Re: As I've said before
Windows Phone is great. Although I agree with you Microsoft's mobile phone strategy has been a bloody shambles since about 2004. I assumed that things went wrong because all management resources were pulled in to try and unscrew-up Longhorn - which got them to the unloved (but actually not that terrible) Vista, and then the excellent Windows 7. Meanwhile their huge share in the smartphone/PDA field died, and the iPhone kicked everyone's collective arses.
But they've just kept on flailing since then. It's almost as if someone is telling them they must do mobile, as its "the future", but they actually hate it.
However Windows Mobile 8.1 is good. It's fast, I think I've only ever had one, maybe two, phone crashes - and I can't ever recall an app crashing on me. Whereas my iPad has an app crash on it every week, and probably crashes or needs a reboot every month. Not that I'm complaining - this is good performance, the work iPhone performed similarly to my iPad. I haven't regularly used a 'Droid since 2.2, which was a bit flaky, so it wouldn't be fair to comment.
Anyway Windows Phone is good. It's a cheap, solid, stable phone. The People Hub (address book) is far superior to Apple's, or stock Android. You can get bigger text easily, so I can call without needing my reading glasses. The email client is good, and allows you to separate email accounts easily, something Apple is awful at. The navigation apps are great, mobile IE is now perfectly useable, it was pretty ropey on Win Mo 7.
The app store is still pretty rubbish. It's still a mediocre mobile computer, compared to 'Droid or iPhone.
Sadly MS keep doing the hard work under the hood. But then no-one ever gets round to the polish that would turn it from an OK system into a great one. Bribe a few more people to make apps. Get simple stuff right, like a built in torch and timer app. Leave the UI as it is, it's great, but spend some effort on making the live tiles thing actually work. Or ditch it, and just make the icons prettier. Keep them big though - phone screens are small, and they're often used in not ideal viewing conditions.
Anyway, if MS screw up, I won't take the update. 8.1 is good enough for me, and at £140 I got a decent camera and decent phone in my Lumia 735. I'm aware it may not have a long term future, but for my needs now, it's the best phone. And the £450 saved over an iPhone can get me an iPad or 2 nice Android tablets.