I bought a Lumia 800 as my first smartphone and I'm not quite happy with it.
- It lost at least 60% of its value in less than a year (price for a new one dropped by that much)
- MS wants me to pay them if I want to build an app to use on my own phone
- And after I've paid them I can only put three apps that aren't published on there. If I publish them in the app store and would like to use them myself I have to buy my own apps. So basically just give them money.
- No significant software updates
All in all, it's a good dumb phone, but it's not a great smartphone.
Well you got screwed then. I just bought an 820 SIM free for £179 (Can buy three for the price of an iPhone 4S here). Buy a new car, lose WAAAY more than that in 6 months. Only Apple devices hold their value and I don't understand that as the market is saturated with them.
You don't have to pay them to build for your own device. Just register it as a development device and you can push your own stuff to it. I just did this with WP8 and it's fine.
Not published an app yet so can't comment.
No significant software updates (compared to Android that is). That's a good thing. The platform is pretty stable and consistent across all vendors. It's a shit trying to push an app to 5 different versions of Android.
The only PITA is to do WP8 apps, you have to use Windows 8 which I really don't like. It's bearable with Start8 though.
To be honest I've owned iPhones, Android handsets (Samsung, HTC) and the only thing I don't want to throw across the room due to stupid problems has been WP8.
That is to be expected from a first generation device unfortunately. Windows Phone 7 was Microsoft toe-dipping into the mobile space with the Metro UI to see if it could be viable.
While WP 7 was a huge success in this regard, the hardware / platform wasn't designed with a long roadmap set for its future, as in order to advance Windows Phone to WP8, the hardware specs of all of the WP7-generation devices was to be abandoned.
I just upgraded from my HTC WP7 device to a Nokia Lumia 1020, and the phone is amazing. I use Android on my tablet, but I prefer Windows Phone on my phone. FYI, the camera on the Lumia 1020 is as amazing as all the reviews say it is.
It costs like $19 to register an account on the WP dev centre (or free if you are a student), that's less than Apple and Google charge. For that you get Visual Studio and Blend all set up to develop with and can publish apps to the store.
It's free to build an app and deploy it on your own Windows Phone(s) too - you only have to pay if you want to distribute it through the Windows Store.
1) Somebody already told you this, only iDevices hold the value, everything else would value peanuts after a couple of months.
2) This happens with Apple too.
3) I don't have that problem, did you check that? Maybe is a problem in your end.
4) My 1 years old LG android 2.3 got stuck with that version for good. On the other hand, WP8 doesn't even have a year.
I had been used 4 platform (ios, android, BB and WP7 & 8) And my Lumia 920 is my all time favorite smartphone and it is a pleasure to develop for it in comparison with Android and iOS. So I guess is a matter of taste
- It lost at least 60% of its value in less than a year (price for a new one dropped by that much)
- MS wants me to pay them if I want to build an app to use on my own phone
- And after I've paid them I can only put three apps that aren't published on there. If I publish them in the app store and would like to use them myself I have to buy my own apps. So basically just give them money.
- No significant software updates
All in all, it's a good dumb phone, but it's not a great smartphone.