Do you wish Windows Phone still existed?

Nokia Lumia 950 XL
Nokia Lumia 950 XL (Image credit: Android Central)

As we get ready to say farewell to 2020, we noticed some parts of the AC forums are feeling a bit nostalgic. Looking back at old devices is a lot of fun, and recently, a few of our members started reminiscing about Windows Phone.

One forum member kicked off the conversation, sharing that they just now said farewell to their Nokia Lumia Icon and replaced it with the Pixel 5. As you might expect, this got other members to look back at their own Windows Phone memories.

Here's what they shared:

The Nokia Icon was one of the best cell phone ever made. It never, in six years, let me down. When I say never, I mean never. The camera and Nokia's software was way ahead of the game. The pictures were stunning. The OS was fluid and fast. Full Microsoft Office in the palm of your hand. My wife refuses to give hers up. And now that I'm on a Pixel 5, she says she has my old Icon as a replacement....

beantownsouth

Welcome! I still have my Lumia 925 which I somehow managed earlier this year to get to WM10. I loved Windows Phone and used it as a daily driver until I switched from the Lumia 950 to the original Google Pixel in January of 2017. I am currently using a Pixel 4a 5G. You will love the Pixel series.

worldspy99

I absolutely LOVED my WP ICON!! I switched to the Pixel 2 and have been very happy with it, and am now contemplating on whether to get the Pixel 5, or wait for the P6. I really wished that Microsoft had continued with the Windows Phones, as they, and the camera, were GREAT!! Now, the Surface phone is just another Android phone, without a camera. Don't get me wrong ... the Pixels, and their...

NMCynthia

This got us to wondering — Do you wish Windows Phone still existed?

Join the conversation in the forums!

Joe Maring

Joe Maring was a Senior Editor for Android Central between 2017 and 2021. You can reach him on Twitter at @JoeMaring1.

34 Comments
  • Most definitely! While my Android does what it's supposed to do, My Windows Phone ICON did it soooo much better in so many ways. And it is was smooth, easy to use, multi tasking a breeze, and not all of the D@#$ crap wear either.
  • Yes.
    I miss windows 10 mobile with every fibre of my being. Windows launcher looks good and I have used it since it was arrow launcher. I switched from individual office apps to the one office app and I love that especially since I moved my life to office 365.
    But even with the partly functional your phone app, continue on pc in Microsoft Edge, it still isn't the same as running the full os.
    I still regret never having bought the Lumia 650 or the Lumia 950. I still have the Xperia zx premium I bought instead.
  • I wish there was more competition. Bit let's be honest, that wasn't Windows phone.
  • Then you wish there had been better marketing because Windows Phone/Mobile was a much better OS/platform than Android was.
  • There's an argument for Windows phone. Windows mobile sucked. That was the problem, they eventually made it into an excellent OS, but by that point people were already sick of it.
  • That's typical Microsoft. Their first versions of anything sucks, but they finally get their act together (usually). But yeah, by the time Windows Phone matured into a decent competitor, most users had already abandoned it.
  • Yup, I had a couple of Windows Phones,Shame it never could get the apps. I think it's high point was when WP once achieved more market share in Italy and than IOS ! Imagine that ,I think it was around 11% .
  • Now imagine how I feel being from Central Europe, where Windows Phones reached a market share as high as 15% and had all the apps from banking, NFC pay, local press, mobile companies, insurance, TV program, local stores, etc...
  • Yes, I really wish the os had continued to exist. I really loved the design and everything it did - especially when they released WM10
  • Oh yeah. I still have a few that aren't very useful anymore since they lost support. But they were so easy to use. The Icon was my favorite also. I still like getting them out and playing games on them.
  • Hell ya! I loved my Windows Icon, it was in my opinion the best phone I've ever owned. If I had to choose over my Note10+. The Icon would be my choice!
  • For me it still exists. I use a Lumia 950XL Dual Sim as my daily driver. So far it's been the best device ever for me. It's old of course and recently I even got another, of course second hand, to use it as a spare parts donor and to play with Windows 10 ARM. This devices are tanks, literally it's hard to really damage them, and my daily driver device has had a very though use. I've changed the 20MPx camera four times, seems the OIS degrades with time, but it's a thing I;ve seen in many other devices with OIS, thankfully the Lumia 950XL has an easy replaceble camera, as many other parts, so it's faily easy to keep it running. Also the battery, since it's replaceble you can keep it going as long you can still get batteries, which reminds me to get a couple more. Also Continnum, it by far one of the best things, I have the HP Lapdock and the Microsoft HD500 Display Dock and in both I can use it in a desktop mode, even connecting to my PC to have a full desktop experience. Something I've also noticed is the sound recording, so far I haven't seen, or heard, any other device that can record audio the way it does, it has 4 mics, when you record audio it's crisp and clean. With video it simply crushes even the LGs that are in my opinion the followers. The Lumia might not allow to select the mics to use front, back or omni directional recording, but the quality of the sound in every video is amazing. This comes from the 930, which I also have as a support device. I mean these Lumia devices where awesome in every way. Of course people will say about the apps... well, I mean, sure I've lost many apps in the way but I'm fine, I can use the web version of many and those that I can't I use BlueStacks in the PC, then with the Lumia through Continnum I can literally use evey Android app with my Lumia, even remotely. I wish Nadella was removed as a CEO, he has just pushed Azure and everything related, since that was his baby project, and put someone that brings WinMo back.
  • Same here with a Lumia 950 DS. I tried iPhone for a year and now have owned a Samsung Galaxy S10e. As time passes, my Lumia 950 had become a sidekick for Android, but I simply cannot let it go, as there are use-cases for which neither iOS nor Android is a solution.
  • I miss the fluidity and just the general design of the OS. The kinetic sense of flicking through tiles is still the most engaging launcher action I've used and while I know technically Android is more customizable it honestly doesn't feel like it. I miss having a parallax background image in my tiles and having that smart and beautifully designed OS and user experience consistency. Yeah the apps were often half assed but the core functionality of the phone was great. GROOVE MUSIC! Damn was that good. Time to wrap this up. I'm feeling triggered. Windows phone is making me emotional.
  • Metro was a brilliant UI. It was head and shoulders better than anything I ever saw on Apple (and I still detest the Apple UI), and better than Android, at the time. Ironically, Microsoft has figured out how to do excellent front ends on Android, and the Microsoft Launcher is excellent. I feel that Metro, at this point, would be a step back from what Metro was ---- but it would be nice to see that UI still available on a handset.
  • Well, to me the Metro design is exactly what Surface Duo is screaming for.
  • I loved Windows Phone 8.1 but I never liked Windows 10. I really hated the Edge browser. My Lumia 640 will forever be one of my favorite phones. The world moved on.
  • I'm with you on that. W10 mobile lost me and I tried Android and stayed for the apps.
  • Judging by the comments, people still like and miss WP. I don't miss it per se but I do remember the gold times I had using it. IMO it was the best OS at that time. Excellent UI!
  • Yes I miss it and wish it still existed. The Windows Mobile OS was really interesting and full of potential and it would have offered at least a third choice between just Android and iOS. I liked the design of the OS, it's fluidity and overall functionality. Not perfect by any means but there was definitely something there. That unique look with the live tiles was a winner on it's own. Nevermind that the Nokia Lumia devices were quite unique themselves and had a really eye opening and very catchy design. Unfortunately, as many others have said, I never really warmed up to it, not like BB10. By the time I was contemplating a switch to Windows Mobile from BB10, it was too late. The OS and hardware went belly up... Too bad, since it ended up as yet another case of "what might have been".
  • I miss WP and WebOS
  • I think any new OS will stand or fall on whether they can get developers to make apps on a par with Android or iOS for it. Most people these days are 'settled' in either the Android or iOS ecosystem and rely heavily on Google services for many everyday tasks. So unless say Huawei with its new harmony OS can make a compelling reason for the majority of people to switch it won't matter if they come up with a superior OS because outside of China it would end up going the same way windows phone did simply because because of lack of apps. That's the challenge for any new operating system to overcome as between them Google and apple really do have a stranglehold in this area of tech.
  • I do wish it was still around. I bought a 2nd hand low end Nokia phone towards the end of it's life to see what Windows phones were like. Quite liked it but in my part of the world the lack of apps killed it so stayed with Android. I still have the phone as an emergency one in my car.
  • I can't say I miss it as much as I missed the quality of the Nokia phones. There were some things I liked but when I went back to Android, I realized how basic WM really was. And that's not to downplay the OS because it was good, but the versatility and progress of Android just made me no longer care for it.
  • Good reasoning, I feel the same way, I hadn't used Android when I got my windows phone I went from a feature phone to a Nokia symbian then windows and initially thought wow this is awesome but after retiring my Lumia 820 for an original Moto g I quickly realised why there were so many Android users compared to windows. It seemed to do everything and had all the missing apps I'd been painstakingly trying to find for my beloved Lumia. So yeah enjoyed windows for a while but don't really miss it.
  • I'm always happy for competition, but Windows should have built on what they had & what gave them a fan base instead of what Windows Phone became. I HATED the tiles!
  • I used my Lumia 950 until last summer. The family were using others. We finally had to make the switch after apps started being shut down. We went with Samsung Galaxy 9 series. The awfulness of Android was why I switched to the promise of a Windows Phone 7 many years ago. I kept with it and various phone upgrades over the years. We were happy. Everything worked, and worked well together. When the apps started getting shut down it was time to go. We did Android on the Samsungs for a year. After so many years, it didn't seem like much had changed with Android. After a year of crashes, complaints, and data mangling updates, it was time for Android and Samsung to take a hike again. I swore I'd never use an Apple iPhone. Spending the money for a phone status symbol made me slightly nauseous. My iPad worked fairly seamlessly after multiple updates, and we needed some phone stability. Windows app interconnectedness gets better all the time. We made the switch. It's the Apple iPhone 12 series for everyone now. If my apps still worked on my Windows Phone, I'd still be using it. I fired it up a couple of days ago. It's still a joy to use. I was a brief Microsoft Band user (I could see the writing on the wall and returned it after a week), and a Zune and Windows Phone user, I will never forgive Microsoft for their lack of commitment and how they abandoned their customers. Microsoft on Android phones is a Frankenstein horror. Congratulations on pushing me to Apple.
  • Oh yes, the Bands. I had two of them Liket the first gen better. It was a joy.
    I can't understand Microsoft's lack of commitment either. I mean Apple took its time decades to be where it is right now. And Microsoft instead kept tossing out everything if it was not successfull in a couple of years. And the saddest thing is that when app gap started to be a thing, it was always Microsoft to pull the support from their own ecosystem first.
  • The Palm Pre Plus and the Lumia 1530 are still my two favorite phones of all time.
    I remember people asking me why i was carrying a tablet around when i had the 1530.
  • I used all the Windows phones until I shifted to the Erstwhile Nexus Line.
    As I recollect, in my group of friends I owned a Windows Phone i.e. Lumia 730. They would laugh it off but I knew how good Windows Phone were. I explained to my friends and some changed to Windows OS. I really miss those days. I believe Windows Phone were the 1st phones to have the Dark Mode on by default. I do regret not buying 950 but it was reaching its limit.
    They were ahead in the OS game. Sadly, they couldn't capitalize on it. I wish they would come !
  • Windows Mobile software ware just as fluid if not more so than Apple and in many cases way ahead of Android. I had the Lumina 640 back in the day. Even though it wasn't the top SoC champ of the group, you'd never know it by how it performed. As with anything what killed it were three things. Yes it did come late to the party. By that time iOS and Android had a strong foot hold. The lack of polished native apps from known developers didn't help either. There wasn't any real YT and such. Then that leads to the bigger blow. The outright hostility Google had for Microsoft. For that Apple did have a begrudging relationship with Google with search that lead to them having YT and the other Google suite of apps on the iPhone. No such luck with Windows Mobile. Google even took active steps to sabotage any real efforts to make an app that would work with their services on WM. If they could have found a way to get together on this Windows Phones would still be going strong.
  • YES! I won't even their away my lumuas 920, 1020 and 950.
  • I dearly miss it actually. I was on a lumia 650 and the available apps had me covered.
    the camera was great for a phone that I got for 135 euros and the system was really snappy in response.
    Metro UI with the live tiles was great idea and it sadden me that MS is abandoning it even in windows for pc, I even spent the life of my first android after the 650 with a metro style launcher, Even if now I have settled for ms arrow.
    But overall the one thing that I never felt in android was that system response. I buy and use budget phones so to have a snappy phone is rare and so far only winphones managed to give me a good experience.
  • That question invokes such strange feelings for me! For the sake of tech ecosystem diversity and competition....yes. For myself personally? Were I still "Windows-Forward" in my personal computing otherwise? Absolutely. But since I've moved primarily to ["full-fat"] Linux and secondarily to ChromeOS for my computing life beyond the phone, it would no longer make sense for me to want one. The reason this is such an emotionally complicated question for me today is that while Windows Phone was never my daily driver, for a little while, I had fallen in love with the vision and idea and design of them, and had been looking for a viable opportunity to jump on at the time the collapse began. I guess that among non-users, you could maybe say that I was among the most passionate "outsider" fans of the platform once upon a time. So, while the me of today would have no use for one, the me of yesterday was really sold on, well, at the very least, the IDEA of them, and so, that whole cocktail of emotions, paired with still to this day thinking that the live tiles home screen idea is one of the coolest ideas out there, and still to this day feeling the trailing wisps of smoke from the anger that once burned over how mishandled the whole thing felt to me to let it die...makes that a complex question. I suppose that even if for absolutely no other reason than that I think the tech scene would not only be more interesting and robust as a three way fight rather than as a two way, and probably healthier too, sure, I wish they were still around as that "third way". I'm watching the open source Linux Phone world's development with great interest, hoping that someday it will provide that third way. But til then, having Windows around would've been nice.