The article is confusing and misleading.

One thing is that the 10% of the new phones that are sold now are WP, and another completely different thing is that WP has a 10% share in Europe.

According to statcounter WP penetration in Europe is still ~3% http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-eu-monthly-201309-20130...

The thing is the Windows Phone is actually quite good. In many ways it is better then Android (consistency across the OS & apps, Visual Studio is better then Eclipse, C# better then Java). Much, if not all, of the bold choices around flat visual style have now born out as great choices. Lots of things going for them. Pretty cool seeing it born out in higher adoption numbers.

This reminds me the slow but steady grow of Chrome a few years ago over IE. I don't think MS would dominate those markets but it is healthy to have a firm third alternative.

Microsoft needs to cut the crap and really streamline the process for developers. If its developer onramp were as easy and painless as, say, Android's, the floodgates would be wide open because it could use the installed base of Windows developers and the superiority of Visual Studio as a dev environment to its advantage. If it does that it has a chance at second place. But as of now it won't climb past a distant third.

Android makers need to make money on the phone while MS needs market share credibility. So these users are more valuable to MS than to Android vendors and MS is outbidding Samsung et al with spiffs for salespeople.

Pretty impressive since Nokia had only ever sold 27 million Lumias worldwide up until June 30. Or Kantar has messed up their analysis.

My guess is this is almost all Nokia.

I think this may contribute to a trend away from mobile native apps to web apps (or web apps in native wrapper like phonegap). It's already difficult supporting iOS and Android. But what if WP and maybe Firefox OS also gain significant market share? How many companies can support 3+ dev teams for an app?

I've had a Lumia 920 for about a year now and I'm kind of just tired of not being on the iOS/Android bandwagon. Since I've had the phone, WP hasn't had a meaningful/noticeable update and there are some pretty big flaws.

The biggest being no central notification center. If you receive a toast notification from more than 5 applications (you can pin 5 to your lock screen) you'll have to hunt for the 6th app's tile on your "home?" screen (the hot mess of tiles dumped onto your screen) just to see if you have a notification or not. Assuming you have 2 email accounts (1 work, 1 personal) and send text messages, this means that you really can only afford to put 2 other apps on your lock screen. Hilariously, if the application isn't on your home/tile screen, swiping over to the applications list won't help because the tiles there don't update or display toast notification count.

Another issue that I've noticed more recently (while trying out some of the mediocre applications in yawn-inducing app store) is that, because of the tile driven UI, I don't actually even know the names of some of my applications. The real issue is this: I can't have multiple pages of tiles like iOS & Android, so I have to throw them all onto one page that just turns into a wasteland of small tiles. If you use big ones, this wasteland will become so large that you'll find yourself forgetting about applications on the bottom so I try to keep it small. The other problem this causes though is that I'll "unpin" rarely used applications which sends them to the applications list... but because I'm used to seeing them as a tile, I don't even know THE NAME OF THE APPLICATION so I have to scroll around this application list looking at the tiles hoping that I spot this thing like some kind of police lineup. This sounds stupid, but it happens... I'm talking about rarely used applications.

I'm sure I could think of more. Most of these problems are just subtle annoyances... lots of little "workflow" issues that go unrecognized until you really start to use the phone a lot. Restricting tiles to 1 screen really sucks. I try to include only the apps that I use often on my home screen... but everything else... I'll never touch it again. Remove a tile from the home screen is a big deal. As soon as you demote something from the home screen, you'll probably never use it again. If I had the luxury of multiple pages of tiles, I know for a fact that I'd use more of these things, but once your tiles get 20 rows deep it just feels dirty, inefficient and unorganized. Some applications benefit greatly from having a large tile as well... weather apps and stock portfolio apps... so those alone can take up 2 entire rows.

Edit: Another issue that I thought of is that I was assigned some awful XBOX Live username "Player1045748#####" and I've tried to link up my actual XBOX Live account (which I don't ever use anyway), but I can't actually figure out how... so I've just given up. It's not a huge issue for me though, but might be for the gamer types. To WP's credit though, all of the games get lumped into a Games tile

Edit: Sorry, this is really poorly written, I'm not actually as illiterate as this reads.

/rant

I got to play with one at work for testing purpose. The UI is actually not that bad but as with anything Microsoft it had some pretty major flaws... like date and time having to be set manually before SSL certificates works.

Where does this information come from? Article mentions the research firm (Kantar) but I can't find any explanation on where or how they got the numbers.

I still haven't seen one windows phone, only windows tablet.

Windows is always going to be behind a free system, especially since all cool features invented by one get copied within a few weeks by others.

At most Microsoft can charge them less but even that will probably more than Android pays in licenses to Microsoft. Not sure what benefits can Microsoft offer them over Google, or maybe for an extra $10 (or whatever the license cost) manufactures won't care. Verizon, ATT and other have a vested interest to promote a third OS so who knows.. Another wild card is Nokia's purchase, Microsoft can easily eat a few dollars and flood the world with phones of all kinds

I don't get it. For me and most of the people I know < age 50, "Windows" is pretty much a synonym for "bloated, insecure, junkware"...

Who in their right mind buys a windows phone?