Never let it be said that I don’t swim against the stream…
Just as the latest IDC numbers show Android eating up the Mobile Smartphone market, with even Apple numbers slipping, and Microsoft 3rd by a long, long margin…. I decide to take a sojourn into Windows Phone for a while. What could I be thinking?
A few things actually. The first is that I’m presently engaged on doing a consulting gig where I’m constantly switching between JEE (my heartland) and Dotnet. After drinking deep of the MS dev stack on Windows, I was pretty impressed. Embracing MVVM as a UI pattern, and adding a super slick design tool like Blend turns out to be pretty darn productive - even for an Enterprise Java guy!
I’ve come to really love this “other” enterprise platform. In particular I’ve come to love C# as a language. First level support for properties and events is absolutely game changing. And having a unified UI markup language (XAML) that works across PCs and mobile is, well, just awesome. All platforms with deep support for data binding always impress me (looking at you Grails and Angular).
So I figured I’d buy the cheapest Windows phone I could find, take the SIM out of my Samsung Galaxy S4, and see how the Winphone platform is tracking.
I
was
… stunned
This is a black $147 Nokia Lumia 520 Windows Phone from my local OfficeWorks, which is the most popular Windows Phone on the planet. From those Nokia characters, remember them?
I last used Windows Phone on the 7 platform when I was building some PhoneGap apps for a client who wanted to target WinPhone, Android, iPhone and Blackberry (!) from single source. It worked pretty well, but at that stage WinPhone was probably the worst of those platforms, by a margin.
Fast forward to 2014 and I’m taking Windows 8.1 for a spin. The verdict?
I’ve been carrying this phone as my main device for a few weeks now, and here’s what I’ve come to discover.
- Nokia make exceptional hardware. Even in this cheapo phone, the device feels good in your hand, is light and responsive.
- WinPhone 8.1 is visually beautiful. The animations are smooth, the fonts are stunning, and the O/S design is futuristic. Love it.
- Everything works properly. The calendar is amazing, and syncs with Google out of the box. Ditto for the mail client. Same for contacts. Even the Nav is great. The Office integration is deep, and OneDrive is baked into the platform for cloud sync of everything.
- Apps work the same. The Modern UI styling (nee Metro) is adopted by everyone, and it makes for a fantastic user experience.
- Live Tiles = Amazing. The whole Live Tile thing is just unbelievably useful as a feedback mechanism.
- Home screen goodness. The endless scroll approach to the home screen tuns out to be super useful to. You quickly work out what to pin where, and in what size, to optimise your workflow.
- Compelling User Experience. So, basically, a tremendous amount of vision has gone into designing the user experience. Maybe the whole flat, square thing just works for me. And the whitespace. So much great whitespace.
I can’t believe how quick I was to dismiss this platform without giving it a second hearing. So glad I gave it a shot.
Yes the App Store is a little thinner on the ground, but what could be a better playground to monetize in? And why does the phone on this camera not have a flash (!)?
Anyways, I’ll upsize to a higher end WinPhone in good time…
In the meantime I’m off to PluralSight for a while to take in a few more WinPhone developer videos..
Heaps of Alpha Winphone devs over there…
Will keep you posted of the journey…