Windows Phone - More More and More - The Something Awful Forums

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Inspect Your Gadgets > Windows Phone - More More and More

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

Venusy posted:

Looks like Lumia Cyan with the final version of WP8.1 is starting to roll out. Still no word on Cortana in the UK other than vague statements indicating it'd be before the end of July.

Not even 'vague statements' for Canada. No worries MS, you've got time to catch up - after all, it's the fastest rising smartphone platform!

# ¿ Jul 15, 2014 16:06

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 23:34

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

Drastic Actions posted:

I'm still working on Awful Music, and I think I found a bug with BackgroundMediaPlayer. When you transition tracks, it will play a blip of the first few milliseconds of audio from the previous track. No matter what I do (use files, stream as a media source), it never goes away. It does not happen if you skip tracks though, only if you let it switch on its own.

The XboxMusic app has demonstrated that since the WP 8.1 preview, so it's been around for a while.

# ¿ Jul 15, 2014 16:08

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

LentThem posted:

Fuuuuck I hope mixradio will be okay

As The Verge reports, Nokia's popular MixRadio music streaming service (formerly Nokia Music) looks set to be divested from Microsoft's software portfolio.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2014 06:05

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

Stick100 posted:

With as good as apps have gotten I'm not sure what advantage MS or users get from having their own mobile OS as opposed to well integrated apps and services. MS will probably skin Android with Xamarian + Visual studio (please do) or just shut WP down in 18 months.

In order to get access to the Play store you have to use Google's services. There is little chance of MS's services breaking into any significant share of your Android userbase - why would you choose them over Google's stock offerings which will be better integrated (and like Google Now, actually loving available outside the US)?

And of course iOS will have the iCloud integration. MS keeps Windows Phone around because their services really don't stand much of a chance on competing platforms that already come with their own cloud solutions OOTB.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2014 18:55

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

Edward IV posted:

Well, the 3D touch phone got axed.
http://www.wpcentral.com/microsoft-kills-3d-touch-windows-phone-codenamed-mclaren

I suppose that shouldn't have come as a surprise. It's a feature that'll only be available on a single high end device that not many people would buy giving developers less of an incentive to utilize it. If it was cheap enough to implement on even low end devices, it could have stood a better chance. Oh well.

It could also - like Kinect - just not have actually worked that well in actual usage (even if it got that far).

Refusing to slather interface gimicks (ala Samsung) on your platform is hardly the reason WP isn't breaking into the mainstream. We know the only way for WP to gain marketshare right now - offer extremely cheap phones that work well ankd offer reasonable compromises for their price. It's no surprise that the only significant traction WP has had was with the 520, as it had little competition in its price range at the time - it wasn't a great phone, but for it price it hit the mark in terms of what it offered for that better than any other phone within that range at the time.

So as expected, Android has continued to improve where it's not completely poo poo on low-end devices, and with MotoG/MoteE, they're competitive in price while offering equal to superior hardware.

In the interim we got WP 8.1 which has improved things on the software front (largely) and the app situation has improved, but after a year of the 520 and Android offers catching up in hardware...we get the 630/635. They are not the 520 replacement by a long shot in terms of standing out from a price/performance/features perpsective, and with things like removing the camera button and ambient light sensor that are regressions, they're less agressive now when they actually need to be more aggressive with the new competition in this area.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2014 19:10

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

Maneki Neko posted:

I have a hard time seeing how this isn't fair criticism, this is an experience that Microsoft owns end to end now. Are you saying that Cortana making suggestions that you can't actually do anything with is an acceptable user experience?

It's a completely legitimate critique. Here Maps is the default mapping app on Nokia phones, meaning "Windows Phone". Even if MS never bought out Nokia, to not have proper integration with the map app that is the default on the oem that ships 95% of your phones just indicates a laughable lack of foresight. It's not as if 8.1 was a quick release ffs, they had plenty of time to foresee issues like this.

# ¿ Jul 19, 2014 00:17

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

So less internal ram, slightly heaver, worse battery life, same ram, now non-IPS LCD (could it actually get worse?) than the 520

Hell of an upgrade.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2014 11:47

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

Drastic Actions posted:

EDIT: Better performance of the Xbox music app is nice too I guess, but I'm hoping things like the new live tile support and "better performance in areas like app load and list scrolling" mean new and better APIs for all of us, rather than special poo poo just for Xbox music.

That would be my expecation - requiring an OS update to get a significant (?) performance update with Xbox Music would seem to indicate they're fixing up the API's/more low-level stuff which seems to be the blocker in Xbox music and other apps.

We'll see. I can barely notice a difference between the app now and the first release with the DP, despite "Performance Enhancements" being listed as a major point for the past 4-5 releases.

# ¿ Jul 31, 2014 15:18

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

G-III posted:

Got the update. Folders work well and is great replacement for Nokia App Folders. XBox Music is still a flaming pile of garbage that still takes up to 10 seconds to load songs stored locally on the phone and still no gapless playback.

It's like Microsoft doesn't even give a poo poo anymore.

Apparently the latest OS update will work in part with another Xbox music update coming later that will give it the speed boost, Update 1 alone won't deliver it itself.

So I'm sure unlike the other 10 updates this one will really, really deliver. Really.

# ¿ Aug 7, 2014 13:15

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

EdEddnEddy posted:

Thinking back to when Windows Mobile had a lot of the market share before iOS even became a big player, if they would have just ReSkinned Windows Mobile 7, and ran it on the hardware that had just started to roll out with the like of the HD2 and such, it could have maintained a presence and had nearly all the features Android has now.

That's exactly what Windows 6.5 (I assume you meant Windows Mobile 6, not 7) was - a basic reskinning. And it was loving awful, because the underlying OS & API's had barely changed. So go into settings and especially apps you would be hit with the arachaic Windows 6x interface which focused on pen input. You couldn't bring Windows 6.x into the modern world with just a reskinning. A teardown was necessary, but as usual MS somewhat gets the strategy but fucks up the implementation details so badly that having any sort of "vision" really doesn't matter.

quote:

Instead they did a reboot, that looked good, but was way more limited, then hey, lets Reboot again!

Dumbest thing they did during that reboot was to focus almost entirely on consumer needs and completely ignore the enterprise.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2014 17:21

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

Maneki Neko posted:

I really like the 635, but yeah, an ambient light sensor and an LED on the back are things I would've been willing to pay more for.

I'm not entirely sure where the battery life complaints I've seen in reviews came from, it has been light years better than my poor Lumia 920, even in big convention centers where things usually suck.

My value carrier started offering the 635, and due to the cost for me basically amounting to paying off the last $50 from my 520's tab-plan, plus living with a heavily cracked screen for the better part of 3 months I decided I'll give WP yet another shot (well as long as I barely have to outlay over $100, it was $150 outright on this carrier).

Anyways, for those coming from a 520 (warning: bunch o words)

Gotta say with keeping budget expectations in mind, I'm actually quite happy with it, more so than I thought I would. Yeah, the lack of an ambient light sensor is a weird cost cutting measure and I bitched about that bizarre decision, but in real-world use it's a minor inconvenience IME. To start, the screen is significantly better than the 520's, in black levels and massively better sunlight readability. With sunglasses on and in direct sunlight, at the high brightness setting it's completely readable - the 520's screen was invisible by comparison. In general outdoors it's more readable at medium brightness than the 520's at high, and I pretty much leave it at medium 80% of the time so I'm not changing it that much. If I do, it's because I'm about to do more on the phone than just switch tracks or check email, so the extra 2 seconds to swipe down and tap the brightness setting a couple of times isn't much of a bother. It helps that the 520's automatic setting set the brightness way, way too low in lower ambient light situations and at least in mine was super-sensitive, so just changing the angle of the phone in a darkened room would cause it to constantly adjust, so I was often manually changing the brightness regardless. Colours are well saturated, and the lower resolution (at least outside of the web where it can be noticeable in font rendering) doesn't seem to stand out as being a limiting factor in terms of clarity for the screen size.

I don't know if it was something with my 520, but one area that's also significantly improved is the time for GPS to poinpoint my location - my 520 could take 10+ secs often. Here, it's basically instant - 1-2 secs. Getting directions now is almost an order of magnitude speedup.

Performance-wise, you do definitely notice the CPU upgrade. There's still a number of times you're looking at "Resuming..." for a couple of secs when switching amongst a variety of apps so yeah, 1 GB would have helped. But overall, when I'm going back and forth to a $600 device like the iPhone5S or MotoX that I use here for testing, it's not the sea-change in terms of performance delta that would be noticed in certain areas as with the 520. Apps load quickly, animation is flawless, phone is responsive - you just don't get that there's a massive difference in performance, at least what you would expect for a device that costs ~$500 more.

One area where the CPU really seemed to help is with Xbox Music. You still shouldn't need a loving quad-core CPU to display 4 albums from an artist in under 4 secs, but I had the latest version with the most recent dev preview on my 520 as well, and it's definitely far better with the 635. Barely any delay at all now performing most tasks. Oddly enough the longest wait is resuming the app, which I noticed was getting lengthier in the past few updates on the 520 as well, when they had it down quickly a few updates prior. Surprisingly as well have not that that static burst of the previous track once (using the same SD card that was in my 520) - other still have going by the uservoice threads though, so maybe it's a combination firmware/OS issue or I've just been lucky.

Camera is definitely improved, albeit still firmly in the "serviceable" category of course. Decent amount of contrast boost applied to low-light photos so the lack of flash doesn't render it completely useless in poor lighting conditions as it did with the 520. Again don't expect much here, but I do notice a decent improvement.

Battery life is pretty solid in my short testing. Over the past 2 days it was completely off for roughly 3 1/2 hours as I saw two flicks, but after 2+ solid days since charging I was sitting at 27% battery this morning. Only feature disabled was Wifi Sense, otherwise all features enabled at all times - location, wifi, pedometer (which is nice with the Bing Health & Fitness app). Not heavy use mind you by any means, about 1 & 1/2 hours of internet sharing with my iPad, ~4 hours of music playing, browsing the news app at transit stops, just a few voicemails/SMS's checked but no talk - but my 520 by comparison would have been dead a day earlier easily.

Only 2 downsides:

1) No super-sensitive screen like on the 520. I walk everywhere and still do in bitterly cold weather, so I took advantage of this with the 520 often using gloves, so this will be annoying as the weather gets colder. I normally just used this to skip music tracks the majority of the time, so the obvious "solution" would be to just have headphones with track/volume control. The reason I don't use those is because...

2) No equalizer control, still. FFS, why Nokia/MS consider basic tonal control an "upsell" is beyond me. I have a pair of cheap Sony earbuds that hit the mix with treble/bass just right so it doesn't really affect music quality with those, but every earbud/mic combo sounds like a tin can when I can easily compensate on other phones - as you could with any $30 MP3 player from years past. Completely artificial limitation, just dumb.

Aside from that, pretty much solves the majority of annoyances I had with the 520. Barring the app selection meets your needs, it actually gives me a better first impression relative to the price than the 520 did, at least at launch prices.

Happy_Misanthrope fucked around with this message at 17:42 on Aug 31, 2014

# ¿ Aug 31, 2014 15:55

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

SMERSH Mouth posted:

And even though the animations can get a bit choppy and applications that lose focus for a while often get reset, the overall design philosophy of the GUI is pleasant, and the OS is easy to use.

Curious as to where you're actually seeing this. "Choppy animation" is something I rarely saw even on the 520.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2014 07:42

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

vigorous sodomy posted:

Bought a Lumia 635 on a lark from T Mobile and using it is like when I went from a dumb phone to an iPhone. This is so different I feel all stupid and intimidated. Are these phones totally rad?

# ¿ Sep 10, 2014 06:41

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

SMERSH Mouth posted:

And speaking of bugs, today I got to enjoy having all media playback fail until reboot. Maybe I should try the WP equivalent of setting up the iPhone as new in iTunes, because this is getting s little ridiculous.

The behaviour you're seeing is a little odd, really. I can relate to seeing "Resuming..." far more than I'd like (it's odd how it's always with certain apps but not with others, no surprise Xbox Music is one of the worst offenders) but constant crashing and jerky animation is certainly not my experience, not on my 520 either. Flixter has always been a little unstable, but that's about it. It's possible there could be something up with your phone.

Bear in mind I'm running dev preview 8.1 update 1, did that first thing when I got my 635.

# ¿ Sep 11, 2014 06:27

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Inspect Your Gadgets > Windows Phone - I think I'm finally getting to the point where I regret the purchase

# ¿ Oct 8, 2014 05:57

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

benitocereno posted:

Had a "critical update" on my HTC 8X (developer preview program) this morning that seems to have fixed this weird delay issue. Maybe I'm crazy, but seems like they actually resolved it . Can anyone else confirm?

Certainly not on my 635. Using the Tetra lockscreen, unlocking it still takes 2-3 seconds after the update. Not really usable.

# ¿ Oct 25, 2014 03:04

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

Biggie Shorty posted:

Edit: aaaand for some reason i have a shitload of duplicate songs...great...

Holy gently caress they still haven't fixed this. It's literally been years.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2014 14:27

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

soapgish posted:

Android is convoluted and Apple is for children.

Windows Phone fans, ladies and gents.

# ¿ Dec 16, 2014 23:09

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

RVProfootballer posted:

I know what you're thinking, but somehow I doubt thinking "everyone that liked our platform has left" is going to be something that spurs lots of investment and development

It may spur some staffing changes, Win8 certainly did. You know, that's why the WP team now works on...er never mind

# ¿ Dec 16, 2014 23:33

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

Pipski posted:

Sodding hell. Is there really no app I can use to edit / create a docx saved to OneDrive, other than the utterly useless default one? I want to be able to set indents, change fonts, things like that. How does WP Office not include a word processor? How are there no 3rd party apps that can do it? I must be missing something. If not, I'm flogging this 930 straight after New Year. I've had enough of this nonsense.

You want a better Word experience...get an iPhone - really. Office on WP is awful compared to iOS/Android currently.

Of course, this is supposed to improve with W10 when it becomes "Windows Mobile" (again), but we've been down the "We're getting the underpinnings sorted out, then the spice will flow" road before. Perpetual catch-up.

# ¿ Dec 24, 2014 14:22

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

Took advantage of the $50 Xbox music offer during the daily deals last week...and almost regretting it.

Cripes, with all the grief the Xbox music app on the phone gets, the 8.1 app is something else. It's really astonishing how poor designed and buggy these apps are, I really have to wonder if the team has ever used a music player before.

# ¿ Dec 28, 2014 07:32

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

Cybernetic Vermin posted:

Time did pass the entire concept by a bit, but the failure to parlay the Zune stuff into a cornerstone of the new phone offering was a boneheaded mistake to make. As it happens they also later rather trashed a lot of what was good about their first try at a phone platform as well, so I guess having the decent parts of Zune survive both revamps would have been too much to expect.

I'm on Spotify and pretty OK with the mobile situation myself these days, so I have very little personal investment in that, but it is hard not to recognize it as a series of messups anyway. I rather hope that the Zune team got good positions in other divisions, as they quite clearly knew what they were doing despite fighting an almost impossible fight at the time.

Pretty much every key figure involved in the Zune (and the Xbox 360) left MS quite a while ago as I recall.

# ¿ Dec 28, 2014 18:59

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

Gotta say it's annoying that MS has just now seemingly figured out that even your lowest-tier phone needs 1GB. This was patently obvious a while ago, yet they still brought forth a slew of 512mb devices which are now outmoded in just a few months.

I mean FFS, I get "Loading.." when unlocking the phone with only the shopping list portion of the H&F app running on my 635, even if I've just locked it 20 seconds before.

# ¿ Jan 16, 2015 16:31

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

xylo posted:

Uhhh... We were not the ones pushing for 512. You'll note that this came after 7 GA (tango specifically). Our tango partner was the one that wanted it just to keep BOM costs down for the low tier modules models. This is also the reason for button removals, lack of camera flashes etc

You're right, I've actually already made the mental connection "Lumia=MS", forgetting that my 635 is actually a Nokia device.

On another note, my 635 with Dev Preview 8.1 Update 1 has stopped updating Live Tiles...this is still a thing in WP? Argh.

Happy_Misanthrope fucked around with this message at 00:52 on Jan 17, 2015

# ¿ Jan 17, 2015 00:32

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

WattsvilleBlues posted:

Read this part of a post by Paul Thurrott and made me think:

He's done nothing but (rightly) complain about the state of the Music app on WP for the past 9 months. What's he talking about?

Has he actually been "complaining" about the Music app though? I haven't seen it, rather he eventually just reports what people are saying in general around the web and in his comments, usually after he praises/promotes said product. Basically like his Windows 8 coverage - early on, dismissing the complaints as "whiners" and people just "resistant to change" (you know, like the Win8 thread in SH/SC), then promoting himself as a truth-teller from the start when the failure of it was so laughably obvious and impossible to ignore.

It's really amazing how little actual analysis the guy does, especially in terms of actually reviewing MS products in light of the competition. It's usually just throwaway lines in the middle of an article, such as when he lamented Spotify's march to dominance, despite Xbox Music being a "great" (or some such accolade) service. When the comments filled up with "WTF are you talking about? Xbox Music is awful!", his defense was "Well the Windows Phone Xbox Music app is better than Spotify!". Yeah, got that 2% marketshare segment locked up.

tl/dr: Thurrott is really, really dumb and serves no point in existing

Edit: Hah, he just posted an article on how to use Xbox music to manage your local music, of course not mentioning how absolutely awful it is for this express purpose.

Happy_Misanthrope fucked around with this message at 02:57 on Jan 21, 2015

# ¿ Jan 21, 2015 00:13

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

Jewmanji posted:

You're not alone. In this article http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/21/7869441/windows-10-for-phones-features-hands-on there's a few images of the Messaging app (I believe), both the directory of recent contacts as well as a messaging thread- they both look ghastly. Add to that the fact that there's now a left and right swipe in Outlook to flag and delete e-mails (as opposed to the standard carousel), and it seems like the original design aesthetic is being splintered. Outlook looks like something from the new Google design style.

Actually it looks closer to Ice Cream than Lollipop - those apps look really, really bad. Metro had some issues and the reliance on huge typography was overdone at points, but excising pivot controls, horrible icons and tiny fonts - basically it looks like a cheap Android knock off. Metro needed some pruning but this is taking a chainsaw to the concept.

Cripes MS is laughably schizoid when it comes to design.

# ¿ Jan 22, 2015 06:39

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

Try Hard Pill posted:

I simply adore the Metro interface, I feel it beats Android's and iOS' easily.

Enjoy it while you can.

# ¿ Feb 8, 2015 09:53

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

Thurrot will write poo poo like that then complain that people call him a Windows shill. After all, he said Windows8 was a failure!

He is a bad person

# ¿ Feb 8, 2015 18:26

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

It's stupid to bitch about the horrible UI at this point, after all remember how bad the Windows 8 preview looked compared to the fin-

# ¿ Feb 13, 2015 20:49

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

Jewmanji posted:

What must it be like to be so intimately familiar with something that causes you so much aggravation?

You tell me

Jewmanji posted:

A good percentage of the people I know have recently bought the iPhone 6. Watching them use it, it's hard not to get a tad jealous with how smoothly everything operates. The one thing I always loved about WP from the beginning was how fluid and enjoyable the basic interface was. Ever since 8.1 though, I feel like things have gotten so choppy and unresponsive, it's like I'm using Android from years back. The Podcast App is sometimes unusably frustrating, and even Cortana has a noted delay from the time I click the mic button to hearing the "go ahead and speak" sound, meaning it often takes 3-4 clicks of the button and around 15 seconds of my time (If she gets the command right) to use properly. Similarly, if I'm listening to music, and I try to tap into the Music app from the homescreen by clicking the volume controls and then tapping the artist name to bring me to the Now Playing card, the phone basically shits itself for 3-5 seconds while it swipes it's way through various menus and finally gets me to my desired location.

Between Cortana being sluggish, the Podcast app being downright embarassing, Music still being a shitshow, it makes me really frustrated with the basic functionality of the platform for the first time since its inception. I hope that a new phone and some tweaks bring it back up to buttery-smoothness, because it's that basic usability that makes all of the larger, more-discussed shortcomings over the platform easier to stomach.

Really though, the problem is just not that the changes exhibited so far are idiosyncratic due to the early nature of the builds, it's that the direction they're going towards is seemingly as generic as possible, to the point where I wonder what exactly their selling point with WP will be when the final goal is to basically make it look and operate like Android 3.x.

We're not completely in the dark here, we have a good look at Windows 10 and recent apps on both WP, Windows and Android/iOS demonstrate what their direction is likely going to be, and from all indications the change coming is basically to remove anything unique about the platform from a design & operation perspective in the name of...making it easier to port apps? Being less alienating to new users? Who knows, but then what's the draw for WP, especially when all of MS services/apps will be on Android/iOS, and third party developers already have the other bases covered? This grand universal app future?

It's not like the design of WP is just some bulletpoint on a feature list, really - WP doesn't have much aside from the basic operation of its interface and a low price point to promote it at this point. You remove that one distinctive feature of it, and what's the pull here?

Happy_Misanthrope fucked around with this message at 06:08 on Feb 14, 2015

# ¿ Feb 14, 2015 05:45

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

OldPueblo posted:

I'm going to guess the seamless transition from phone to PC to tablet to TV to wearable, personal and corporate, etc. Not being facetious, I think that's their goal and honestly it's a pretty good one.

It's been their goal for years, the problem is trying to find situations where that's actually compelling (and developers not exactly jumping on board this train hasn't helped).

My argument (and hardly one that's original) has always been that the idea is certainly compelling at first glance, but the cracks become fissures when put into practice largely because the input methods are so distinct between the platforms. There can be cases where actually making it easy to run the same app on a PC/tablet/smartphone ends up being a detriment because it's a case of lowest common denominator - you get an app that isn't suited to each platform. You invariably have to compromise on the native experience for each in some fashion, and we're seeing that with Windows 10 (so far), both on phone and tablet/desktop. WP's thumb-friendly navigation is being reduced for the sake of platform consistency, Surface owners are dismayed at how lovely the tablet experience is with W10 in tablet mode for example - they've basically just reversed the problem. It's extremely difficult to have an app optimized for the distinct environments of a desktop vs a tablet/phone, there are many factors that dictate why an app works better on one vs the other.

What I want to share most amongst my mobile and desktop platforms is data first and foremost, and that's a problem that's largely already solved by the competing platforms, especially iOS and OSX. Hell, they're superior right now in some ways - for example, you can sent txt messages/calls/facetime on your OSX desktop through your iPhone and have them completely in sync. Open and edit the same files in iWork and now Office. Sync your bookmarks, your ebook positions, your media, etc. You get a good degree of synergy, but the desktop experience is distinctly optimized for m&k, and the touch experience optimized for touch. You don't open an iOS 'compatible' app have it display in a different DPI than your desktop and use a shittier font rendering method because it has to prepare for the fact it may be displayed on a tablet and can't use subpixel rendering, for example. Purchasing one app that can be used on all platforms is nice, but then again considering how cheap most mobile apps are and with the subscription model becoming the trend, how much do you really save here?

It's the same chicken/egg problem. In order to make universal apps a compelling argument, you have to have people invested in your mobile platform. Now, it appears one of the most distinctive and compelling (?) features of WP is largely being deprecated...for the sake of universality. I don't know how you sell that potential future as a benefit to someone looking at a mobile ecosystem now or in the immediate future.

Happy_Misanthrope fucked around with this message at 18:11 on Feb 14, 2015

# ¿ Feb 14, 2015 18:04

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

Ok, some small positive news - the MSN apps were updated, and it looks - finally - like at least the step counter live tile is ~~now working~~ to update across a new day without having to launch the drat H&F app. Also the Weather app (albeit I don't use the MSN one) was apparently also fixed to solve the same issue.

"Making Live Tiles work properly" though really shouldn't require months before a patch to fix an essential feature of the platform.

Edit: Nope, step counter tile still doesn't update unless I launch the app.

Happy_Misanthrope fucked around with this message at 02:29 on Feb 15, 2015

# ¿ Feb 14, 2015 18:15

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

Doctor_Fruitbat posted:

Is there any rhyme or reason to the naming conventions of Lumia phones? The 635 appears to be worse overall than both the 535 and the 735 - is there any way of ballparking whether one phone is better than another by name alone?

Nope, they're a mess right now, apparently due to some being largely done by Nokia and others (with 1gb now standard) being more directed by MS once they took over. A potential 640, say with the 535's mem/camera specs but with the better CPU and screen of the 635 would be a great low end model now, but with either the 535 or 635 you make some rather significant compromises either way.

# ¿ Feb 18, 2015 14:46

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

Early price rumors for the 640 were in the range of $300 which would have killed it out of the gate, but at $180 for the LTE and expected ~$150 for the 3G it's actually looking like MS's most competitive mid/budget offering since the 520. Really solid specs and no bizarre omissions like the 635 (all expected sensors).

Obviously not the flagship most want here, but on a pure price/features scale it's actually...impressive? :ohdear:

gently caress, even the name is sensible.

# ¿ Mar 2, 2015 15:59

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

wookieepelt posted:

I get that Microsoft wants to wait until Windows 10 to launch a new flagship, even though I don't agree with them. But they could at least release the new outlook app that everyone has been talking about. That's making me want to get an iPhone now, and not get a new Windows phone.

Don't think it's possible as they're likely writing it as a W10 universal app, wp 8 would be a rewrite.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2015 01:24

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

For those of you pointing to WP's aesthetics as a positive you should probably see how W10 is shaping up :smith:

# ¿ Mar 17, 2015 02:42

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

BonoMan posted:

Desktop or mobile?

Both.

Latest WP leak images available here.

# ¿ Mar 17, 2015 15:42

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

Suspicious Dish posted:

That is what I did. It takes around 2s to navigate into a folder. I realized I forgot to add ID3v2 tags to a file so it showed up wrong on my phone. To fix it, I have to navigate into the thing (2s), delete it (10s), copy in a new file (5s), and then make sure that it's all synced up somehow. That means going into Settings, Storage Sense, SD card, Manage, and wait a minute or two for the Music app to finish rescanning. And then hope that it all worked. And if not, try again a few more times until it sticks. And hope that it notices the change and doesn't just go "Unable to play this song" when clicking on the music.

I cannot figure out how to make a playlist, even using the app or Windows Explorer.

Do you have a subscription to Xbox music? No? Well then you can't sync playlists.

Seriously.

Xbox music is just so...MS.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2015 13:26

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

There was a small update to the music app:

- You can now delete items from the recently played section, which is helpful as most every update has hosed this up and made a mess of it IME.
- In settings, there is a "Sync Now" option, so you can finally force a sync of your music and playlists as opposed to XM updating it whenever the gently caress it wants.

So 2% less lovely now, woop

# ¿ Apr 22, 2015 16:19

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 23:34

Happy_Misanthrope: Aug 3, 2007; "I wanted to kill you, go to your funeral, and anyone who showed up to mourn you, I wanted to kill them too."

Even if you have an Xbox music pass and can sync playlists from the Music app, it's still a clusterfuck (even aside from having to use the 8.1 music app).

One of the problems that's always existed with the XB Music app on 8.1 is that it would try and 'match' the music from your collection with what exists in XB Music, except that it usually did a horrible job. You would frequently have completely mismatched albums/album art, duplicate tracks and albums , and for the tracks that it coudl match, some had licensing restrictions such as they couldn't be downloaded to be played offline, or their license would suddenly be revoked. This is even separate from the 'other' duplicate track problem with Windows Phone 8.0 - that was a constant music DB corruption issue that took about a year to fix (for most).

This was compounded by the fact that the Music app would prioritize the Xbox Music version of your collection (even if you didn't have an active XB Music pass subscription), so say if you viewed a particular artist, the only version of the album you would see was what Xbox Music could find its licensed DB - so you might see your album with identical album cover art (maybe) as the ripped version in your collection, but would only see the tracks that the (meagre) Xbox Music service had licensed, so invariably you might be missing tracks. Only by going into the Album view and searching for that album would you find that you had 2 copies, and of course they look identical until you go into each version and see which has the lesser # of tracks or has the small streaming icon beside it, indicating it's from the XB music catalog and not your local. Of course when you attempt to remove those duplicate tracks, you would get an identical question (Do you want to remove this from your collection?) as you would if you were actually deleting songs from your local storage as opposed to just removing the title name from your collection - all for naught regardless, as when you restarted Xbox music it would try to match tracks again as well and just gently caress up your collection again.

Over time there were small obvious should-have-been-at-launch improvements with icon clarity designating which tracks were streaming/downloaded/local, and matching improved - a bit. But really, the only way to avoid this crap with your local collection was to got into settings and just disable Xbox Music from trying to automatch your album data. You could still access your streaming/downloading abilities, but at least it would stop loving with your collection and present only what you actually had.

The problem is that if you want to utilize playlist syncing from desktop->phone, you don't have that option to just skip Xbox Music's attempt to 'organize' your locally stored copy on your phone, you have only one option - to 'sync my online collection'. It's bad enough that you ever need a paid subscription (to one of the most sparsely populated online music catalogs to boot) just to sync playlists, but because you will invariably end up with duplicate tracks/albums on your phone, that will often screw up the playlist syncing. For example, just recently I had a playlist synced from my PC to my 635 a while ago, the PC's playlist was compromised entirely of local songs from my collection and it was seemingly finding the local tracks just fine on my phone's SD card when it synced. Invariably after an update to the phone app, suddenly I'm walking about and I notice some songs are being skipped - what happened was that the playlist was automatically 're-created' after the update, and despite having perfectly legitimate local copies on the phone, it went out to the Xbox Music service and found identically named tracks - except the license agreements for those tracks had expired, so it starts skipping them on my playlist. It replaced the tracks in my playlist that had legitimate copies from the local source with tracks that were removed from the service - holy poo poo. Only by completely wiping and re-creating the playlist on both my PC and phone did I eventually get it to pick the right tracks - for now at least.

gently caress you could have a blog with weekly updates on how useless the music experience has been from MS.

tl/dr: XBox music is bad and always will be

# ¿ Apr 22, 2015 18:01

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