I am still a Windows Phone guy. Hell, I am still a Zune guy, for that matter. But it's getting harder and harder to support Microsoft's excellent, yet apparently unappreciated and unsellable, handheld hardware.
Zune has been dead for years, of course, but I still have two. One is a 32 gig Zune HD which holds my entire music collection and has seen me through countless flights. The other is a little 8gb jobby that contains my running playlist which I use exclusively for running. Both continue to work flawlessly.
Still it's getting harder and harder to resist power of the Android/iOS axis. I recently bought an Amazon Fire Phone, not because I needed a new phone, and certainly not because I want another piece of Amazon hardware after my disappointing experience with a Fire HD tablet. I bought it because Amazon is bailing on the phone market and they were selling the things for $130 plus a year of Amazon Prime. Amazon Prime costs $100 and since Prime is about the best deal in history and I would buy it anyway, I am essentially getting a Fire Phone, which is a mutant version of Android, for about $30.
I'm not even going to put a sim chip in it. It's going to be wi-fi only. It can hold almost as much as my Zune HD holds, i.e. my nearly entire stored music collection. It can also run Pandora or Spotify and Amazon Prime music, of course. I hear there is a way to put Google Play on it which I might try. So boom, I have all my stored music, and all streaming music anywhere there is wi-fi.
Whether it can replace my little Zune for running remains to be seen, but I don't see why not. Could I have done all this with my Lumia? Sure, but I would risk running down battery life at inopportune times, and my Lumia is down to about 19 GB of storage thanks to all the photos and apps, and I don't want to risk frying my main phone with running sweat.
The ideal next step would be to find a cheap data-only plan for the Fire phone but I don't think such a thing exists. It should. The first one to do that will make a mint. For now, it's wi-fi and stored music only. We'll see how this little experiment pans out.
It's even getting harder to keep my Lumia. Windows Phone gets all the major apps (except Instagram, apparently) but it lacks all the specialty apps, particularly the ones produced by individual organizations. At my day job, they will create apps to support upcoming conferences and events -- Android/iOS only. Things like electronic hotel keys or scanning check deposits to my bank or ordering from Chipotle -- never will you see these apps for Windows Phone. My Lumia is sweet and solid, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone for practical reasons and that means I wouldn't recommend it to myself going forward. The only questions are will I go Android or Apple and what will be the final straw to push me.
