddenly there was a build were performance and stability were there and there was just a long list of known issues to fix. I didn’t think they would get there this soon but they did. The current build works flawlessly on all my devices (after suffering from the reboot loop that they put most insiders through).
I must say that Windows 10 Mobile doesn’t look like a big change. It is basically the same OS that I love with:
* All the obvious issues (Settings!!!!) fixed and search everywhere.
* Lots of extra features everywhere ranging from a built-in flashlight, timer, stopwatch to a very speedy File Explorer and totally unexpectedly added slow motion and 4K video
* Security (PIN is almost forced upon you), Device encryption and a very clear privacy/permissions section.
* Every built-in app feels a lot more powerful and fleshed out. From obvious things like the new Mail Client and Office, but also “Maps” integrates all 3 previous Here apps.
* Keyboard slightly improved again
* Presenting with MiraCast is so much better than a ChromeCast or Lumia Beamer
* Home-screen even more customizable
* Edge became a really competent browser
* Generally faster, especially in multitasking and resuming apps
* Battery life went from 2.5 days to 3.5 days
* Still has the free worldwide offline maps and free offline music through MixRadio
Did anything get worse?
* There are a few inconsistencies. Like “Extras” inside Settings, the “Send” button in various apps and the hamburger menu
* Quiet hours is now a part of Cortana so it doesn’t work for my parents (Dutch). No problem for me personally because I set everything to EN-UK anyway
* Double-tap to wake works on the 1020 but not the 1520
* Calendar tile only shows 1 appointment
* Battery saver doesn’t work while charging
* No more family room
Is anything big missing?
* I would love to have a landscape home screen and app-list especially when taskswitching while playing a game or watching video
* Kid’s corner shouldn’t have a pincode
* Skype Video, regular Skype, Skype 4 Business…please integrate these into 1 Skype
* Office Apps cannot open files from SharePoint
Okay, so the hardware is on par, you love the OS and it improved…….but how about the apps?
* I have about 60 apps installed of which I use 20 several times per day
* Almost all of these apps are non-Universal apps for now
* I noticed quite a few big names announcing Universal Apps the last month, like TeamViewer yesterday.
* Apparently Microsoft is pushing (too hard) because both FaceBook and Outlook Mail introduced new features that caused problems and got rolled back quickly
* I have apps for standard things like FaceBook, Messenger, WhatsApp, but also for my bank, dutch tvguide, a bunch of my favorite games, translation and Japanese studies, Lego Mindstorms, Passwordmanager, Travelling…everything
* Some apps are not as full featured as I want, for example I would like a better app for Tweakers.net (a Dutch tech site). There are several basic webfrontends but the “real app” that I like most doesn’t show comments.
I have no idea why Windows on Mobile is doing so badly. The developer tools are probably the best there are, there is plenty of push from Microsoft and both hardware and OS are good. I am afraid that there is simply only room in the world for 1 big player (Android) and 1 high-end alternative (iOS)
PS1: That review from TheVerge is ridiculous. Just read the other two and compare them. Where the other two love the screen and camera The Verge calls them “washed out” and “just fine but slow”. There isn’t even a single photo-example in their review. If you want to see what this camera can do (under bad lighting conditions) have a look here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=23&v=1pPMYFOy3No
PS2: “Way too little, way too late.”. I am curious what “WAY MORE” you think could have been done. An x86 phone running Continuum with full desktop support?
What makes this phone and OS worse than other highend phones?
The app gap is the key issue. I don’t understand why Microsoft hasn’t got a dedicated team offering to port and then support Windows Phone & Windows Metro versions of key and popular apps (particularly banks, government sector services, etc.). That’s totally within reach given Microsoft’s huge cash resources, and would I think drive adoption immensely.
Having said that, this is the whole idea behind Bridge for iOS (Project Islandwood), so maybe that will start to address this problem?
I’m pretty sure Kid’s Corner doesn’t need a pin.
It’s been a while since I’ve had a Windows phone (It was 8.x when I did) but looking at the help page at windowsphone.com looks like all you have to do is swipe up from the kids corner screen.
That is how it should be, but now how it is for my phone with the 10586 build at the moment. Of course it works like that when I don’t have a pin at all, but once I put a pin on the phone it is there for Kids Corner as well
Microsoft’s developer tools always being The Best is a myth we should get rid of.
It’s not a Myth.
Oh, yes it is. Microsoft’s development tools haven’t been better than the competition in many years. It’s a breeze developing in e.g. Qt Creator compared to Visual Studio. The latter is confusing, much slower, has way worse code indexing (“Intellisense”), etc. Setting up projects and managing multiple target platforms in it is horribly annoying compared to CMake. And so on, and so on.
Exactly this. In my company all C++ devs (those that were on Windows) switched from Visual Studio to Qt Creator a long time ago.
What if you want to use something other than C++? Or work in a team? I haven’t used QT Creator personally, but it looks like I couldn’t import any of my existing code in it. Are there emulators for Android/iOS/Windows included?
It looks like QT Creator might be the best tool for QT Development, but not for anything else.
It’s great for general C++ development, not just Qt.
Edited 2015-11-23 20:55 UTC
But nothing except for C++, right? That by itself already puts it into a whole other league compared to visual Studio that
QT Creator might be a great tool for you and your team and that is really all that matters in real life. But when we are discussing “The best development tools” QT Creator doesn’t come into play if only for the simplest reason: “Qt Creator does not include a debugger for native code. It provides a debugger plugin …”
QT Creator is a multi-tool screwdriver that works very nicely with the other tools in the toolbox
Visual Studio is the toolbox
Ever heard of Jira, Stash, etc? Use the right tool for the right job. Visual Studio tries to be everything, but always ends up being a jack of all trades, but master of none. Visual Studio is also Windows only, and Windows development doesn’t have a very as strong demand these days.
Platform independence, focus on important features and be lightweight is not in Microsoft’s vocabulary.
Native debugging works just fine out-of-the-box. If you’re using GCC then Qt Creator uses GDB as the debugger, for example. Maybe you should try it before pasting some random quotes from web.
Edited 2015-11-24 08:12 UTC
Maybe you should understand that I quoted a bit more than just “It doesn’t support debugging”. The topic is not “Is QT Creator + Jira + Stash + GCC + dozens of other tools a better development tool”!
The topic was simply Visual Studio > QT Creator.
…and Visual Studio can work with all those other tools as well. It is an extremely extensible development tool, just like you would expect from something that is made by developers for developers
…and Visual Studio can also be used to generate programs for non-Windows platforms. That is actually where a lot of the recent focus is for. And there is now also Visual Studio Code that runs on Linux/OSX/Windows and is much more comparable to QT Creator in featureset, but (without having worked with both tools) it looks like QT Creator > Visual Studio Code
Please don’t attack somebody like me that does research and has a 2 decades of cross-platform development experience. Read and react to what is written, not this kind of ad hominem argumentation.
The original claim was that Microsoft’s development tools are the best. For C++ development that’s not the case. Visual Studio doesn’t even support CMake natively. That makes it practically useless for cross-platform C++ development. Of course if eating nails is cool, then it’s ok.
The other thing I wonder is that how Visual Studio is better than e.g. the newest Android Studio? Let’s compare Visual Studio + Windows Phone against Android Studio + Android.
Edited 2015-11-24 19:16 UTC
My bad, mostly. I was under the impression that I made the original claim, but this was the chain of conversation:
Me (avgalen): The developer tools are probably the best there are
juzzlin: Microsoft’s developer tools always being The Best is a myth we should get rid of.
Dano: It’s not a Myth
I would say that I was fair, juzzlin was correct but introduced a strawman (always) and Dano probably wanted to support my original claim but fell for the strawman.
I think we can all agree that Visual Studio is the most full featured IDE that works well for almost everything. Specialized IDE’s like QT Creator and Android Studio are probably better for their specific tasks.
I have used Android Studio (not the brand new 2.0 though) and Visual Studio for Android development. Android Studio felt a lot more tailor made but whenever I started the emulator or debugger Visual Studio was vastly superior.
That was more or less my point :p
Microsoft is moving slowly out of making mobile phones. It has done this for over a year. Finally they understood that they have no chance to succeed in mobiles phones as long as they own Skype, which mobile networks hate. Basically, all over the world the mobile network were sabotaging Windows phones because they cannot afford to support the owner of Skype, which sells also mobile phones. Selling Windows phones for mobile networks is like subsidizing their own deaths. Even Sthephen Elop has said this to investors! We will see few more launches of Windows Phones from Microsoft like this just to confuse people and investors!
Edited 2015-11-21 05:58 UTC
no contract phones make this irrelevant. i just bought a moto e lte 2015 from amazon for 99usd. It’s faster than the galaxy s4 it replaced and has dramatically less crapware. No it’s not perfect but to me it’s become a good standard i would suggest to anyone.
Yeah, the 2015 Motos are amazing for their price and Android comes with almost no mods.
Eventually mobile phones will become VOIP devices. The networks will sell data not calls.
Edited 2015-11-22 05:39 UTC
I doubt that windows phone is done, I fully expect that Nadella will support new devices being made after the 950.
If blackberry can stay in the market selling 300,000 phones a year then MSFT can stay in the market selling 6-9 million
-> the downside is that you don’t have the iPhone (80 millions a year) or the Android (300+ millions) scale or distribution to support extremely high-end devices and low prices.
Meanwhile Google, Apple and Samsung increase their prices for the EU market with no real reason except profits.
I’ve been really negative agains Windows Phone since its inception, but I must say that the Lumia 950 with Windows 10 Mobile look quite nice. If it has a better camera than my iPhone 5s I’ll probably buy it as a Christmas gift for myself.
I used to be a big supporter of Android, but I noticed that it really didn’t move in a direction which I appreciate. After that I tried the Nokia N9 (which is still the best phone ever) and then BlackBerry 10 (which indirectly killed itself by supporting Android apps). Now I’m currently carrying an iPhone 5s which I love, but I do miss the gestures of N9 and BB10.
I really hope Microsoft won’t support Android apps. There’s very little incentive to write apps for Windows, and there’ll be even less if they support Android. In my opinion, it’s better to lack support for something than have an half-assed variant of it. Why use Windows 10 Mobile to run Android apps when you can get a real Android device for it?
I think following the trends and stats – coming to the conclusion that WP is “done” is a fair conclusion to draw.
And if it were pretty much any other (smaller) company, you’d have a high confidence in that conclusion
But it’s MS, they’re rich, perhaps stubborn, have changed direction (several times, including recently)
And really it’s down to the level of their stubborness, the persuasiveness of the CEO with the board and shareholders and whether they have the collective stomach for a longhaul project
Because project it will have to become. A bit like the ever-gestating Apple TV “project” – I don’t see big growth again for some time, if at all.
But personally – I see room in the overall mobile OS market for a 3rd major(ish) player. I don’t see the 3rd spot ever having more than about 15% – but they could fight to grow from 5% to 15% ish over time. In terms of mindshare alone it might be kind of worth sticking in the game.
Also – with the the presuming “continuation” of Continuum – I would have thought it makes a certain sense to have an OnGoing focus on the smaller phone form factor as well as Tablet and Desktop. It will lend perspective to various decisions are scaling and adaptability that they could miss if they lose the smallest position.
In the medium term, if there is support enough from the board (and the CEO), the project will continue – it’s their decision not Thom’s, The Verge’s or anyone else. But in the longer term – they need to have at least a nice chunk of the Tech press on board or the wider shareholders will sour any remaining mood for failing “projects”
We shall see
Edited 2015-11-21 11:01 UTC
MS can, and should, produce one phone that is new and creative, much like the Surface Book, and put the Surface name on it. Leave off the Microsoft logo, no one is excited by it, and play down Windows, unless it has a full fledged Windows Pro OS installed. There would be no app gap. To keep it safe eliminate Java and Flash, the vectors for ~90% of malware on Windows. Build in safe alternatives, a creative software leap that they should be working on, and I suspect that people will be more than intrigued. They would buy the Surface Phone.
The point of the Surface brand was to identify a category of devices that had been moved to a touch interface. It started out as a mark used on table-sized infotainment devices in bars and hotels.
It is completely irrelevant on a smartphone because that’s how they have always worked; touch is not a new paradigm for handsets. This doesn’t mean MSFT won’t adopt it for phones. After all they put a phone interface on laptops.
Perhaps it will make their phones sell as well as their tablets and touch-enabled laptops. X-D
They are going to adopt a Surface phone because there are no premium phones in the Microsoft space, just carried over Nokia models. Technology has nothing to do with it. They have to due to the phones what they did with Surface sales wise. Surface caught up with the iPad and actually eclipsed it.
Edited 2015-11-22 07:02 UTC
In a Nice Dreams Cheech-and-Chong-world maybe.
The original, 2007-era, Surface brand name was moved from the rear projection table-top devices made by Samsung (SUR40) to the ARM-based tablets that have since been discontinued — along with the version of the OS that runs on that hardware.
The table-top devices were renamed to Pixelsense, thus muddying the brand name as it applies to the original product. In that regard technology indeed had nothing to do with the renaming process; this applies to moving the brand name to phones as well.
The Surface Pro line now has a Surface [non-Pro] model that is based in Intel processors. More mud for the consumers to deal with.
In the mean time the original infotainment devices are now called Surface Hub — bye-bye Pixelsense brand — and will be offered again once they get manufacturing sorted out. But for now there is an indefinite delay while they try to resume making them. This change will only confuse corporate/business users, not regular consumers.
And if by “eclipse” you mean lost $billions and has now sold enough to stop losing money for a couple quarters and have single digit market share then tell me what it is eclipsing other than its own history.
The Nokia 8xx, 9xx and 10xx phones were premium/flagship phones. They didn’t sell. So Nokia started making inexpensive handsets in a move to reduce their losses.
They sold much better than the flagship handsets but far from enough for Nokia to make a profit on them. (Nokia lost over $15 billion going all in on the Msft OS for their phones. And msft has been losing money on phones since before they bought the Devices and Services division and they are losing even more now that they actually make phones.)
Sticking the Surface name onto phones is extremely unlikely to reverse that even if they make them overpriced handsets that are supposed to confer elevated status on the owner like the non-phone devices were intended to do.
Until Microsoft says it’s over.
Personally I am going to skip the 950 and wait for the Surface Phone. I like my Sony Xperia Z5 but even it’s laggy compared to my old Nokia.
This is exactly the point.
Something that all the knee-jerked anti-MS, living-in-the-nineties “anticonspirators” here seem to ignore.
For all of those, who abundantly swarm around here: you’ve “determined” the death of a product from an enormous company with your tiny single little post here. Congratulations. Useful. Now please enlighten us, since you must for sure be entitled to: when will the internet end? >-D
Does this mean Windows Phone outlasted Jolla?