Thanks for buying a Windows Phone, sucker.

Buying full price phone + prepaid (Virgin Mobile, Cricket, others) < free phone + standard carrier plan (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, etc)

The big carriers charge you $70 to $100 a month for the same service you can get from a prepaid for $30 to $50 because the extra $40 to $50 is to subsidize the phone. Essentially, over the course of a 2 year contract, you are paying $960 to $1200 for the phone you get for "free" or at a discounted rate.

Just to give an example of what I'm referring to:

I'm on a 2 yr contract and pay 20€ a month for a data & SMS flat rate, plus 100min to all networks included. If I were to get a phone with that contract, they'd charge me 15€ a month of top of that 20€, ie 35€. So over 2 yrears I'm effectively paying 360€ for that phone. Now if I wanted to buy that exact same phone right now, I can go to a store and get it for 240€.

Can't agree enough with this. I worked out the numbers on my phone in the thread about the subsidized XBoxes, and the phone I paid $250 for would have cost me $1500 if I'd gotten it "for free." People really need to start understanding this and buying phones this way.

To be fair, though, 1.6 is a very old version of Android, and in fact it was only current for about a month (mid-September-mid-October 2009) before 2.0 came out, which probably has much better compatibility with current apps. Sucks that you're stuck on it, but I don't know if it's much of an indictment of Android's backwards compatibility on the whole.

Pretty sure the deal they signed with Nokia would say something like Microsoft shall make the software and Nokia shall make the hardware and never the opposite upon pain of fiery corporate death in the first paragraph. or someone really FUCKED up.

Well yes, some of it is to subsidize the phone, but a large chunk of it is also the difference in service and performance, which is pretty significant unless you're always in the city. The big carriers are the ones who actually own all the towers you're using. The rest either have a pretty small network footprint and get by everywhere else on roaming agreements, or they're virtual carriers that have nothing BUT roaming agreements. This can be a pretty big limitation on service, both in terms of performance (priority goes to subscribers to the carrier that owns the tower, so you can get bumped out leading to dropped calls or data sessions, various features can get delayed/messed up while roaming, etc) and coverage.

That said, obviously they wouldn't offer the subsidies if they weren't making a sweet profit off of it, so you can't ignore that difference, and depending on where you are the problems I mention above could be minimal, so it might be worth the savings if you're cool shelling out the cash upfront. And if you're on a major carrier and DON'T do contract subsidies (unless you have a specific reason you think you'll want to cancel in the next 2 years), you're an idiot, because then you're really overpaying.

I don't even know what you're trying to say here. In the future, all games for Windows Phone will be written using WP8's NDK (which makes them an easy port from the Android/iOS versions, as opposed to a full-rewrite in C#). Games using the NDK will never run on any WP7 device, full stop. There's no ngen or cloud compile or anything to talk about here.

Sounds like theorycrafting in defense of bad-deal subsidized phones to me. "Always in the city" applies specifically to limited-area carriers like Cricket and MetroPCS and makes sense as far as that goes, but the "works anywhere on someone else's network" carriers (like the one I use) work just fine. As far as I can tell the price difference is entirely due to the fact that they subsidize the phones, and that huge of a gulf is made possible by the very odd way cell phone consumers have been conditioned to view phones as being necessarily "free" or "cheap," two-year contracts being basically required, and prepaid carriers being for poor people with bad credit.

How dare you, sir! I may have been generalizing, and I may have been grossly oversimplifying, and in a minute I'm about to vaguely appeal to authority, but theorycrafting I was not!

What you're saying has some truth to it, but there's more to it than you finding a good deal and the other sheeple overpaying for no reason. Your carrier probably does work fine, and overall you're probably saving money, but I guarantee you the service would be better on one of the big contract ones, likely with much faster data speeds. I'm not saying the difference in service is WORTH the difference in price; that depends on where you live and what your priorities are, among other things, but all else being equal, virtual subscribers are treated differently by the networks and this can have an effect.

Without going into detail so the stormtroopers dont get me, I have a smidge of an inside scoop on how the networks are designed that also means, I'll admit, that my livelihood may give me a vested interest, but I'm not just postulating, and if not for aforementioned livelihood I'd seriously consider going the no contract route myself. But there are still both upsides and downsides to the switch outside of phone subsidies.

Out of curiosity, what do you get for data speeds?

I'm not saying you're wrong about the way virtual subscribers are handled, just that you're wrong about the effect that it has. I mean, I didn't always have a prepaid phone. I've had almost every major carrier's service at one point or another, and I've talked about this in detail with people who've used them all recently, and at times even compared them side-by-side. In particular, I've used both this phone and my last phone while traveling all around the country. I haven't seen any difference in the level of service. I haven't dropped a call, I haven't been unable to get signal when I wasn't in some entirely remote place far from civilization, and I haven't suffered through unbearably low data speeds. It's all anecdotal, of course, but I find it hard to believe that I'm that much of an outlier no matter where I go.

I have a little of that in my background too. I know the stuff you're saying. I just don't think it makes the practical impact that you're asserting.

Haven't tested them, because the other decision I made when switching away from my previous work-provided plan was that 4G wasn't worth the extra twenty bucks a month, and since that's what I had gotten used to I resigned myself to doing my big downloading via WiFi at home and limiting my away internet usage to simple web browsing and email and navigation. All of those work tolerable well. It's too slow to stream music over, and I guess I was able to do that about half the time over my last carrier's 3G, so maybe it's somewhat slower, but it's also not a particularly relevant data point since I opted into last-gen internet as it is.

Games for WP7 don't have a choice -- they have to write things that way. The reason that'll change with WP8 is that mobile gamers also have iOS and Android versions, and writing in C is still, even today in 2012 absurdly, the best way to make your code as easy to port as possible. The amount of effort required to make an NDK version of a game that uses Android and iOS's NDKs is much less than the effort needed to redo it in Silverlight.

So ngen is when you take MSIL code into native for the processor into a device specific image. It's now a service that is centrally managed and you dont have to compile on the phone. I'm not talking uhh, natively native code, just published MSIL apps that get ngen'd and signed over the platforms, once. Then they get downloaded and installed.

I have a lot of this in my background, and this is incorrect information to my knowledge. I've seen these types of statements before and have access to the tools necessary to test this, yet I have always been unable to do so. I'd love to know what you're basing this assertion on.

Which assertion? There are two separate ones in there: prioritization and feature delay while roaming.

Please excuse me! I meant prioritization specifically.

So, HTC event today in which HTC and Microsoft took the stage together and announced HTC's new Windows Phone 8X. The Verge explains that HTC and Microsoft are best buds:

This inspiration has resulted in a closer partnership with Microsoft for HTC's first set of Windows Phone 8 phones. "It will be a joint marketing campaign where our devices will be the signature devices, almost the face of Windows Phone 8 in the marketing collateral with Microsoft." This partnership extends to the device naming too, with HTC being the first and only manufacturers to include the Windows Phone 8 name in its product — a decision that was made between Microsoft and HTC. "In Windows Phone 8 marketing you will see the HTC phone as a predominant phone in that marketing campaign," he says.

So back when Nokia was trying to figure out how to make modern phones, Stephen Elop didn't want to have to compete with other phone makers on an equal footing. So he bet the company on an unpopular OS from a last-place vendor, and the only thing they had going for them that Microsoft would kiss their ass and do whatever Nokia wanted, because they had no other friends. But now Microsoft is telling Nokia that they like HTC better, even though HTC still makes semi-popular Android phones.

How chumped must Nokia feel right now? And how long before they crack and release Android devices?

Nokia does not like HTC.

Oh I love this, it's only a two paragraph article with the headline "Nokia slams HTC's Windows Phone 8 announcement, calls it a 'tactical re-branding'", the second sentence of which is this:

First comment on the page:

Fuck yes, Internet!

He totally clears that up in later comments stating that he means that the consumers didn't ask for the writers at The Verge's opinion. Why he feels that matters I have no idea. I mean, isn't the point of going to a site like The Verge to hear opinions about facts? Isn't that the point of most websites? "Here are the facts, and here's what I think about them..."

I've never understood that particular mindset. Equally baffling are the people who find it necessary to write things like, "Slow news day? Why are you even writing about this? I don't care about (topic)." Evidently you care enough to click through, read, log in, and comment, jackass.

Think how much better the internet would be if comment sections had never been invented.

Eh, not entirely true. There is such a thing as a reasonable comments section. I've seen them!

So I used my sister-in-law's Lumia 920 for a bit. It's a nice phone. I like Windows 8, and even agree that Apple really need to have a better notification system like the the W8 one.

My company issued my an iPhone 4S recently. It's actually making me appreciate my Windows Phone more, there's all these little UI things I've been taking for granted. I'm finding I'm not a fan of the iPhone's design either, it's much less comfortable to hold than my HTC 7 Trophy. I do wish though that the "not IE9" browser on my Windows Phone would steal the "jump to top" and "don't reload the entire goddamn page on back" functions.

The 7.8 update was released on the 31st Jan for Windows Phone 7.

Not to mention that the iPhone's keyboard fucking sucks.

If your carrier chooses to send it to you. Fucking sprint.

I'm with Vodafone and I've been very happy with the speed at which they've put out the updates.

The new start screen is weird. The big tiles are bigger than before, so you can only get six on the screen at a time, but the small tiles are really helpful and most apps are still useful at that size. I've gone for a sexy mix of both :)

I like the Bing lockscreen wallpaper option.

Is there a good, free turn by turn directions app? My father has a WP7 phone (thankfully he's almost done his contract and he will be upgrading soon), but is going on a driving vacation and would like turn by turn.

Yeah but you still need to confirm each step, so it's useless for driving.

The Register and others are reporting that Windows Phone 8 is being end-of-lifed in July 2014, 16 months from now. This could mean one of two things.

Option 1: Microsoft is killing its phone business. People who bought Win8 Mobile phones are getting soaked. If this is the case then it would be hard to take them seriously as a phone OS vendor anymore.

Option 2: It's being EOL'd because the next version is coming out. This would be somewhat more understandable, and as the Reg points out, commensurate with Apple's OS release schedule. If this is what's happening, then it raises a number of further questions, about OS design consistency, software compatibility and so on.

Cue the new Microsoft "Surface Phone" in 3... 2...

I think this is one of those non-news things that sounds ominous but isn't. They're basically just defining the support lifetime (patches and various forms of contractual support) for the OS. WP8 came out in October 2012, so that's a roughly 21-month lifecycle. That seems to be a weird number, but it's not like Apple or Google are putting out patches for their two-year-old OSes, either. They just aren't as formal as Microsoft in predefining their support period.

While true, many phone contracts in the US typically last two years. They're essentially defining the lifecycle of their phone OS to be shorter than the time a given customer will own a given phone. That seems... aggressive. It makes more sense with Google as vendors fork the Android OS as they see fit.

So I'm almost due for an upgrade to my WP7 phone. I love Windows Phone, but I listen to a ton of podcasts and from what I hear managing podcasts in WP8 is annoying. So I'm a bit reticent. Anyone here with a WP8 want to weigh in?

The timelines they've given are for WP8 and WP7.8. If they release a WP8.5 or WP9, they'd have different timelines. So it's not "we won't give you upgrades" it's "you really ought to upgrade by this time." It's as much guidance for OEMs as anything else.

They should hire someone that can work on their messaging then, because leaving it open to interpretation hurts them more than a 200k employee would cost.