China, India the key to Micr-okia's fate says IDC The mega-markets of China and India, and more broadly the rest of the Asia Pacific region, will be key to Microsoft’s success in the handset space with its newly acquired Nokia assets, according to analyst IDC. China is the number one market for Lumia shipments, with India in second, Vietnam in eighth and Thailand tenth …
Took a tour of the phone shops at the weekend. I have 10+ years of email arranged in 1000s of folders.
IPhone/iPad can't cope as it truncates the folder names.
Windows didn't appear to work with folders properly.
Android, too many to be sure, but my Nexus 7 can't cope.
That left me with my old Blackberry 9700 doing a fine job.
Apart from email, Windows looked pretty good though, but I don't use more than email & geocaching.
I'd say that the first mistake was keeping all your emails stored in the manner and I wouldn't expect my telephone to be capable of dealing with multi nested folders of anything. ( 2 or 3 levels is fine anything more becomes a pain in the arse because of the scrolling and selecting that is required). There comes a time when the nesting becomes so deep that it becomes difficult to extract anything easilly anyway.
I would say that you are trying to use the wrong tool to accomplish the task.
Both the 520 and 620 are already under the $200 boundary - unlocked. About the app "ecosystem" it's something highly overhyped. How many "apps" do you really need, and use? Besides games for the GameBoy generation, which apps the average user on a low-end smartphone really need? If you look at any store there are thousands of apps doing the same. Beware of judging a system just by the number of applications available - OSX - and even Linux on the desktop - has not the Windows "ecosystem" and nobody say it's a failure. Sure, for some company just counting the apps is a good marketing move, but it's really so imporant?
I barely use any apps on my phone, so before work gave me an iPhone 5, I was a very happy Win Pho 7 user. But even I was annoyed by some obvious missing stuff. For example, I tried every single free torch app that didn't have horrifically broad user-permission (about half wanted access to address book for example) - and none of them were much good - a good number were horrifically crap. I suppose £1.00 is a small price to pay to get a better one, assuming they were any better of course, but for something as simple as a torch app I really resent paying.
Another app I wanted, as Android have it, was something to adjust the screen brightness without having to trawl to the second page of the settings menu. This is because when you're out in bright sun, and the screen is too dim to read, you can't see the menu to find the control. But you can peck at the button you've placed on screen. Simple stuff like this, little widgets, should either be baked into the OS or easily available. Win Pho lets you pin some commands to the home screen, but for some weird reason not others.
Anyway I digress. My point is that many people want apps, and will pick their platform for them. Even total non-techies like my Mum have an iPad with 50-odd apps on - and if she wanted a smartphone it would be the same.
Apparently many people even use a Facebook app for Windows Phone. Despite that being built into the excellent People hub - and Facebook being horrible. But you need things like BBC iPlayer/Sky/catch-up telly, I guess the major newspaper apps, Twitter, Dropbox, Skype etc.
MS could take something like $50m out of the marketing budget and put it into app development. That would get them a lot of widgets, and quite a bit of work from people like the BBC as well - and fill their app store up nicely. Things may of course have improved in the last year - but even I was disappointed with the options, and I bought the phone knowing I didn't want many apps.
Flashlight XT is the app you want, if you ever get WP8. Very easy, one button, and you can swipe across to a full white screen if you'd rather use the screen as a light than the camera flash.
Screen brightness setting - you're right. Apparently no way to make that app with the current API.
It's a fair claim that no number of available apps you don't want to use matters. That all that matters is if the ones you do want exist. Fair but incomplete.
A strong market does matter. It increases the chance that rare niche app only you and a 100 others want exists. It gives you a decent choice of competing apps where there is duplication - despite coming with built in browser, calendar, media player and clock apps I currently use better 3rd party versions on my phone.
If nothing else if spurs the platform holder to try harder with their own built in apps. Lack of a strong app environment is a sign of a weak platform in many different ways and affects even users that claim not to use downloaded apps.
Lack of a strong app environment is a sign of a weak platform in many different ways
This is kind of specious though; actually WP app platform has grown faster than Android did in its equivalent days. There aren't as many apps right now as there are in the Android stores, but you can't say that's a sign of a bad app platform, especially considering the entrenched competition, whereas iOS and Android were far more blue ocean stuff.
Having done some Android development, while overall you can do more in it than in the other platforms, compare the tools available and the WP ones are really, really good.
I seem to fall into a slightly different category - I didn't think I would use many apps (which I still think of as "programs"), but, since getting my Note a year ago, I have acquired and regularly use several that are better than the stock items, or have functionality that should have been, but wasn't on the phone, or which only make sense on a phone. Examples? - and note I use these regularly (daily or several time a week): "Co-pilot" for satnav; "MapsWithMe" for offline mapping; a compass widget; "Aldiko" ebook reader; a better Torch widget with three levels of brightness; an easier, more configurable sound-profile manager ("Sound Profile"); an LED-style clock for timing ("StudioClock"); a scanner ("CamScanner"); Firefox and Opera; a better app manager (AppMGR III); a better file manager ("Astro"); a sleep monitor ("Sleepbot"); Google Authenticator; a better calculator; and two Czech-English-Czech dictionaries (fairly niche, I suspect).
Would I go to a platform that didn't offer a wide range of apps? No, I wouldn't. Symbian was killed by too few apps, and Microsoft need to encourage people to be porting their existing apps from other platforms as quickly as possible if they are to survive.
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