Microsoft Has Run Out of Windows Phone Stock (venturebeat.com) 81
Even if you really wanted to buy a Windows phone, Microsoft has run out of Windows Phone devices to sell to you. From a report: I've been watching the number of Windows Phone options on the Microsoft Store website dwindle for over two years now. I was honestly expecting them to disappear completely more than six months ago. It's 2018, and there are still two remaining phones. Last night, they both flipped over to "out of stock." The HP Elite x3 with dock, normally $799 but on sale for $299, and the Alcatel Idol 4S, normally $299 but on sale for $99.99, are officially out of stock. The third option for $169, the Alcatel Idol 4S with VR Goggles, is of course also out of stock.
Oh no! (Score:5, Funny)
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Story after that: Guy wonders why he bought a Windows Phone.
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I expect it was some old guy where is current phone was broken. Perhaps a flip phone from the 1990's found these as a cheap phone for a replacement. With markdowns like that, it is a good price.
If he is going to be using it to make phone calls, and perhaps some new fancy smart phone thinks like internet browsing, it is probably perfectly fine.
Microsoft actually put some effort into the Windows Phone 8 and 10, vs the old Windows Phone powered by CE which just crammed the desktop UI onto a small phone. Wh
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worse.....a 12 year old wants an iPhone like his friends....Clueless Dad sees 99 dollar Windows phone and buys it expecting to be a hero for his son......
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Boy did she get pissy went I laughed at her.
To be fair, it was not a bad phone for $150 (local money) nice camera.
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Last Post! (from Windows phone)
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https://www.google.com/ [google.com]
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What is dead though is https://www.computerworld.com/... [computerworld.com]. They could not even sell their own phone, blew $7.6 billion dollars not to mention destroying a company and unemploying it's staff . Now it's all Windows anal probe 10 and you have no right to privacy or the right to control what software is installed on your computer once you install windows anal probe 10. They are just a disgusting company.
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Next Story: "This guy bought the last Windows phone!"
I really hope it's like that story on the first guy who bought the first iPhone 3G and then proceeded to drop it while opening the box in front of the camera crew.
not surprising (Score:1, Flamebait)
guess nobody wanted a mobile phone that required a nearby Xbox to work....
Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
That means they finally found a vict^H^H^H^H buyer for the 10th Windows Phone! ;)
So much for ... (Score:2)
... my 401(k) wherein invested it all in Windows fucking Phone!
All gone, you say?
Which is really kind of sad (Score:5, Insightful)
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I am not arguing your assessment of the quality of windows phone 8 and 10. I knew people who had them and loved them. But I doubt it would be like it is without the iPhone. Apple actually broke the mold with the original iPhone, multi-touch screen as a primary interface, Microsoft would had just made a blackberry clone. That said, By the time the iPhone was released Microsoft was getting a backlash of its dominance. The Zune wasn't bad, but people didn't want a Microsoft Zune, Their PC and Gaming Consol
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The Zune wasn't bad, but people didn't want a Microsoft Zune
The problem for MS was that the Zune was a severely crippled and mediocre competitor to iPods that was released when Apple was leaving the market for smartphones. If you are a new competitor to an established player, you have to have something that makes you better than the established player. The one actual defining feature "squirting" was so crippled as to be useless.
Add to that problem was the nonsensical marketing and advertising [youtube.com] that MS employed. It seemed like by being obscure and mysterious, MS thoug
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Reminds me of the OS/2 Warp vs Windows 95 Advertising.
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The Windows Phone was really well done. (We'll ignore Windows Phone 6 and before as if they never existed!) Much more coherent interface than either the iPhone or Android. And the battery life was way better. The problem with it was timing and apps. If it had come out before the iPhone, they would have ruled the market, and Apple would probably be suffering. But coming out after the iPhone and Android, they were continually playing catch up. They never got the app base, and without that it was chicken and egg...nobody bought it because it didn't have apps and no apps because nobody bought it.
It's also why the Windows RT version of the Microsoft Surface failed. Microsoft tried to make an iPad but they just can't seem to get traction with mobile App developers.
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The problem was also with the branding...
If they brand it windows, people will assume its compatible with what they know as windows - ie desktops... When it's incompatible they become disappointed.
The brand is also tarnished, windows is associated with crashing and malware but people put up with it because they now think computers are inherently unreliable and insecure, just look at all the movies and tv shows featuring "hackers" who gain access to anything they want at the drop of a hat. People have become
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They did, a lot of windows mobile devices were dirt cheap and most of the people who bought them did so for precisely that reason.
But most of those users were replacing dumb or feature phones, and didn't make use of many of the features, or they always felt frustrated because they wanted an iphone but couldnt afford one.
But as the dirt cheap chinese androids improved, windows phone becomes less and less attractive even at a low price.
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What they really needed to was just stick with it. They kept on coming out with some new attempt at mobile, and when it didn't completely set the world on fire, they killed it off and replaced with some new, incompatible, hotness. Eventually, the Microsoft faithful, the early adopters, and the app developers had been burned enough times that they no longer took any of Microsoft's platforms seriously no matter how good they might have been. Microsoft never gave any of their platforms a chance to gain mome
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The Windows Phone was really well done.
Let's assume this is true (whether it is or not doesn't matter much), and move on.
The problem with it was timing and apps.
I think timing here matters very little. I think there are two main reasons the Windows phone flopped:
1) Microsoft was/is run by complete and utter assholes, whose main objective was sucking your bank account dry by hook or by crook. This catapulted them to dominance in the 90's, and kept them in dominance despite their hoards of customers wanting to leave. However, their abusive monopoly power and absolute control over mos
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I have some complements to that:
3) Nokia had their own new system, MeeGo, under development at the time. Nokia users were hyped for it. App devs and phone carriers had sunk sweat and money preparing for it. Everyone who actually used it says it was excellent. So when that was killed in favor of WP, simply because the new CEO was a Microsoft puppet, you have tons of people - a very vocal fanbase and several big companies - furious and ready to jump ship to anything but WP.
4) Like that hadn't angered carriers
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> Microsoft couldn't have come out with a design like that before the iPhone,
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The hubris in having that mock iPhone funeral is still funny as hell. That’ll go down as one of the dumber moments along with Ballmer saying no one would buy an iPhone because there was no physical keyboard.
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The hubris in having that mock iPhone funeral is still funny as hell. That’ll go down as one of the dumber moments along with Ballmer saying no one would buy an iPhone because there was no physical keyboard.
Hey, a lot of Slashtards essentially agreed with him...
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Yep just like how the iPad was panned here (remember when people said no one would buy one since it sounded like maxipad?) as well and Apple has sold 100s of millions of them.
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Yep just like how the iPad was panned here (remember when people said no one would buy one since it sounded like maxipad?) as well and Apple has sold 100s of millions of them.
No WiFi. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
Isn't that how it goes? ;-)
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Microsoft couldn't have come out with a design like that before the iPhone, because Apple HAD to show Everyone else what a usable smartphone should actually look like.
FTFY.
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The Windows Phone was really well done.
Except that part where you’d buy a Windows Phone and your phone wouldn’t qualify for the next version? And then Microsoft did it again with the next major version? Yeah, that was really well done... NOT.
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Virtually every 7.0 device got upgraded to 7.5 (unless the manufacturer abandoned it), ditto on 8.0 devices getting upgraded to 8.1.
Which is not what the OP was talking about. He's talking about WP7 -> WP8. No device could be upgraded. Imagine not being able to upgrade a computer from Vista -> 7 or 7-> 8 or 8->10. We're not talking about a long time here. From XP -> Vista (5 years) might be tricky if the computer was really old but WP8 was released only 2 years after WP7.
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Stop being dense. I was clearly talking about the move from 7 to 8 and then from 8 to 10. This wasn’t some obscure thing that happened. It was all over the Internet.
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They never got the app base,
Much of which I would blame on MS. From what I understand from the migration from WM6 -> WP7 -> WP8 required developers to write new apps each time. A developer would be lucky if it was as simple as opening the old app in Visual Studio and migrating, but often it would require re-writing different parts. With Android and iOS, your app would work for a few versions for the most part before you had to release a new version.
Re:Which is really kind of sad (Score:5, Interesting)
Two friends of mine interviewed at Microsoft recently to work on Windows phones, so it sounds like they're trying again.
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The problem with it was timing and apps. .... and the fact apple had iTunes back in 2001... which made the iPod a huge success and a natural lead to a very successful launch of the iPhone in 2007.
Microsoft sought a deal with the music industry for years and failed to broker it until 2004 and by that time the iPod craze was well underway. I believe it was Steve Jobs and the connections he brought with him from Pixar that helped catapult Apple into becoming the major player in the digital music and film indu
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Before the iphone they were selling windows mobile (the 6.x versions and below), had the iphone and android not come out they never would have developed windows phone 7+, they would have continued selling 6.x until they got bored of it.
Development stagnates without competition, the reason windows mobile 6 was so terrible you'd like to forget it ever existed is because the competition wasn't much better at the time.
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It was terrible because it was designed for devices around in the 90s. It wasn't designed to be used with fingers, it was intended to be used with a stylus, and this was because the technology to operate a touch screen hand held mobile device with a finger just wasn't practical at the time. Plus the processing power was such that the interface had to be minimal, with no fancy transitions or animations. The issue was they had to rebuild the Windows Mobile OS from nearly the ground up and it took Microsoft
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No, Metro UI sucks. Tiles are useless. It's ugly. It's cluttered. That's why it failed.
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You've never used it right?
The last thing anyone would say about the metro ui is that it's cluttered... especially compared to Android and iPhone. The UI is actually quite beautiful and I would describe it as very clean. Windows Phone failed despite it's UI... not because of it
And probably was not by a person (Score:1)
I think that most people who bought them were companies, I met 2 sales reps that use Windows phone and those are the only Windows phones I have ever seen.
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2 sales reps
What were they selling? The last two Windows phones?
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The phones aren’t for sale anymore. That’s the whole point of the submission...
Really? (Score:2)
They still sell Windows Phones? I thought that was a done deal years ago. Or was that Zune? /smh
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"But I never dropped it!"
*sigh*
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Under UK law you can claim for up to 6 years from the date of purchase against a manufacturing defect which caused a device to stop working, assuming the type of device in questionable is generally expected to last that long.
Aside from reduced battery life, it's reasonable to expect a portable music player to continue working for much longer than 6 years so if that customer had bought the device in the UK they'd have a reasonable claim under consumer law.
There are many ipods out there much older than this w
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Plenty of Zunes (Score:1)
It's 2018, and there are still two remaining phone (Score:2)
"It's 2018, and there are still two remaining phones."
Literally.
Small wonder (Score:2)
Since there were only 2 of them in stock.
Well, I'm also surprised it took this long. (Score:4, Interesting)
Since I abandoned Android after they dumbed it down in Jellybean, I decided to move on to an Iphone and have both a 7+ and a X. Great phones and the Microsoft apps like Office, OneNote, OneDrive, OfficeLens, Skype for Business, and Office 365 Admin work better on Ios than on Windows Mobile.
Go figure.
You never go wrong with buying Microsoft (Score:4, Interesting)
There's probably a lot of corporations stocking up on this phone who developed in-house applications that run on Windows phones and not Android. Part of the reason for this is that they could have much better control over the phone/environment once it was in a worker's hand. There are inventory tracking companies that still use it.
Did support for a couple years (Score:2)