I have a $29 640 phone (and a 530/635) and the phone itself works great and the OS is fast.
But, in my opinion, the phone has the same problem all windows phone have. And that is the OS design.
I ran into problems with it soon after I first picked up a windows phone. For example, I have a friend who doesn't have the best eyesight and who gets easily confused due to a memory deficit. On his home screen i put the people app and facebook app for him. The people app tile when set to medium or large, the only settings that can be easily viewed by someone with not the best eyesight, does an animation thing flipping over and showing various things, including a facebook symbol. Very annoying. But worse than that, the facebook F symbol confuses my friend all the time making him think it is the facebook app. And there is no way to turn off this useless animation unless you make it a very small icon. In addition to this being very small - it also creates a lot of space around it making it difficult to make a cohesive look if you like things organized a certain way with a certain size.
As well, I find the animations for animations sake on some of the tiles very distracting and just sensory overload. The live tiles that provide useful immediate information like calls missed etc is good, but something flipping around for the sake of it or just to share some info that doesn't change very frequently is incredibly annoying. Throw a background behind it (which of course you don't have to do) and to me it just makes my eyes hurt and looks chaotic.
The tiles themselves look primitive to me with their flatness. Yes you can resize and move them around, but they are essentially just flat squares/rectangles with plain colors (and only 1 color) and I find it difficult to organize them in a way that looks eye pleasing to me and that creates a little space. I much prefer the way the android screen is with nice looking icons and lots of space with nothing flashing around unless I want it to.
I have a feeling that the user interface even more than a lack of every app is a lot of why WP has not been very successful.
The functioning of the OS is nice. It is fast and in my experience works well. The hardware seems to be good on these phones as well - good call quality, sound, okay camera etc. It just imo does not "look good", its boxy and plain, and can be distracting with the tile animations and hard to organize. Even just out of the box its just tons of boxy tiles of varying sizes flashing and to me comes off as disorganized and confusing. Instead of a simple screen to make calls/emails/contacts etc, it's just everything all over the place that you then have to mess around with it . Just as an additional note, I also do not like the way Windows 8 or 10 looks on the pc and use classic start to make it look and behave the way earlier versions of windows did - which is organized, logical, simple and better looking than the flat squares of the metro screen.
Anyway, many of the android devices that I have tried in the WP price range, have not been good devices and I'm not really a google fan as well so it's not all great on that side, but I am keeping my eyes out for a decent android device that is not too expensive. Apple devices are just too expensive. I have also read the call quality on them is not so hot.
I think if M made a nice looking organized gui similar to android or ios with nice looking "live" icons (that could be shut on or off) that go on top of a background with the same windows functioning - a speedy os that works great - they would be unstoppable.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram