Stick a Fork in Windows Phone

Bill Gates uses Android now. The odds of MS getting back in the phone business seems slim. https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/26/16365424/bill-gates-android-phone-switch

Good. My plan for world domination of the windows phone market is proceeding well. Anc will have an accident then my dominion will be complete. (did I just type that out loud?)

Mobile 10 really seems like the project of a couple MS geeks more interested in surfing the web. I'm getting weekly downloads (maybe less frequent) as part of their beta program. Each one seems more buggy than the last.

I can't power off my phone now without corrupting the SD card. It happily repairs it for me (this takes about 10 minutes) and then reboots.

Cortana has turned into an ignorant bitch. When I say, "Take me home!" Cortana now replies with a web page of music videos for "Take Me Home" instead of soothing me with her Majel Barrett voice: "Sure thing, Steve," and starting nav with the correct destination that she figured out on her own.

"Email name" takes me into some dead end messaging app that I can't even tap out of (and thus the need to power-off/on).

What's a good Android phone for $30?

At that price? Not too many. The big concern with a phone at that price is that the OS isn't being updated as the processor in the phone can't run a recent version of Android. So, while the app store will have better offerings than Windows Phone's, from a security standpoint, it'll be like running unpatched Windows XP without a firewall. If you've got Verizon or Sprint as your carrier, you're pretty much going to have to take what they've got on their sites. If you're on AT&T or T-Mobile, then Blu has a reputation for making decent phones, though not quite at the $30 level.

Or, you might see if you can get one of these.

I didn't even know that they were still a thing, to be honest.

Never even actually met a person that had one.

Go on . . .

Now it's most sincerely dead. zdnet

Windows 10 Mobile: Microsoft just put the final nail in the coffin
Microsoft has told its die-hard Windows 10 Mobile fans not to expect new features for the platform.​

what oh no how could microsoft do this it's like the zune all over again

not so fast, knobby-knees...

Zune Forever.

I admit to not knowing what a zune was before googling it.

My oldest daughter had a Zune at one point. Somebody swiped it when she was in high school and she switched to Apple.

I met two people who had them. One was a worthless piece of shit who claimed to have done all kinds of fantastical things (like being a Black Hawk helicopter pilot), yet was working a dead-end job. The other seemed to be having an "unhealthy" relationship with his mother.

I've never piloted a black hawk and I don't think Anc has either.

And we've never met.

gee tuck, i feed you a line and you strike out...

It was 5 AM and I was in the middle of my 4 mile walk to work.

Why don't you use a bike?

If you switch to Metro PCS you can get an LG K20+ for about $70 and the specs are pretty good. Just make sure to buy a screen protector and the insurance (about $5 a month) because the plastic bodies don't hold up as well as the metal bodies of the more expressive phones.

Steep hills abound. /besides, nobody'll stop and pick me up when it's raining, if I'm on a bike.

Metro uses T-mobile's network. Their coverage is spotty around here (metro atlanta). AT&T for me.

$150 is my pain point for an android. The $30 is what the MS winphone cost. I don't expect to duplicate that for a platform anyone actually wants...

Have a look at GearBest for a Shenzen Generic.

I've had a Xiaomi for something like 12 months now, and it works a treat. Only issue was I needed to unlock it and install a official ROM as the one that came with it was loaded up with crapware and adware.

As for WinPhone, writing was never off the wall. Ballmer's "who'd buy this?" moment with the iPhone was the moment MS doomed itself to mobile OS irrelevance.

Had they stopped dicking about, and maybe done an Xbox phone, or kept Nokia's brand, they'd have had a chance, but trying to juggle the enterprise and domestic was never going to work.

I'd say shame, but given MS's desperate attempts to copy Google in slurp-all-the-data in Win10, they were never going to provide a genuine alternative to Apple's Walled Garden or Google's Big Brother, just a knock-off of both.

compatibility seems to be more than just "GSM" now.

4G LTE doesn't appear to have compatibility looking at bands/frequencies except perhaps 850MHz band 5 (not sure what CLR vs FDD means, this could be a problem), but I'm no expert. It looks like AT&T focuses on 700Mhz bands 12 and 17. US cell networks are pretty old tech. I'm not sure I have the stomach to order from China and not have it work, or only work on a slower protocol.

Frequencies used on the AT&T Network


while the typical Xiaomi global phone supports:

This Moto X was one of the highest ranking phones when it was released, is fully compatible with AT&T and is $130. This Moto E is half the price of that one, and is said to be an "okay" phone.

This Blu phone is $100 and has good ratings on Amazon.

I have a first gen Moto G (CDMA version) and a 2nd gen. Moto G (GSM version). The first gen is a passable, if limited, phone. The second gen. is garbage. (I know the reviewers all loved it, but fuck them, they didn't use it for more than a couple of weeks, I've used it for years.) Until fairly recently, when the 2nd gen. got a major update, it would brick itself until the battery went flat (which could take days). That's been fixed, but software on the phone runs slowly. The 1st gen outperforms the 2nd gen, IMHO. I don't know about the later versions of the phone.

Another possibility, and it depends upon coverage in your area, is something like the Moto E on Ting. It switches between Sprint and T-Mobile's network, depending upon who's got the stronger signal. Now, I have a Ting ZTE Warp, which uses the Sprint network, and I have to say that even though I live in an area with spotty Sprint coverage, it works fine. I live 2.4 miles from the nearest Sprint tower (max signal range for Sprint is 2.5 miles), and with other phones that used the Sprint network, I found that using the phone inside the house was problemmatic, to say the least. There were a couple of spots that I could make calls from, but if I moved a foot or two outside of them, then I lost signal. Why the ZTE does better, I don't know.

That's a shame, I know of a number of sites like willmyphonework, but I don't know of any where you select the network and it lists the phones as there are oodles of Chinese brands, most of which are decent quality, it's just getting a list of what'll work.

I'm gravitating towards a moto e4 plus. No rush as I'm not a power app user. I did buy a toy android tablet for the couple of smart home apps I use.

I attempted to use the Bing Maps feature the other day. It didn't get me lost but I passed the destination and went another 2 miles out of my way, then it had me make a u-turn to come back. This was the last straw.

Wound up getting a moto g5 plus. $220 at costco (same everywhere else). Costco has a good return policy: 90 days on cell phones, no restocking fee. Yes, it's a bit above my pain threshold. I set it down now before going out to work in the yard, where I used to get the windows phone all sweaty and drop it several times. I refuse to get a protective case for it though.

I like the fingerprint reader. It's nice not to have to type in a pin/pw each time. This function also is used for internal banking and other sensitive apps. It works very well.

It's about 3 times faster than the Lumia 640 (1.2GHz 4 core compared with 2.0GHz 8 core) and it shows.

The windows platform was not only suffering from a lack of apps, but the apps it did have are pathetic when compared to the same apps for android. Kindle/Audible for windows is a good example. This requires two separate apps on the windows phone, but these are seamlessly integrated in one app on the Android and performs flawlessly with twice the usability and functions. Kindle on windows was buggy and I had to restart it often while reading to keep it from skipping full sentences between pages.

Accessing hotmail's exchange server took a bit of fiddling to get it to sync contacts and calendar, but once this was set up it's better than on the windows phone. Office apps sparkle now where they were almost unusable on the windows phone.

The very nice AT&T store lady trimmed my micro-sim to make it fit the moto's nano-sim slot. I didn't know this was a thing. No charge.

Put a fork in my 640. @Ancalagon, now you're the only one...

Waze is the best traffic app out there, FYI.

Wife and kids complain that waze runs in the background all the time giving waze data on traffic movement; this runs down the battery using GPS all the time as if you were running the map app in the foreground. I haven't asked them or tried it. Is there a way to opt-out of this feature?

After settling for Bing maps, google navigation is the bees knees. I like how it shows a bubble on alternate routes giving the anticipated times if I were to deviate from their selection. It also gave me verbal warning when beginning a trip that Atlanta traffic sucks (or words to that effect). And it tells me which side of the road my destination is on (something seriously lacking from either Bing or Nokia Here maps).

Sounds like how Steve Jobs and Bill Gates used to compete with one another.

To close out of Waze, what you have to do is after you hit the "Home" button, go up to the top of the phone, pull the "window shade" notification bar down, and you'll see an option to close Waze. Tap that, and you're done. It's a bit of a pain, I'll admit, but Waze gives you all kinds of traffic information, will automatically route you around wrecks, and let you know where speed traps are, amongst many other things, so it's worth the headaches, IMHO.

E-bikes reached a decent price point yet? Seems like a good alternative.