Do you have any concrete substantial examples to back any of those vague statements?!
I think if you look at the objective reviews of the Lumia 1520's camera you would see it goes toe to toe with many "high end" phones. By which I mean it is BETTER than just about all of them. Also I haven't seen a single 6" phone put out by anyone with the gorgeous build quality of the Lumia 1520. I also don't see anyone with a track record of putting out phones with built in GPS with downloadable maps for the entire planet.
I use HERE Drive, Maps, and Transit all the time. I totally agree there is an app gap. There is no epcrates and no app for my regional bank. There are a lot of niche apps missing. But as far as functionality my girlfriend has to either pay through the nose for apps to do what my 1520 does right out of the box or she is simply SOL if she wants a bigger screen on an iphone or more control of her camera. I remeber my old Lumia 900 even had LTE way before she had an iphone with LTE. I was like all those apps are great but if your internet is moving at a snail's pace what good are they? Windows Phone gets no respect. HERE Drive and transit are incredibly useful apps. They are far more useful to me for business and pleasure than a billion social media apps.
It is astonishing to me that when the Lumia 900 was launched they didn't say FREE GLOBAL DOWNLOADABLE MAPS OFFLINE GPS and LTE. On road trips my phone was so much more useful than my girlfriend's. I loved watching streaming movies on the highway while she just looked sad.
I have mentioned this endless times in this very website but if you insist and have so many doubts i feel myself compelled to let you know that:
- Lacks keyboard inputs for some languages
- There isn't one single app able to allow you to aggregate your mails in one single app. You can do in a way that is not suitable for work and without differentiation between mailboxes in the same way Android allows you to do with third party apps (like K9, which allows for different colors, different sounds, different led colours...oh forgot...WP don't have leds so you need SOUND also where in theory you wouldn't need..or at best vibration)
- Microsoft OFFICE won't open password protected files. Only in 8.1 allows you to open files from SD. In 8 it wouldn't allow you
- File management, plainly sucks (there isn't any other technical description for the level of mediocrity it offers)
- Multitasking sucks, too. There is no way to split screen and do two things at the same time. 6" inches wasted in a 1520 (which incidentally i own).
- TILES: You have 3 rows; you can't extend tiles for 3 rows; you can't resize tiles at your will; tiles are more than icons, less than widgets. They are rotating pics with limited interaction.
- IE 11: Doesn't share with Pocket, Instapaper, doesn't have https out of the box, doesn't haev ad blocking, script blocking, (unlike Firefox mobile). It behaves funny in many situations. I am using Surfy and Maxthon.
- No encryption at all. No security apart the password
- MAPS: Maybe they work for you. They don't for me in Asia. A) they lack a lot of POIs Google offers; public transit in GMAPS are clickable, a list of buses shows up and you can plan a trip. BING Maps not only don't have clickable public transports but they even miss some metro lines or stops. They miss tons of places.
- Bing Translator is designed by Mr Bean. It offers Chinese translation but doesn't offer romanized translation of characters. This means that if you're looking forward to understand something or read something it's utterly useless. This worsens as apparently Microsoft only supports Simplified Chinese and forgot Taiwan, Hong Kong and a few hundred millions of users who don't use simplified Chinese but Traditional. However, they came up with Cortana, which in US-Centric websites is the best thing, while in other regions is a no-go a priori due to privacy issues. The life of Cortana for many users doesn't go beyond one week of tests then ends up deactivated (Like Google Now). Microsoft doesn't seem to understand a huge share of users.
- Bing News: gives you the news it wants. Won't allow you to choose your owns. Also it's region depending. The antithesis of usefulness if you keep 170/ 200 RSS on check, in multiple languages.
- Apps/Market: 90% of apps are bad copies of the originals, often badly implemented and even have a price tag on it. So what comes for free on Android comes paid on WP with subpar quality. Calendars, note taking apps, News aggregators (i have bought 3, tested them all. The only one worth mentioning is Next Reader which is a very good app, in recent times)
- Notification centre: Android offers a scrollable one with much more than 4/5 icons...those icons can be moved around as you wish without need to enter a menu.
- Lack of a lot of apps: I miss good translating/language apps (Pleco, Hanping, Dictionaries of various type, not even CE DICT is available).
- Sharing functions: In Android every app has a long list of apps you can share of apps you can share from any other app. This includes tons of third party apps. I click on a pic to share, and i am offered FB, Twitter (which i don't use), then Line, IM+, IMO, Mail etc. WP offers you two peanuts at best. So what i need to do, often is copy paste on word or one note and save stuff in that way. THEN, share it with other apps. That's how good WP is for sharing. Again, MR Bean at work.
Photocamera? Yes it's good, the best of them all..but with 700 euros (the cost of the phone unlocked ) i buy a good DSLR.
Screen: It's the best of them all for me. However due to OS limitations all that real estate is under exploited
You can download those maps: However they are unreliable and inaccurate. that makes them useless. Wait for Microsoft to admit it.
I need my phone to work, not to take pictures. To work i need interoperability between apps, i need good apps (which i pay for); i need integrated solutions on a solid platform and i need encryption. WP has none of all this.
Are my statements less vague? Do i need to go on?
The OS is mediocre. Simple as that. It's not a matter of marketing. You can market something that's good and people don't understand. WP is only partly misunderstood. The rest is due to A) its shortcomings and B) Microsoft slowliness in tackling them.
You and I can spend the whole life arguing but while you seem satisfied, i am deeply frustrated. Checking at the sales, i am not alone.