Windows phone 8 is awesome but microsoft continues to sabotage itself, first at release they promise the world and tout that they have most of the top 50 apps...well that's a lie, they have a lot of 3rdparty clones of the top apps and more than half of them are missing major features, some of the major representative here are nothing but placeholders for example my apps, I have a lumia 822, my wife an iphone 4, and we have a asus transformer tablet and the slacker & kindle apps on both android & ios have almost 3 times as many features as my wp8 version, games? well fairly non existant spend some time and look at the top games on the wp8 lists most of them haven't been updated one in the last 6-8 months!
Microsoft's music/video service with xbox live is a giant charlie foxtrot, and the only entity at all supporting windows phone 8 is nokia. on almost a weekly basis most of my nokia apps get updates. almost NONE of my Microsoft apps have been updated at all since release and samsung & htc has done jack for their customers but microsoft has sure been busy porting their software left and right to the other platforms. all you get for Microsoft advertisments are stupid dancing clicky surface videos or little cameo apperances by some stars. the only people that are REALLY understanding how wonderful windows phone 8 is are the ones already converted.
I can't get any of my in laws to migrate to windows phone despite that they love the tiles, because 1. their major banking institution doesn't work on win phone 8, 2. there is not an equivalent to the Cozi organizer app that is available for every other platform not named windows phone, 3. their fitness apps aren't on windows phone 8 and some good ones just left, some of the best diabetes apps are not present the few there are hollow imitations, my wife CANT move to windows phone despite loving the operating system because as a physician not a single one of the 14 medical apps that she uses in her medical practice is on wp8 yet they are all on blackberry, ios, android and **** half are on Symbian! trust me on android and ios there is a metric crapload of useless apps but there are also a TON of great ones and microsoft is showing zero confidence/support in their own system.
If they put HALF of the effort into their app market as nokia things would be much better. but frankly windows phone 8 is only alive because of nokia, personally I like the 8x best but after previous htc experience on windows mobile and my experiences with my htc phones on android, i've found that htc doesn't give a rats butt about their customers or supporting their devices, so I went with the lumia 822, wich I have to say i'm grateful for because they have constantly added to their apps, and updated to the, and have constantly made clear publicly their plans and intentions with Samsung, HTC and Microsoft its a big vaccume.
Until Microsoft pulls its head out of its butt and puts the full efforts of the WHOLE Microsoft into making windows a success it will stay a niche device because nokia cannot do it all by itself