Microsoft Is No Longer Selling Any Lumia Windows Phones On Its US Store (neowin.net) 85
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Neowin: It seems that Lumia has reached the end of the line, as the Microsoft Store is no longer selling any of the company's Windows Phone 8.1 or Windows 10 Mobile handsets in the U.S. The first signs that the end was approaching for Lumia came back in February, when Microsoft launched the Lumia 650, which was said to be the last in the company's Lumia line. In August, Microsoft removed all mention of Windows handsets from its U.S. store homepage, relegating 'Windows phone' to a dropdown menu instead. This week, just one Lumia handset remained on sale: the ATT-locked Lumia 950, available only in white. Now, that model has sold out too, leaving none of the company's Lumia handsets available to buy on its store. The Windows phones page on the Microsoft Store lists thirteen products, but eight of these are out of stock. When more stock is expected on a temporarily sold-out product, Microsoft typically replaces the 'Add to cart' button with one that says 'Email me when available'. Instead, each of these products now has a grayed-out button, stating "Out of stock."
Offering (Score:5, Funny)
The fact that they're no longer offering them for sale probably doesn't significantly change the number they are selling.
Re:Offering (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah this was probably planned two years ago but it took that long for them to sell their last four units.
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I'm surprised, actually. I'd have thought Ballmer would go through phones a lot faster than that...
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You were perhaps thinking about chairs.
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Oh... I had just kinda assumed Ballmer would've changed up to something more modern, being in charge of a tech company and all that. Plus he's getting older and those chairs aren't getting any lighter.
Business as usual (Score:2)
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The Year of the Windows Smartphone, eh?
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It depends on which apps they missed - and there were plenty. However, for those who required a minimal feature set, Windows Phone 8, and now Windows 10 Mobile, are very adequate. If one is using it for work, then things like Office, OneNote, Outlook, the calculator are there, plus a few utility apps like currency converters that can be downloaded. Some common apps are there, like Yelp, Fandango, Facebook & Twitter, but it does miss stuff like RetailMeNot, and more importantly, things like AirBnB an
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Re: Porked on 6.1 (Score:2)
Yeah, I had one of those as well. Windows Mobile was a good three years behind iOS UI design at the time. Some could argue that they never caught up.
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Those who'd try to argue that would be wrong. Apple's clutter of unrelated icons on a grid (aka: my grandmother's desktop in 1998) is dog shit. People just don't care for whatever reason. Window's customizeable, live tile thing is really neat, super useful, oh, and isn't ugly as sin.
Re: Porked on 6.1 (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is those tiles are basically windows phone's crowning feature, and yet they are total non-functional crap compared to what Android widgets can do.
Windows tiles just flip at an uncontrollable interval, which means if you aren't looking at relevant information when it's up then who knows how long it will be till you actually see it again, and tapping it just launches the app. Also contrary to their namesake, they aren't actually live, rather they only update about once every 15 minutes. And then of course, they only have one of three possible layouts.
Android widgets are real-time, virtually unlimited dimensions, are interactive (I.e. you can scroll through your emails or calendar events rather than waiting for it to flip) and you can tap individual objects in the widget (for example, tapping an email opens that email, not just the app.)
And in fact, Android is so versatile that you can make it fully imitate the windows phone UI. And indeed, there are launchers on the play store that do exactly that.
Android's flexibility is exactly why it dominates the market, and windows phone's limited feature set "with a shiny UI!" is why it flopped.
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Also contrary to their namesake, they aren't actually live, rather they only update about once every 15 minutes. And then of course, they only have one of three possible layouts.
Push notifications are practically an industry standard now. Why would they be using pull? I realize that email notifications would be based on polling intervals, since only Gmail implements push for email and only with Android.
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I realize that email notifications would be based on polling intervals, since only Gmail implements push for email and only with Android.
Wrong again. K-9 mail does IMAP push.
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Not quite what I meant. It doesn't do IMAP push, it does server-side IMAP polling and its own push. Requiring you to abandon your preferred email client (that isn't paired with the email provider). Neither GMail nor K-9 do anything standard that could be supported universally - email just doesn't have a mailbox protocol for that.
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Neither GMail nor K-9 do anything standard that could be supported universally - email just doesn't have a mailbox protocol for that.
sigh [wikipedia.org]
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Each program maintaining a separate connection to a separate push server is not as energy efficient as every program sharing one. That's the whole reason why there's a centralized push notification system.
I was talking about this with my brother (Score:4, Interesting)
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Too late. In some large companies the MS-indoctrinated IT guys would force windows phones on the employees, but when BYOD comes in those windows phones disappear quickly.
Re: I was talking about this with my brother (Score:2, Informative)
They were forced on us all about two years ago (MS partner company, 100k employees). But we're just about due for another refresh now and they've thrown in the towel. Android this time. Windows phone is certainly dead in my company.
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The Nokia N900 had that with it's mail client and "docs to go", as did probably a few other non-MS phones. It sold a few but not the numbers that MS seem to be looking for so I don't think it's that much of a "killer feature".
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I was talking about this with my brother and the consensus between us was that Microsoft couldn't make Windows phones cool to teenagers. It's funny, but it seems like the teenage demographic decides what phones are going to succeed, even if they're not the ones making the final buying decision (or even the biggest buying demographic).
The main thing Windows Phone was is late, iPhone launched in 2007 and Android in 2008 so by the time the stylus-oriented Windows Mobile was replaced by the touch-oriented Windows Phone in 2010 they were fighting a rather established user base with more polished apps. And there were so many Android manufacturers trying to find niches that they saturated the non-iPhone market, leading to intense competition where they often did not make any money at all. Microsoft didn't want to chase the bargain bin market,
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The reason M$ does so bad in the youth market, kids will be kids and they always hate the perve kid that spies and tattles on them, they loathe that kid and M$ spying on all the customers all of the time has put people right off, especially the youth markets and incidentally the power user market (those that made M$ are exactly the ones who M$ is now pissing off). They are pretty much fucked in the consumer market, just hanging on by legacy products they have perverted into undesirability Windows and Office
Re: I was talking about this with my brother (Score:2)
That's why they're all going for Android which doesn't spy on you at all *rolls eyes*
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Seriously, browser support was a joke particularly in the early days of Edge. There are a few other browsers on there, but there's nothing that
I love Windows Phone (Score:1)
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Eventually, their turn will come around in terms of fashion, and eventually, people who use their phones for work will discover Windows Phone.
That's cute, but in the real world, no. I know it's fun to slag off on others' choices as unserious, but those of us with Androids and iPhones are using them to get real work done. We're not sitting around playing Pokemon Go all the time. I mean, we can because it's available and sometimes we do, but we also use them extensively for mail, Slack, project planning, calendaring, SSH, and all the other work-related stuff you're doing on your beloved phone. I promise you that you're not the only person using the
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I fully second this. My first smartphone was a Lumia 520, when Windows Phone 8 was first out. Previously, I never touched texting, but Windows Phone 8 made it a breeze. That, and some other things - OneNote in particular - made it a work in the park. The GPS was good, particularly in conjunction w/ HERE maps. Only downside was limited customization in terms of colors and backgrounds - something completely fixed in Windows 10.
I currently have a Lumia 550, which I use as a travel phone. (I'd have used
Shame (Score:2)
All that money, how many billion spent, and they couldn't shell out a few extra 10 million dollar bills to have the apps written? And it's not the first time they failed to properly buy their way into a market. Just makes no sense to me...
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Actually, they did get quite a few apps written, but they still missed some major segments. Like until recently, when WhatsApp added video calling, there were no popular VOIP or video calling apps for this platform. Similarly, in the US, there is no support for Uber Partner or Lyft, so if one is a driver for those, this phone will not be helpful. It's a pity that Microsoft didn't do a better job in identifying what would be needed and ensuring its support.
One thing I'd note - I travelled to India last
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Good riddance (Score:2)
I've had nothing but issues with my Lumia 950. Windows Mobile has some really good design/usability ideas but jesus it is buggy.
I regularly need to reboot the phone to fix GPS issues. A patch came out a few months ago that made Bluetooth not randomly get completely corrupted with my car, but the implementation is still buggy. Using apps while playing music causes stuttering in the music. I've had the phone for over a year now and it still feels like a beta device.
The worst part of it is that the previous ve
Death to Metro/modern (Score:4, Insightful)
Great.
Now MS can remove their cell phones out of the start menu and desktop and bring back aero, menus, skuemirphism, and a consistent UI so we can upgrade past 7.
We all know Windows 8 and 10 bombed because MS crippled them to turn the PC into a cell phone so old people afraid of change would want a Windows phone.
Well sorry for those that said MS had to focus on mobile. It clearly failed.
Modern is out and win32 is back in hopefully very soon
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I gave up on Windows Phone when my 820 died. I didn't want to spend +$500 on a phone with a dead platform?! Not to mention Windows 10 is buggy and horrible on mobile and even desktop compared to 8.1.
I hate Android but love the ecosystem. Got a bloated Android phone. You know what Android reminds me of?
Android == DOS/Windows. Windows Phone == OS/2. Blackberry/Symbian == Unix. IOS === Mac classic. It's like the 1980s and 1990s again. No one likes Windows! But loved the apps and everyone had one so it became s
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One of the problems i've noticed even back on win7 is a lot of websites are deciding in error (like msft did with win8) that everyone has a touch screen and have thus removed the scroll bar to get an extra few pixels of screen space.
How do I get that back without killing script for the whole page?
I can work around it by clicking in the area and then using the arrow keys but I shouldn't have to.
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that everyone has a touch screen and have thus removed the scroll bar
Or a mouse with a scroll wheel. Though I'm sure if you had a trackball instead you would have loudly said so by now.
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Yeah scroll wheels while awesome aren't common on laptops.
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But edge swipe scrolling and multi-finger scrolling both are.
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Those are features i've had to disable so the mouse doesn't resize the icons on my desktop and jump me around the page when I accidentally brush it. I'm sure it works well on some but not on mine.
Imho the webpage shouldn't even be able to control that aspect of the browser
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Imho the webpage shouldn't even be able to control that aspect of the browser
You have no disagreement from me on that part. Other than the fact that sometimes in CSS content box overflow should not be obviously scrollable - part of this used to be to enable compatibility with non-standard spacing in IE. Hiding scrollbars on a main content area is not the intended use of that.
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Because winforms in .Net and their MFC counterparts provide a superior desktop experience over mobile phone apps on a desktop.
The whole reason for app stores and universal apps is to make the desktop ecosystem available for Windows Phone so people will buy them. ... But here is the problem? There are now more apps on Android today than desktop applications on Windows :-( They lost.
What MS needs to do is focus on media creation by improving visual studio Android tools and cross platform .Net tools for iOS an
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I have all the platforms in question. For Facebook or /., I use this laptop running TrueOS (formerly PC-BSD). Due to all the coverage about Windows 10 Telemetry and other security controversies, I no longer use that for things like banking, shopping, or anything where my data security is important to me. Only thing I use that for is when there is something that I have to have Windows for. So I've kept automatic updates open, and right now, mainly use that for games. Once I have either a SteamOS jail ru
Here in Finland, even hardcore Lumia users dislike (Score:4, Insightful)
Even hardcore Lumia users have grown to dislike their Lumia phones, by now. Almost always it's because the lack of features compared to Android.
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Actually, that's a good point. One thing that the Lumia line had was a wide range of choices and price points. IMO, too many - something they've corrected in the Windows 10 Mobile lineup, where they offer only the 950, 640 and 150. If someone wanted a barebones smartphone, there was the 520 (or now, the 150), and if they wanted the high end phone, they could get those as well.
So maybe they wouldn't like to spend $600+ on any Lumia, but at least, if they have to spend several hundreds less, they have a
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It's because they were descended from Nokia stuff where they had what looked like an insanely huge number of models, until you get that it does scale when you are selling millions of phones per year. Microsoft were not selling in such volumes so that made the cost of supporting multiple models something to be noticed.
They killed Nokia and are wearing it's skin, but they are no Nokia.
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Those cameras appeared on a Symbian model (808?) and were pretty good. The first model of Windows phone that had them didn't have the software chops to actually take advantage of them. Then they sort of just went away.
Oh, while they were a real ~50 megapixel sensor, they usually used some fancy interpolation to bring it down to a really good 12 MP or so image.
This is all correct, except that the Nokia 808 (AKA Pureview) had a 41 MP sensor, of which only 38 MP were used. Apart from that, everything you wrote is accurate.
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The phones you mentioned run Atom, which is something Intel abandoned for mobile. Likewise, they haven't been interested in cramming a tablet Core M processor into a phone.
If you've been following the announcements, Microsoft are partnering with Qualcomm to emulate x86 on Snapdragon.
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That is a shame - too late to the game (Score:2)
However, it wasn't too long ago, when I was using my Galaxy S2, that I never tired of bashing Windows Phone 6 and the prior iteration - Windows CE. They were terrible in my opinion. With the advent of windows 8, the game changed. The UI finally surpassed both Android and Iphones and I found the devices worked great. Windows 10 is even better.
However,
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I have an iPhone, and the reason I got it in the first place - FaceTime. My son and my sister's family have iPhones, and I wanted to video chat w/ them. Android Duo and WhatsApp's video chats only came recently: FaceTime was the only game in town for a while.
Now, w/ WhatsApp video calling, Windows 10 Mobile users too can have video chats
Re: That is a shame - too late to the game (Score:2)
Maybe they like getting OS updates which is pretty hit and miss with Android. How many devices are still waiting for Marshmallow never mind Nougat?
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They should sell android phones (Score:2)
Since licencing undisclosed tech in android is where all of Microsoft phone division's profits have ever come from.
Mobile Windows is dead (Score:2)
Well, that went well (Score:2)
Certainly worthwhile to kill Nokia for.
This is Just Temporary (Score:2)
Taking the Lumia off the market is a very intentional maneuver on Microsoft's part. They are hoping that by the time they launch the Surface Phone in Q4 next year with full support for X86 Win32 apps on ARM [pcworld.com] that we will have largely forgetten about how much the previous Windows Phone underwhelmed us. Also making a short but clean break gives them an excuse not to upgrade all the phones on the market right now to the new OS that supports X86 Win32 apps.