Back in the developmental times of eighth-grade, I received my first cell phone. Had I known that my first-generation Motorola RAZR would be the most exceptional phone experience of my life, I would have held on to that slim, shining technological achievement for many years to come.
But in 2012, I came down with a degenerative disease known as "Windows Phone."
At the beginning of my diagnosis, the sickness was only at Nokia Lumia, stage 510. But before I knew it, my disease had progressed to stage 720. After over three years of suffering, I decided enough is enough. I wanted to share my Windows Phone story so that those enduring the same ailment can have hope and can seek treatment.
At the eve of smartphone hype, everyone wanting to upgrade from their flip-phone came to a fork of three separate paths (nobody cares about Blackberries). The center path, the most frequently traveled and quite well-known, took the traveler down the road to the Apple iPhone. The path on the left, a slightly newer path with rising popularity, took the traveler down a road to the Google Android. The path on the right, the most questionable of the three, with a construction zone sign ripped out of the ground and tossed aside into the bushes, took the traveler down a road to the Windows Phone. At one point, in a time not too long ago, each path was equally balanced with its own pros and cons. But at one point, in a time not too long ago, people thought powdered wigs were attractive and everyone had syphilis.
When I decided to write a rant about Windows Phone, I wanted it to be as fair as possible. So I will refrain from concentrating on the fact that I’ve had to send a Nokia Lumia in for replacement twice, do numerous phone wipes, replace my SIM card, spend dozens of hours on either the Internet or phone tech support, manually transfering all of my contacts one-by-one, or endure hours of the most painfully unhelpful and unintelligent T-Mobile employees that even gave me some free accessories out of pity. Maybe those were just due to fluke occurrences and I was one of the consistently unlucky ones. Fine by me.
I started to get annoyed when I “upgraded” from the Lumia 510 to the 720. One of the few positive comments I’m willing to make is that Nokia constructs solid phones. They do not break. I had the entertaining privilege of dropping my phone on hard surfaces in front of deeply concerned iPhone owners. But tear off the indestructible Nokia hardware, and you’ll expose the terrible software within.
My experience can be summarized as a two-pronged attack. There's T-Mobile's service and there's Windows Phone software. The two are fully intertwined, like two pythons strangling a rat. Only the rat is actually you, and the two pythons are two pythons.
The T-Mobile service is the earthquake’s primary wave (if you thought I was going to wait a few paragraphs before another metaphor, this might not be the article for you). It shakes you enough not to injure you, but enough that you know something is terribly wrong. The service is absolutely awful. In almost every building I step foot in, I get zero reception unless I’m standing within two feet from a window. This includes my house, restaurants, any academic building at Willamette...whatever the place, I’ll probably have zero bars. If you’ve seen some weirdo with his phone pressed up to the large glass walls of Rogers Music Center, that was probably me. Are you in a more rural area? Forget about it. The thought that raises my blood pressure is that T-Mobile knows their reception is terrible and yet they refuse to take logical action. They offer cheaper packages and desperate deals to make up for their dysfunctional service. The problem is, if you can’t get any bars on your smartphone, is a slightly cheaper phone plan even that cost-effective?
But alas, dear reader, do not shed a tear! T-Mobile has a solution to all of your troubles. When they realized how egregiously deprived their cellular service had become, rather than purchasing more cell towers, like, you know, someone with common sense would do, they took a much more complicated approach by releasing a feature called “Wi-Fi Calling.” This crusty band-aid of a "solution" allows users to opt into give the phone calling and texting capabilities using a Wi-Fi connection. On Windows Phone, it has several adjustable options bundled in a very easy-to-use app. That is, if you enjoy apps that don’t serve their only advertised function. What, you think this is Apple or something? No! This app has not worked for me once. And I try. OH MY GOD, DO I TRY. I TRY ALL THE TIME. I’ve had this app probably close to two years, and even after getting a replacement phone and a new sim card, it remains broken.
Due to these egregious reception issues, texting can be a bit difficult. I’ve grown numb to the “unable to send” alert accompanied by a shallow frowny-face. But it is at its worst when reception wavers between one and zero bars. Often I will send a text message and I will not get an “unable to send” alert for hours, days, or if I’m really lucky, eternity! This creates the false assumption that the message actually sent and can be quite problematic for communication. To add fuel to the fire, miniscule reception will often reduce texts to an abridged, jumbled series of messages that it sends to the recipient. This can be catastrophic if the wrong words are mixed up.
For instance, I once sent my girlfriend a text asking when her event was taking place. My phone seemed to have full bars and there was no indication that it didn’t send. I received no response from her and tried sending multiple texts asking what was going on. But she never received the texts until seven hours after the event, which made me look like a flaky jackass. She was understandably upset and I was horribly confused. Adding insult to injury, I attempted to express my confusion in several text messages, but what she received were a series of jumbled snippets sent in a random order at random times even throughout the next day. Around that time, I decided to switch to the Facebook messenger for texting whenever possible. We met up in person and sorted everything out, but it caused significant stress and left us both fuming at my phone. It made me wonder how many people I’ve left hanging or sent erroneous texts to in recent years. So if you ever desire to sabotage a friend’s relationship through miscommunication, I recommend a Windows Phone with T-Mobile!
The software is just as disgusting as the service. It used to be praised for being fast and sleek, but these days speed has become a basic expectation for smartphone operating systems. That said, it is slightly more customizable than iPhone or Android. You can adjust tile size, insert a background image behind your tiles, reorient them in whatever way you want, change tile appearance and color, and control what information each tile provides at a glance. So that's nice.
I’m going to try to keep the remainder of this rant organized, but this is the part of my phone experience that really makes me want to chuck it through the window of Microsoft's headquarters.
APPS. Not something you really worry about these days, is it? If you have an iPhone or Android device, almost everything has an app. Now set aside about a fifth of all those apps and you have the junkyard that is Windows Phone Marketplace. Expect the majority those apps are somehow less functional and buggier than the same apps on other smartphones (looking at you, Instagram, Words With Friends, Facebook, Spotify, etc). On top of that, expect third party developers to rip off about a fourth of the apps companies refuse to release for Windows Phone. Then, expect about 50 percent of those third party apps to be shut down via legal threats from the real app developers, who still refuse to release a real app for Windows Phone.
Take Snapchat, for example. Snapchat never officially released for Windows Phone, but about a year ago there were several third-party replacements available, "6Snap" being the best. After some time using this admittedly decent alternative, I received an email from the real Snapchat, saying that if I continued to use a third party application, they would permanently ban my account from accessing Snapchat. I didn’t think the threat was legitimate, until they actually did. "That’s fine, I can just create a new account," I naively reckoned. Nope. Snapchat had 6Snap removed from the Windows Phone Marketplace, along with every other Snapchat client app in existence. Apparently, someone with a third party app leaked Snapchat’s server data and Snapchat retaliated. But instead of patching the flaw that allowed such a leak, Snapchat blanket banned all third party apps everywhere. This meant the entire Windows Phone user population was completely cut off from the app, and Snapchat decided to never release its app for Windows Phone because of the incident. I haven’t been able to use Snapchat since.
Instagram will not let you upload videos, Words With Friends makes strange noises, shows wrong information, and has sign-in issues, the official YouTube app is so awful that a third-party app took its place long ago, and connecting headphones often results in audio only playing through one ear and the phone must be restarted several times to fix it. A Windows Phone user can also expect apps to crash frequently. Every app will periodically close itself, some more than others. Oh, and whichever developer had the bright idea to alphabetize the apps list but horrendously scramble the settings list into a completely nonsensical order was a jerk.
The Windows Phone has become such a joke that I've see multiple ads showing apps available for “all” smartphones, including the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry. THE BLACKBERRY. As a left-handed cello Performance major, with the spelling of my last name one letter away from that of the male genitalia, I can handle a good insult. But this is too much. Imagine if “Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2” got better reviews than “A Walk to Remember.” And no, it didn’t, if you’re wondering.
Microsoft’s Windows Phone has been reduced to its failed child -- it’s no wonder that its remaining users are switching to iPhones and Android devices at a rapidly incerasing rate. Windows Phone-pride is now Windows Phone-shame. Luckily, I will be joining the emigrants shortly. Think about how many people you encounter with iPhones. I haven’t seen another person with a Windows Phone in over a year. While it’s saddening in its own way, I’m ecstatic that so many individuals have successfully fought off the disease and are starting down the long road to recovery.
