I haven't seen or handled one, Omar. On paper, they look OK, but the hard truth for MSFT and Nokia is that they don't have some huge win in their phone or platform, other than possible integration with Microsoft Office.

A great low-light camera? That's nice, but... if I need a much better camera than my phone, then why not go and get a real camera? Suddenly I have a lot more features to handle low-light situations, as well as a real flash.

So I'm not seeing a convincing reason for anyone to switch to Windows on a phone from ... anything else.

Their marketing campaign certainly is annoying, tho. Switch to their phone because some celebrity has done so? Yea, what's the thinking there?

Lots of celebrities get breast implants. Doesn't mean I'm about to do so. Celebrities hop from bed to bed. Ain't going there, either. Celebrities say more stupid crap before noon on any given day that most of us can conceive of in our lives. So their "choice" of phone is of no more account to me than their choice of plastic surgeon that week.


From my perspective, the Blackberry Z10 is the phone I'm going to be eyeballing for the next year. It has features that interest me, and unlike 99% of s/w developers out there, I've used QNX Neutrino (which was/is developed up there in Ontario, BTW) and I was highly impressed with that embedded OS platform. Low overhead, tightly written, robust, good API's, written for C developers as well as C++. We used it at cisco for the 'next generation' router OS, which I think is now shipping on the highest end router platforms. If I were going to develop phone applications to do something more important than allowing teenagers to chatter with each other, (eg, remote process or industrial control) I'd be looking at the Z10 really closely. I really cannot say enough good things about Neutrino. Unlike every other embedded OS that I used in my career, it did not suck. It was developed by people who obviously had been around the block a few times and made a decision to do it right.

I like my iPhone 5 well enough right now, but I'm the first to admit it has areas of the OS and s/w that are already handled much better in Android - like being able to turn WiFi/Bluetooth/etc on/off from a widget on the home screen. The lack of direct access to the flash storage in the iPhone is annoying at times. I'd like to be able to have the option to just mount the phone like an external thumb drive on my Mac. Apple, of course, wants to keep people fenced inside their application environment. The iPhone can't sync or back up over Bluetooth. You can over WiFi and direct cable connection, but I'd like to be able to do something with the Bluetooth connection other than bind the phone to my laptop as a hotspot on the road. That hotspot feature, tho, the iPhone does flawlessly, and that's been pretty nifty.

My wife has a more recent Droid phone, and likes it well enough but for the lack of battery life. The thing is a wretched power hog. It solved her #1 complaint about the Droid X - hanging up because her hair touched the screen.

The iOS 7 upgrade will tell me whether I'm keeping the iPhone platform long term. I'm probably going to break out the old s/w hacker kung-fu this autumn and write some apps for the iPhone and that will tell me part of the future. I tried writing apps for the Droid X and gave up. The Android environment is bizarre - it's enough like Java to suck you in, but not completely like Java to avoid patent infringement, which is terribly annoying when you're trying to use existing Java tools. In the end, it was like hitting myself in the head with a ball pein hammer - it felt really good to just stop.