Hi there

Agreed -- Windows phone --good idea --far too late now. Apple iPhones, and Samsung S5/S7 (S6 was a dog BTW) are good phones and even HTC is back into the fray with decent phones. I never liked the look of the Nokia Lumia handsets either (YMMV on this of course).

Actually I'm surprised Ms is even in the Phone game at all -- the only possible way forward is if it say takes over a passable selling brand like HTC. Otherwise Samsung and Apple have got this market well and truely sown up.

Android apps are everywhere now --even sophisticated Stock Trades can be done by mobile phone these days !!!.
Ms would be better carrying on with some areas where it's really good --Robotics and VR for example.

I HATE cameras in phones -- I'd only use as an emergency for witnessing an accident say ---give me a REAL camera any time - even a small portable digital one. Phone camera shots always look like snapshots -- not real photos with proper adjustable Depth of field -- and as for Selfies --'nuf said on that topic. The quality of the camera on a phone is one feature that wouldn't sway me into buying / not buying.

I think though I've too much invested (time and convenience wise -not money - I don't BUY apps) in Android now to switch.

Cheers
jimbo

My household just got two Lumia 950XLs (Windows 10) after careful consideration of the alternatives. My work phone is an iPhone, and we have Android tablets so we are fully experienced with iOS and Android. After less than 24 hours with the new phones we are totally satisfied with how they operate. The phone and messaging apps are elegant and intuitive, more so than the iPhone. The user interface matches our dekstops, and the way you can customize it (like a desktop or Surface Pro 4) is familiar and just works for us -- the common cross-platform design is working. Settings make sense, identical to the desktop/Surface Pro 4 where they make sense and those settings added or subtracted are intuitive in their organization within settings. The email is Outlook, it comes with Office 365 for a year, and the Edge browser. Cortana works better than Siri. I've had a lot of fun with my Android tablets over the years, but I really haven't found anything I can't do on the Windows 10 phone. We are happy with the purchase.

The phone even has an FM tuner, evidence of the legacy back to Zune days. And we have two Zunes HDs that are still going strong. Yep, we like Microsoft software and now hardware. After we left the Microsoft Store (which was full of customers and was more than adequately staffed) we passed by the Apple Store. Yep, it was busy too. For Android? The local Best Buy or cellular provider store doesn't come close to either for phone support.

The title suggests that the author is incredibly short-sighted and incapable of thinking long term of what the effects will be 10-15 years down the road if Microsoft were to do that. If Microsoft give up on Windows Phone and switch to Android, then in 10-15 years Microsoft will be finished as an OS maker.

Today it is already possible to do most things on a phone if someone wanted to, with Continuum making that even easier when plugged into mouse/keyboard/monitor. The main area where the phone is lacking when it comes to replacing the desktop computer as being the heart of the system, is compute power (CPU, GPU, RAM), storage space and I/O Ports. That will change. As technological advancements makes compute power more efficient and addresses cooling, and small form factor large capacity storage becomes cheap, we could see the equivalent of a NUC i7 for example in a mobile phone sized device in the near future, at which point for the vast majority of people a Desktop computer will not be required anymore. When that happens (and it is a matter of when) if Windows no longer has a presence in the mobile world and software developers are all concentrating on IOS and Android, then Windows will not be required anymore.

On top of that, for those who would need even more compute power, for example to run high CPU/GPU intensive applications or games, the only limiting factor would be their Internet connection. Here's a demo (starts at 5:20) showing an Xbox handing off to multiple cloud servers when more computer power is required, and all that would be required for that to be possible today from a phone is a decent internet connection. The internet at the moment is still largely inadequate as a global solution, but that will also change and mobile internet will become a lot faster, a lot more affordable and have extremely reliable coverage in all but the most desolate areas. When that happens, landlines will disappear and it won't just be those who need extra compute power handing off to cloud servers, but everyone's computer could potentially be cloud-based with local cache. If all your software, games, music, documents, etc. are stored on a cloud server that your devices just log into, and that server handles all the compute power as well, the only thing a local computer would need to be is a display and input device with a internet connection. Possibly also local storage for caching your cloud data and storing private data/backups that you don't want stored on a remote server.

So, Microsoft not only need to keep going with Windows Mobile, but take it extremely seriously because their future as an OS maker will depend on it. Doing everything they can to keep developers on side is an extremely important part of that too and Microsoft need to show they're fully committed themselves, which as of this moment they aren't. Even full Microsoft Office isn't available as a UWP application sold in their own store yet, which isn't exactly a good precedent to set to other developers.