What’s happening with Windows phones? Is Lumia 735 gone for good?

Something strange is going on with Microsoft and its first-party Windows phone offerings. Or is it? Many speculations as to what exactly is happening are already crowding news headlines.

We may know why

With the much anticipated Surface Phone concepts already being released and earlier reports that another Microsoft phone could be in the works, this might mean we may get something new soon.

It all started when reports were released stating Verizon had become the only first-party seller still offering an activated Windows phone – the Lumia 735, to wireless customers.

While Windows mobile devices can still be purchased from the Windows storefront from other manufacturers like Acer and Alcatel, questioning around the move to gradually take the Lumia out of its offerings is on the rise.

As the industry monitors Window phone offerings from the company’s online store, they noticed earlier this week that the company had also removed its listing for the Lumia 735 handset from its online store.

With the removal of the Lumia 735, that would leave the last company (Verizon) offering an Windows handset to buyers soon to also be crossed off the list. You might still find remaining stock in physical locations.

Microsoft phone revenues crumbling

The move shouldn’t come as a total shock. Microsoft did tell investors during its earnings call back in April, that revenue for the phones were crumbling and that it would be discontinuing all first party phone hardware this summer.

What’s causing everyone to wonder what might be happening is the fact that listings for the Lumia 735 went from an “out of stock” message one day, to “not available” and at the time of this post, completely gone from its products page.

New concepts of the much anticipated Windows Surface phone are being released and it’s only a matter of time before Microsoft starts giving us clues as to how this phone will look and when it will be available. Removing the Lumia from its online listings might be the first step.

What is happening with Windows Phone 8.1 ? #4129

Comments

KakCAT commented Sep 9, 2015

I’d like to reopen this issue with some proof that CompositionTarget.Rendering is totally broken on WP8.1 (and WP10 at some extent)

Using VS2013, crete new Visual C# -> Store Apps -> Universal Apps project. Blank App

Add function to MainPage.xaml.cs

Add CompositionTarget.Rendering+=renderingFunc; to the MainPage constructor.

Add a button to the XAML and a textblock in order to print stuff. Associate this function to the button

Run on WP8.1 device (mine is Nokia 920 , latest firmware update).Tapping the button will print the number of times Rendering has been called

Now mash the screen with all fingers, tapping and dragging. Admitely it takes some more time than MonoGame to crash, but I can make it crash in 10-15 seconds

Now tap the button. Tap no longer works.

OK, now the weird part. I was writing this message to show the evilness of CompositionTarget.Rendering, affecting touch, adding a huge delay to screen rotation, increasing global warming and in WP10 I think it’s the culprit that sometimes randomly the touch locations are ‘portrait’ when should be ‘landscape’. When I thought. this is weird, I can’t see why subscribing to CompositionTarget can affect this.

So, at the previous message I removed everything related to CompositionTarget, and incremented the counter each time the button was pushed. Guess what? WP8.1 still stops receiving touches.

So, creating a simple XAML app, adding a button, and mashing, makes the button (and all touch) stop working in my Nokia 920.

So, my question is. is it just an issue with my Nokia 920 or is somebody else able to reproduce this problem? Because it seems that everything with XAML in it is freezing when mashing the screen in WP8.1 mode (not a problem in WP8.0)

EDIT: I’ve seen several WP8.1 only games freezing under those conditions, and apparently not using MonoGame at all, which would confirm that everything-XAML based on my Nokia 920 is affected by this problem.

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Why Windows Phone Failed — And How They Could’ve Saved It

Windows Phone. A product with so much potential that had everything going for it, and yet one that failed spectacularly. Despite the billions of dollars and the priceless connections of Microsoft, the Windows Phone never took off and would go down in history as one of Microsoft’s most expensive mistakes. In this story, we’re going to unveil the reasons behind its failure and the actions Microsoft could have taken to possibly prevent it.

How the iPhone changed the smartphone game

When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone in 2007, he took the smartphone world by storm. Up until then, smartphones had a big problem; they had small screens with interfaces that were hard to navigate, and the reason for that was because half of the phone was occupied by a keyboard with tiny buttons you could hardly press with any precision at all.

What Steve Jobs showed to his ecstatic audience was a game-changer, but it wasn’t just Apple fans that were watching.

The engineers at Google, which for the past two years had been building a smartphone of their own, had to scrap their entire project and to start over with a touch screen design. Their final product, Android, would arrive more than a year later, at which point the iPhone had taken the smartphone crown. The iPhone’s model was built on exclusivity. It was entirely produced by Apple to establish maximum control over the user experience and the quality of the product, which allowed Apple to charge a premium for their phones.

To succeed, Android would have to adopt a different strategy.

So instead of going for exclusivity, Google tried to be everyone’s friend, partnering up with as many phone manufacturers as possible with the selling point of their phones being the fact that they were cheap yet functioned. For a time, the smartphone was in balance, with Android and the iPhone occupying very distinct segments of the market. And then came Microsoft.

Good foundations, bad ideas

Now, out of the three companies, it was actually Microsoft that had the most experience with mobile devices. Back in 1996, Bill Gates unveiled what he called the handheld PC, which was really more of a tiny laptop.

This is how John McGill described it:

F or those of you that might not have seen one yet, Bill talked a little bit about the handheld PC and this happens to be the Casio unit, actually. The Casio unit is typical of the handheld PCs. It’s got a physical keyboard, the 480 by 240 by 2 bit per pixel screen, serial port, IR, PC card, upgradeable ROM, two AA batteries. So, this is a pretty typical handheld PC.

The operating system it ran was known as Windows CE, which was basically Windows 3, modified to function on the lowest specifications possible. Over the next decade, Microsoft would add features and develop this product line extensively, making another six full releases. Between 2006 and 2008, Microsoft’s mobile devices claimed a 15% market share greater than any of their competitors except Symbian by Nokia. But this success is exactly what blinded Microsoft to the threat of the iPhone.

Microsoft stays stubborn

When Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft at the time, was asked about the iPhone, his reaction … Well, let’s say it hasn’t aged very well.

Steve, let me ask you about the iPhone and the Zune, if I may. Zune was getting some traction. Then Steve Jobs goes to Mac world and he pulls out this iPhone. What was your first reaction when you saw that?

$500, fully subsidized with a plan? I said, “That is the most expensive phone in the world, and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine.”

What’s even more priceless, however, is the frankness of the next question.

How do you compete with that, though? He sucked out a lot of the spotlight in the last few weeks because of what happened in Mac world, not only with the iPhone but with the new iPod. How do you compete with that, with the Zune?

Right now … Well, let’s take phones first. Right now, we’re selling millions and millions and millions of phones a year. Apple is selling zero phones a year.

Notice the stark difference between the two men: the reporter very clearly sees the innovations of the iPhone as a threat to the old smartphone establishment, but Microsoft’s CEO can barely look past the sales numbers.

And just in case you’re thinking he’s an exception, the CEOs of BlackBerry and Palm were equally skeptical of the new iPhone. It took Microsoft a full year of declining market share to finally realize that something had to be done. Unlike Microsoft, BlackBerry sales were still increasing, which gave them a sense of confidence they never recovered from.

Better, but not good enough

Now, as they say, it’s better late than never, and when Microsoft finally got around to it, their development was actually pretty fast.

Microsoft began developing a touchscreen-based mobile device in late 2008, and it took them only two years to get it ready for the market. What Steve Ballmer unveiled was indeed a very unique product whose advancement of smartphone design isn’t really widely recognized, but it should be. At a time when the iPhone and Android were stuck with static icons, the Windows Phone gave you tiles with live information.

Overall, critics had much to praise. In terms of design, the Windows Phone user experience was right up there next to Apple, and because Microsoft had very strict requirements for the hardware used by phone manufacturers, all of the early Windows Phones were very powerful machines for their time.

And yet, Microsoft ran into a big problem very early on. You see, Microsoft was trying to do something very difficult. It was emulating Apple in trying to establish strict control over the user experience and hardware, but unlike Apple, it wasn’t actually making its own films. This approach made the Windows Phone a very refined product, but the degree of control Microsoft wanted made working with them much more difficult for phone manufacturers compared to working with Android.

Unsurprisingly, most phone manufacturers decided to partner up with Google, which left Microsoft in a very bad position. It had a great product and no one to make it. The only saving grace for Microsoft was a lucky connection.

Microsoft partners with Nokia

When Nokia replaced their CEO in September 2010, the new guy, Stephen Elop, was a former Microsoft executive, and the first item on his agenda was to try to restore Nokia’s declining market share by abandoning Symbian and pivoting toward the Windows Phone.

Now, you can tell that this was a very premeditated plan because this massive transition during which Nokia completely changed their product offerings happened in the span of a single year. Nokia started selling their first Windows Phone in November 2011, and I can tell you right away that this was possible thanks to the billions of dollars Microsoft poured into Nokia as platform support payments.

Nokia was supposedly paying Microsoft a licensing fee, but in reality, it was actually getting $250 million back from Microsoft every quarter, which more than made up for their expenses. Of course, the other phone manufacturers and knew that this was happening, which pushed them even farther away from Microsoft.

After all, why would they fund their own development and pay a licensing fee to Microsoft when Nokia was getting it all for free?

Effectively, Microsoft had gone all-in with Nokia and there was no going back. But sadly for Microsoft, it was far too late. By the time Microsoft solved its production issue, four years after the introduction of the iPhone, it had fallen to a 2% market share. Nobody was developing applications for the Windows Phone. And why would they, consider the Android and iOS were clearly the winners here?

The death of Microsoft Smartphone

For its first three years, the Windows Phone app store was empty. It didn’t have Instagram, it didn’t have YouTube; it barely had anything. By 2013, the stock price of Nokia had fallen by 75%, at which point angry shareholders were threatening to just fire Steven Elop and get rid of Microsoft altogether.

In the end, that didn’t happen. Microsoft instead just purchased Nokia’s mobile phone division for $7.2 billion in 2014. Here’s the funny thing, though. The very next year, Microsoft wrote off their investment for $7.6 billion, and then to top things off, they fired almost 8,000 employees.

Microsoft kept Windows Phone on life support until October 2017, but it was clearly dead a long time before that. And yet, it’s easy to imagine the different path Windows Phone could have taken, had it only not been as greedy with its original philosophy.

Had Microsoft been willing to compromise on its control over production, it would have easily convinced the big manufacturers to use Windows Phone instead of Android. After all, back then, Google had practically no ecosystem to speak of, while Microsoft had been a software titan for decades.

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Something New

What Happened to Windows Phones?

Windows phones have gone from trailblazer devices to footnotes in mobile computing — and the downfall all happened in the span of about 10 years.

Microsoft Windows phones have gone from being pioneering trailblazer devices worthy of geek envy to mere footnotes in the evolution of mobile computing — and the downfall all happened in the span of about 10 years. But what happened to the once promising mobile smart operating system? While other competitors like BlackBerry were able to thrive after the launch of the iPhone (at least for a while), and more main stream competitors like Android became a breakout hit, why did Windows Mobile fail to catch on?

When Windows Mobile begin is up for debate. Microsoft released a series of supported devices starting in the mid 90s that ran an an operating system called Windows CE. But for our analysis, we’re going to focus on devices released in the early 2000s up until the eventual downfall. These were some of the first smart devices to have full media capabilities and offer a rich browsing experience. Early windows Mobile devices were typically referred to as PDAs, personal digital assistants, because they weren’t always phones. With the advent of 2.5G EDGE connections, the dream of having a mobile computing experience was now real.

The downfall of Windows phones truly began with the announcement of the Apple iPhone. It was at this point that the world realized that the concept of what a smart phone is was about to change. Prior to the release of the iPhone, smart devices and PDAs were existing solely in the realm of business power users and tech geeks. By 2008, Windows Mobile was still in full swing with devices from companies like HTC and Sony Ericsson acting as flagships for the operating system. While these devices were useful, they never caught on in the main stream, and never became objects of desire. Simply put, nobody wanted one. They might have one for work, but it was never a status symbol or a fashion accessory outside of geek circles.

The 2010’s And The End Of Windows Mobile

The 2010s is where Windows Mobile met its end. With the recent release of Windows 8, Windows Mobile shifted into adapting the design methodology of Windows 8 that Microsoft called Metro. Metro presented users with a series of tiles instead of a row of apps. The tiles had the advantage of being live and interactive. They could show live data such as weather reports or emails – similar to Android widgets today. However, users found the tiles to be confusing and overwhelming. The same can be said for Windows 8 which is generally considered to be one of Microsoft biggest blunders since Windows Vista.

Microsoft wanted to have its own flagship hardware maker, which led to the eventual purchase of the once-juggernaut Nokia. Unfortunately, this relationship proved disastrous and the public simply was not interested in Windows Mobile and it’s Metro design. It was at this point that most technology commentators decided that Windows Mobile was dead, whether Microsoft wanted to admit it or not. However, it was not until 2017 that Microsoft officially announced the end of Windows Mobile.

Microsoft’s failure to transition successfully into mobile computing just shows how difficult and different this technology sector is. Apple has in many ways defined what a mobile device is and Microsoft tried to make its own path. While many of their design methodologies were admirable and interesting, the public just wasn’t interested enough. Thankfully for Microsoft, the company still has a huge collection of respected brands that are still dominating various markets today.