A Look at Microsoft’s Unreleased “All Screen” Lumia Windows Phone

Megalith

Megalith

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Windows Central is mourning the death of Windows Phone by sharing an exclusive look at Microsoft’s first “bezel-less” handset, which was canceled and eventually became the Lumia 435: its super-clean, minimalistic, and futuristic design was pretty surprising for a sub-$200 Windows phone in 2014.

I can't help but wonder why this Lumia was killed. It's a unique take on a low-end device, which I'm sure would've gained media attention. People in the market for a low-end device would've loved this, even with it running Windows Phone 8.1. In 2014, Windows Phone was doing OK, and as such people weren't so skeptical about buying one, especially for $200. It has good battery life, a great screen, and a unique design but is still distinctively Lumia.
 
Sounds like the issue was Microsoft's lack of direction with the product and also users thinking they really need all the thousand's of apps on Android/iOS. My friend had a lower end Lumia which cost under $100 but given the price it was actually a terrific phone so long as you're okay but built in apps. It pretty much has all the stuff there for email, web, skype, etc. and camera was also very good. I think if Microsoft was smarter they could have developed it but it went the same way Zune and many other product they made. There certainly could have been market for these if only MS has this vision.
 
I loved the tiles in my Zune HD. It didn't hurt that the interface was super snappy and didn't have any slowdown overtime like other phones did.
 
Ordeith said:
Subjective. Numerous design awards and industry accolades suggests the opposite was true. The apps were the problem.
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The apps (or lack of them) was a SYMPTOM. The real problem was MS was quick to abandon existing users AND developers in their quest to perfect their platform. "The first smartphone out of beta" (Lumia 900 running WP7) was made instantly obsolete by Windows Phone 8 only 3 months after it launched...with no upgrade path for the suckers who bought one. Then they did it AGAIN when transitioning to Windows Mobile 10! After being burned once or twice, consumers and developers quickly learned to avoid the dumpster fire of a platform and move on to a mobile OS that would actually be supported for a year or two after release!
 
personaly think tiles were great for .............old folk or techno phobes big simple icons easy to read basic apps phone,camera etc
 
Yaka said:
personaly think tiles were great for .............old folk or techno phobes big simple icons easy to read basic apps phone,camera etc
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Well is there much of a reason for a bunch of essentially white space between apps? When you could use that space for something why not?
 
Semantics said:
Well is there much of a reason for a bunch of essentially white space between apps? When you could use that space for something why not?
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Is there any reason why my phone should always default to what is, effectively, a fixed, buggy, and not always effective notification screen that has no sense of notification priority? It's bad enough when my email tile rarely worked, when the calendar tile went, I didn't have any use for the large tiles. The small tiles were just a less readable version of regular icons with labels.

I had a Focus, then a 920. As if I wasn't stupid enough for being left behind twice, I went and got a 650. WinPhone/Mobile, etc all sucked. WP7/ WM8/ WM10 were full of lackluster ideas that seemed good on paper, coupled with the extra goodness of horrible execution.

Microsoft's mobile ambitions are dead, not to a lack of trying, but to simply not giving a flying hoot about their existing customers. A familiar story at Microsoft. They can get away with it on desktops, but competition actually exists in the mobile space.
 
jeremyshaw said:
Is there any reason why my phone should always default to what is, effectively, a fixed, buggy, and not always effective notification screen that has no sense of notification priority? It's bad enough when my email tile rarely worked, when the calendar tile went, I didn't have any use for the large tiles. The small tiles were just a less readable version of regular icons with labels.

I had a Focus, then a 920. As if I wasn't stupid enough for being left behind twice, I went and got a 650. WinPhone/Mobile, etc all sucked. WP7/ WM8/ WM10 were full of lackluster ideas that seemed good on paper, coupled with the extra goodness of horrible execution.

Microsoft's mobile ambitions are dead, not to a lack of trying, but to simply not giving a flying hoot about their existing customers. A familiar story at Microsoft. They can get away with it on desktops, but competition actually exists in the mobile space.
Click to expand...


My lumia 830 has been the most problem free phone I've owned. Great battery life (I go days without charging it), AMAZING camera with OIS, and it worked *gasp* as an actual phone..... OS was very fast/fluid, and this wasn't even a flagship model. And 10 is an upgrade for 8, so anyone on 8 should have an upgrade path to get 10, even if it required bypassing your carrier and using the MS Insider app.

The only thing they screwed up on was the app store. MS should have dumped money into getting the best WM developers to port the best android/IOS apps to WM platform. They should also have reached out to the big companies/services and offered to have their dev team create apps for them to push adoption. But without the apps, they couldn't keep up with A/IOS.

Now we are left with only 2 actual choices, and less competition in the market is *NEVER* a good thing....
 
DPI said:
Subjective. But lack of consumer adoption suggests the opposite was true. The tiles were ugly as sin.
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You missed the "I've" in my statement. It's the best system "I've" used. Yes, subjective, I specified that I was the subject.
 
Too little, too late, I guess.

I don't want to see any platform fail, as competition is always best for consumers.
 
There were tons of problems with windows phone.

Lack of support in phone stores. Simply put the sales people didn't want to sell the devices. They had no motivation because MS didn't do what it took to motivate them.
Lack of apps, was huge
But also lack of compelling devices, never once did MS produce a flagship device. Apple always produces a flagship every year.
Samsung produces a flagship android every year, and if they screw up one year someone elses flagship take the top spot. Every windows phone released was at least 6 months late to the game for the specs it offered.
You cannot launch and expect to have a new OS without having a top end device. MS just never got this every device they made had compromises that clearly made it not flagship.


So when you are missing all those things how do you compete, well simple you sell something for a really good price. And that is what MS did they tried to carve out some market share by making cheap but good phones that offered a very good value point. But once they had some market share with that they needed to approach the above problems. The whole flagship phone was the one they could have done for sure. Just contract Samsung to make a device like the note. It is really ironic that while MS really pushed with the surface and its pen they never could see that on their phone platform. Even more ironic when you figure they make onenote.

Microsoft did a lot of cool things with windows phone but they completely screwed up the execution. You don't run around crapping on apple for not having copy and paste then turn around and release a product that doesn't have copy and paste. They were constantly behind the curve because they were constantly focused on a 2 - 3 year old problem. The other phone makers were already past that. Fluidity and stuff just didn't matter as much when MS was doing good with it. That mattered back in the windows mobile days when SOCs were so weak. If you come from behind you have to do something to catch up, cut some deals, and spend some real cash. MS was never willing to spend that cash. They sold out the long term vision for the investors quarterly selfishness.
 
They never really committed to the phones or portable media devices. So.... can't expect much.
 
We had a Microsoft rep give us several nice Windows Phone's a few years back. They were hoping we'd make some apps for them. However, the clients that pay us to make apps didn't want to spend the money on Windows Phone as they wouldn't get an ROI.
These were nice phones, had a decent camera - a shame they never caught on. Microsoft bough Xamarin and incorporated it into Visual Studio. The idea was you could write cross-platform apps. I'm usually not a fan of these apps - they seem to always have limitations and don't feel "native". There typically isn't a huge cost savings either (based on projects I've worked on).
 
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