![]() In terms of press events and marketing, the last of Microsoft’s big push for Windows Phone was probably the Nokia Lumia 1020 event on July 11 of 2013. See “Why a top-screen edge gesture doesn’t belong on a smartphone.” The action center and notifications listing was only accessible from the top edge of the screen, which is a ridiculously poor user experience for phones with larger than 3.5″ screen sizes. We also got a new “Action Center” in this version which, in my opinion, marked the first step towards bad design in Windows Phone. Windows Phone 8.1 came with some nice new Live Tile and Start Screen modifications, a restructuring of the People hub, and our first glimpse of the new speech interface called Cortana. Many everyday tasks were designed to be so much faster and easier as you can see from the old “Smoked by Windows Phone” videos. That’s not true with Android and iOS’s unintelligible cryptic icons that litter their apps and ecosystems today. Not only that, but the typography was completely understandable by anyone who has learned the language. These designs replaced the cryptic paging dots and scrollbars of iOS and Android with typography that obviously continued to the sides. Words would fly into the screen and settle down with only partial visibility that visually indicated the ability to pan horizontally between hub panels. It felt like everything was designed to genuinely make sense and yet it had a beautiful uniqueness to it. See “The Ultimate Windows Phone 7 Mango Preview”. ![]() Windows Phone 7.5’s Mango update was a huge attempt at bringing all the great features to Windows Phone 7, and it really brought a lot of unique mobile user experiences that were certainly superior to the grid-of-icons that iOS and Android were dealing with. Microsoft had to do something to catch the public’s eye in the budding smartphone wars. And Google’s Android was gaining steam after its initial release in 2008. Apple’s iPhone had gained functionality like picture messaging and Exchange ActiveSync and 3rd party apps that finally turned it into a legitimate smartphone. However, in 2010, the smartphone world was changing. In many ways their features still surpass the capabilities of some smartphones today (ink handwriting in every app, customizable apps, programmable hardware buttons, etc.). ![]() Those Windows CE based smartphone operating systems were very powerful at the time. Pocket PC was around since 2000 when it gained that new name from the previous Windows CE 2.1 for Palm Sized PCs. Those date back to 2003 when the Pocket PC operating system was renamed. Previously, Microsoft had been working with a larger number of aging smartphone operating systems such as Windows Mobile 6.5 and Windows Mobile Standard Edition. Windows Phone’s journey began with the announcement of Windows Phone 7 back in October of 2010.
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