I may never use a Windows Phone again

Last month, I had to exchange my iPhone 6 with my wife’s Microsoft Lumia 640. For past three weeks, I have been using this Windows Phone as my primary phone. Out of these three weeks, I used Windows 10 Mobile beta OS for a week. How was the experience? Was it good? Was it better than the experience with Windows Phone 7? Read On!

Even to this day, I feel mesmerized by the beauty of the start screen of Windows Phone operating system. It is so subtle and clean! My wife got the phone in the month of April’15. Since then, till the day I took the phone from her, the phone was never reset, the phone never showed any kind of lag. The first time the phone was reset, it was to install Windows 10 Mobile OS. Given that the phone has just a gigabyte of RAM and is powered by entry level chip, this is an amazing feat. Imagine an Android smartphone powered by Snapdragon 400, running without any reset for 10 months. I am absolutely sure that it will lag like anything.

The stock applications are perfect too. The stock keyboard is among the best ones out there, better than the stock keyboards on droids and iOS. The phone application, contact app, messaging app and the email app are all very well designed. The UI is nimble and very easy on eyes. I still love twitter and Facebook updates from my contacts in ‘People’ application. I can quickly check what is going on without going to two different applications. The calendar application is perfect too. In fact, this is the first time in years that I started actively using calendar application on phone to schedule tasks. Then comes the Microsoft’s business suite of applications like Office, OneDrive, OneNote and I love them. I am using Office 365 subscription which makes these apps much more powerful. And this is where the good things stop.

Bing Maps came out more than 5 years ago and still is nowhere close to the functionality provided by Google Maps. I miss ‘traffic view’ big time. Yes, it is there in Bing maps but turning it on barely shows anything. The traffic detail is showed only for a few roads in Bangalore and that too is inconsistent. Every day, in the evening, my start time from office depends on how the traffic is and now, thanks to the useless Bing Maps, I have to open Google Maps on my laptop, check and then leave. Once in a while it works and even then, it is like bits and pieces of information. Searching for a place and navigation works only when you have a strong Internet connection else it takes eternity.

Microsoft says that most of the ‘top applications’ on Android and iOS are now available on Windows Phone. The problem is that many of them still are not and most of them are nothing but poor ports. Very few applications are designed from scratch for Windows Phone and those applications work well. The worst part is that most of the applications that I use are either not available for WP or are bad ports from Android/iOS

• Amazon Kindle : really painful to use. So bad that some pages shows blank (missing few lines at the bottom)
• Amazon App : lot of space wasted. Everything feels like ‘zoomed in’
• BMS : very very ugly!
• Buffer : crashes, hard to use
• Facebook : super ugly, super slow and feels like antique application.
• Twitter : same as above.
• Zomato : material UI, seriously?
• YouTube : its just a pointer to a web page, takes you to Internet Explorer
• redBus : This is how a Windows Phone app should be. Very good use of space and very clean UI.
• Makemytrip : looks like an iOS port. Ugly looking and unintuitive UI

A lot was said about closing the application gap but in reality, the gap is getting wider and wider. Its even worse if you consider gaming on mobile phone. The best thing about gaming on Windows Phone is Xbox application that shows your Xbox gaming statistics and game details. Some may say that with Windows 10, the things will change. I did try Windows 10 and I will discuss about that later in this article. Such is the quality of the application ecosystem that I even though of selling this phone and getting an Android but given that I only have to use this for just another month or two, I decided to live with it.

Major changes in Windows 10 Mobile:

• Home screen wallpaper displayed behind translucent tiles
• Expand Notifications, actionable notifications
• More toggles in action center
• Notification sync
• Continuum (selected devices only)
• Universal apps
• Smart dialing
• New Edge browser
• New look application drawer (still the same vertical stack of apps)

If you take a look at iOS 7 that was primary OS version for Apple in 2014 and at iOS 9, which is available today, the difference is massive. The same goes with Android. Marshmallow released in late 2015 is much superior to KitKat that was used back in 2014. The problem with Windows Phone is Windows Phone. Countless experts say that Microsoft has been painfully slow in evolving Windows Phone OS and they are spot on. You will not find much of a difference between Windows Phone 7 released way back in 2010 and Windows Phone 8.1 available as primary OS today (from a user’s perspective). The  fact that most of the changes done are to the start screen and notification center shows the incompetence of Microsoft.

Windows 10 Mobile

For many many years, I have used various operating systems in beta state (Windows desktop, linux on desktop, Android beta ROMs, iOS beta etc). If I have to rank the OSes based on how stable and smooth the beta versions are, I would rank Windows desktop OS at the top and Windows 10 Mobile at rock bottom. I have never seen such a buggy operating system. No wonder why Microsoft keeps on postponing the release date. Internet Explorer Edge is the worst of all things on Windows 10 Mobile. Sometimes, it shows blank page, sometimes, I hangs and crashes. The worst thing is that even Microsoft’s own Office 365 pages wont load. If I try to open navigation from Zomato application, the maps app thinks that I am trying to go from the restaurant to my current locations and once I start driving, it starts saying ‘take a u turn, take a u turn’. Ability to take a photo and upload the same from whatsapp and telegram is broken and everytime, I need to take a photo, go to images app, click on share, select the application and then share. Battery life went for a toss, Cortana wouldn’t understand a thing what I say (never had any issues with Siri or Google No). Maps wont load properly, navigation was broken (keeps on trying to load).

In short, that one week that I used Windows 10 Mobile made me hate Windows 10 Mobile OS so much that I thought of removing all the Windows Phone devices from out Smartphone Recommendation List. It was worse than those days when my Galaxy S3 would lag like hell. After grueling week with Windows 10 Mobile, I had decided to go back to Windows 8.1 and now, life feels a bit less painful.

Dear Microsoft. Please stop working on Windows 10 Mobile. Instead, design a 6″ or 7″ large phone with Windows 10 Desktop OS and name it Windows Phone. This is the only way you can get a phone without buggy software.

Why Microsoft, Why?

When startups are able to innovate so much in software side, why can’t you show some real innovation and speed up the process? You have unlimited resources at your disposal, a limited number of devices to push the OS to and yet, you could not deliver in five years! If planned well, you would have had enough time to release a spectacular update and even design truck loads of applications that would reduce the application gap. I was a big fan of Windows Phone OS and Windows desktop OS. I even thought of getting rid of my Mac Mini if you played the Windows 10 Mobile card right. But now, I have decided to remove Windows 10 from my desktop too. There is no point in using a Windows desktop OS when it is nowhere close to the continuity that Apple provides with iOS and OS X. Talk all fancy about Continuum, about unified apps but as long as you cannot right the OS, there is no point in talking about any of these cliché` features.

RIP Windows Phone! Once I go back to iOS, I will never see you again!

Note : If you are using a Windows Phone and looking for a list of good applications, check out our recommended application list (list1 and list2) for Windows Phone