How can Windows Phone 10 make a splash with consumers?

[Jazmac]

Performance in WP is horrible. The "loading.." screen is frequently seen in low end devices.
The launcher is one of the causes of the awful performance. Live tiles take CPU, GPU and power. A grid of icons would be more efficient.
Live tiles are a failure in phones because the battery constraint make impossible to update the information often, tiles are most of the time showing stale data. Because of the space constraint the text in the tiles is directly over the background image, so It's hard to read. Tiles introduce usability problems, It's difficult to find the apps if the images are always changing and the text is hard to read.

Universal apps won't help with snapchat, bank apps and many others. In fact, It could take years before Universal apps have any impact in the store.

It's impossible to differentiate a product with hardware, It's a commoditized good. OEMs need other means to differentiate their products or they won't adopt the platform.

....

How much did you pay for your Windows phone and would you consider selling it?

 

[tiziano27]

How much did you pay for your Windows phone and would you consider selling it?

OK... something tells me that you didn't like what I wrote, and you have a suggestion for me.

I've bought 3 WPs, 920, 520 and 720, the 520 died. I wouldn't sell them, not enough money to bother.

 

[Nicholas Maguire]

WP would have better performance, longer battery life, a great UI, most of the popular apps, Microsoft services, and any innovation that Microsoft could built on top of that strong foundation.

I think It's a mistake to differentiate the product with a weird UI, specially if the target market is the low-end. Besides, Microsoft could still use the traditional Live Tile launcher in some devices or provide it as a download from the store, for the fans, thanks to the flexibility of customization.

Dude, it's already been proven that Windows Phone is more battery efficient than Android, the live tiles make no difference. Look at the HTC One M8. The same hardware running Windows and Android. The battery of the Windows version lasts longer. We love the live tiles; you're obviously not a Windows Phone fan. The tiles ARE Windows Phones. Without the tiles, Windows Phone isn't Windows Phone.

 

[Legoboyii]

Live tiles that don't work properly shouldn't be the reason to buy the product.
I think WP would sell more with a grid of icons. Specially in the low-end segment, the only segment in which the platform is competitive.

This app needs a dislike/thumbs down button.
You've earned your first double thumbs down. Grats

One of the major reasons I picked Windows was BECAUSE of the tiles. If it had icons I'd probably just end up buying a dumb phone because no other phone OS appeals to me in the least.

 

[hotphil]

They need to leverage some of what they've got:

• Office
• OneDrive
• Xbox and Xbox Music/Video
• Skype
• Nokia
• Band ecosystem

Sadly, when the MS board have review meetings, I imagine they go a bit like this:

• ​Office - we've concentrated on making the services better on all platforms other than our own - High Five, man!
• OneDrive - we've still not got this syncing thing sorted. Or introduced any of the features similar offerings have. Time for a pay rise chaps?
• Xbox and Xbox Music/Video. Have we managed to totally tank them yet? Cool, let's move on!
• Skype - if only we had some way of having some kind of cool cross-platform IM service. While we're thinking about that, let's kill MSN Messenger.
• Nokia - Didn't we buy the world's best handset maker? With the best smartphone camera tech? Yep. What happened to those guys? Anyone heard from them recently?
• Band ecosystem - Weren't we going to open up that platform to other manufacturers? Has the phone rung yet?

There's just no killer reason to have a Windows Phone. With even MS concentrating on other platforms, it's unlikely to get better.

For me, I'd want better integration with MS devices, decent (working) music/audio performance, excellent camera, qwerty slider, massive battery life (even if it means an end to the quest for thinnest, most fragile handset everyone seems to be on), USB 3 file transfer sync. Oh, and maybe available outside the US.
That list is probably pretty niche, and won't happen, but I can dream.

 

[tiziano27]

Dude, it's already been proven that Windows Phone is more battery efficient than Android, the live tiles make no difference. Look at the HTC One M8. The same hardware running Windows and Android. The battery of the Windows version lasts longer. We love the live tiles; you're obviously not a Windows Phone fan. The tiles ARE Windows Phones. Without the tiles, Windows Phone isn't Windows Phone.

Yes, WP has better performance and battery life, but it would be slightly better without the dysfunctional live tiles.

I don't love tiles on the phone, I kind of hate them, in fact I kind of hate Metro, the typography, the monochrome UI, the menus at the bottom.. but I do love to everything else about WP, with the exception of the lack of apps, the setting page and Nokia's fat hardware.

Windows never had live tiles before. 25 years of success without any live tile, then they add live tiles and everything starts going wrong.

 

[Praxius]

Live tiles that don't work properly shouldn't be the reason to buy the product.
I think WP would sell more with a grid of icons. Specially in the low-end segment, the only segment in which the platform is competitive.

They work perfectly fine. They work perfectly fine of my 930, my wife's 1320, her mom's 630 and her older 625 which I now have as a tinker device, my co-worker's 1020 and they work perfectly fine on my old Lumia 800 which is running 7.8.... They worked perfectly fine on 7.5 too.

If you keep getting load screens and tiles not updating often, it's not the device that's the problem. The problem is with you not knowing how to optimize your background tasks, notifications and apps you leave running in the background which you often forget to turn off.

I'd suspect you're one of those type of people who forget that they have dozens of tabs still active in Internet Explorer or that you have just about every app on your phone having all their background tasks and notifications turned on with vibrate and every bell and whistle sucking up what little resources your budget phone has.

Then you complain that your budget phone and the OS sucks because your battery drains so fast and that everything you do is so slow.

And the previous complaint about tiles flipping so that you don't know what app it is until it flips around again?

Are you that forgetful that you don't remember which apps you installed and which ones you manually positioned on your Start Screen? Or are you that impatient that you can't wait the 5 seconds for the tile to flip back around to remember what app it was?

Solution?

Go into that App's settings and disable all Toast Notifications.

And like the wave of a magical wand, your tiles stop flipping around and remain like those plain, boring, static icons you admire so much from Android and Apple.

Turn off all the extra features, all the toast notifications, all the background tasks.... Make sure you properly close all apps and tabs and suddenly your low budget phone will not only work and look as you wish, but you will also see your battery life last longer and many functions load and run faster.

Less things for the CPU and RAM to do equals a smoother system with quicker reaction time.... Go figure.

Now, if your argument at this point is a deflection along the lines of "well my budget phone shouldn't have to turn all of that off to have a good battery life and run decent without constant loading screens."

My response is this:

You got a budget phone. If you want a phone that can do all the things a mid range or high end phone can do and do just as snappy, then you should have bought a mid/high range phone.

You get what you pay for.

 

[Praxius]

Yes, WP has better performance and battery life, but it would be slightly better without the dysfunctional live tiles.

I don't love tiles on the phone, I kind of hate them, in fact I kind of hate Metro, the typography, the monochrome UI, the menus at the bottom.. but I do love to everything else about WP, with the exception of the lack of apps, the setting page and Nokia's fat hardware.

Windows never had live tiles before. 25 years of success without any live tile, then they add live tiles and everything starts going wrong.

So you DO love Windows Phone, except pretty much everything about it.

You don't like the battery life despite being one of the best out there, You don't like the live tiles, you don't like the UI, you don't like the settings, you don't like the menus at the bottom for easier access, you don't like the typography, you don't like the lack of apps, you don't like the hardware, you don't like the performance....

Yet you love Windows Phone and bought multiple Lumias despite hating everything about them that makes them WP.

You first complain that the battery life and performance is crap and then switch and say they're both good but could be better.

I've seen better trolls in debate forums about fairy tale trolls who demand tolls while standing by polls near holes.

 

[Jazmac]

This thread can't be too far from the Masterlock since its turned from a reasonable question to yet another android infection from those that cannot decide how to move on from here. I could see if you were forced to use a Windows phone. You choose it. Some could say it chose you but that's another story. And its weird A argument since Windows phone had live tiles since its inception.

3 phones deep and you never liked them? It sounds like another buyers remorse story to me.

 

[runamuck83]

Can we get back to constructive feedback on ways that MS could make Windows 10 phones a splash with consumers? I don't really care about Android nor did I ask anything about it. Saying "make it like Android" isn't really a satisfactory response in my opinion.

 

[Legoboyii]

Can we get back to constructive feedback on ways that MS could make Windows 10 phones a splash with consumers? I don't really care about Android nor did I ask anything about it. Saying "make it like Android" isn't really a satisfactory response in my opinion.

Easy: death to the hamburger menu, bring back hubs and original people hub, stay unique, MixView tiles, make the settings app more "Metro," native option to close music playback (like the Stop Music apps), better Music and Video apps, rebuild Skype from the ground up to improve performance, more features, more emojiis, maybe customize the keyboard, auto update meta data for music files and option to manually alter the data with a file explorer, attachable IR blaster??? I'd love to have that, would pave the way for universal remote apps

About all I can think of for now.

 

[nallWhite]

Easy: death to the hamburger menu, bring back hubs and original people hub, stay unique, MixView tiles, make the settings app more "Metro," native option to close music playback (like the Stop Music apps), better Music and Video apps, rebuild Skype from the ground up to improve performance, more features, more emojiis, maybe customize the keyboard, auto update meta data for music files and option to manually alter the data with a file explorer, attachable IR blaster??? I'd love to have that, would pave the way for universal remote apps

About all I can think of for now.

All of that and get Starbucks to make an app