Reply to post: Re: Hold on, if I read this right - Not small/elegant/successful?

NYPD head of IT doubles down on Windows smartphone idiocy

ROC

Re: Hold on, if I read this right - Not small/elegant/successful?

Evidence for that claim?

I have been using a Lumia 640 running WP 8.1 for almost 2 years, and consider it a "small app" platform - WP apps usually are, and WP 8.1 tends to run them well in 0.5-1GB of RAM. Android usually needs more RAM to perform well (partly because of its platform and vendor software bloat).

Not sure how to measure "elegant", but WP 8.1 and its apps seem comparable in usability and features to similar apps (for the same time period) for Android in my experience with both platforms (have not touched iPhones). I find the overall UI elegantly easy-to-use to the extent that this characteristic was what motivated me to use WP 8.1 as best suited for introducing my wife to smartphones in her first step up from feature phones. I was dreading getting her up to speed on Android until I learned about the WP option since she is not the "techie" type, despite several years on her home PC running Linux - she would have been lost without her live-in tech guy, me.

In fact, I was so impressed in teaching her how to use WP, I decided to switch from Android to WP myself. I have kept dabbling in Android phones and tablets since then, but keep coming back to WP for its "elegance", although not so much for Win 10 Phone since it has lost apps, is far more intrusive with MS's ramped up "telemetry", and annoying with forced updates.

"Successful" depends on the criteria for measuring success. From what I have read about this project before, it was a success in terms of meeting the needs of the NYPD. There may have even been an additional bonus in keeping the Android and iPhone users from "mixing" their job and personal phone usage/apps, which was something I hated about my job when I had to submit my Android phone to biz restrictions in order to support my on-call duties. It all depends...

The only real negative I see is that MS has since withdrawn support for WP 8.1 with a very uncertain upgrade path in Win10 P - it may be alive, but barely, so not a good bet from the current perspective ("Surface Phone" notions being only a wished-for rumor). However, as pointed out here, 2 years is a fairly typical life-cycle for replacement of business phones and apps for them, so a conversion of some sort would have been just about inevitable.

Meanwhile I intend to keep using my Lumia 640 running WP 8.1 until it ceases to perform in terms of hardware and/or functions - it "just works" for me (and wife).

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