Re: Confused
> Microsoft's is too expensive (This could either be license or hardware costs)
The WP only agreement with MS expires early this year so the $ billion per year from MS terminates. This was intended primarily to offset the licence costs. Effectively this will raise the cost per phone by $30.
One major problem with WP7 and WP8 is that these only supported a limited range of specific SoCs so the phones became outdated internally and the makers could not benefit from newer, cheaper, chips. WP8.1 is supposed to add a new SoC to the list but it is likely that the cost of this will still disadvantage WP compared to even newer chips.
The only reason that there has been a recovery in market share is that the cheaper phones (520) have been selling below real cost.
Mozilla, for example, has just announced that FirefoxOS will run on a new SoC that integrates so much of the hardware, and is so cheap, that it can be made into a phone that costs $25. It is unlikely that WP8 would ever support this simply because Microsoft has to do it, the OEMs cannot.