Took me a long time, but I finally said goodbye to Windows Phone. I was not happy to do it, but I was compelled by happenstance and reality. Verizon, my former carrier, has made it clear that they are no longer interested in supporting Windows Phone. It took us well over a year after its release to upgrade us to version 8. Version 10 has been out for a while and there was no word from Verizon on an expected update -- I suspect they never will, hoping Windows Phone will just die out of their line up.
The larger reason, and one that I am sure would not go away, is the legendary app gap. Windows Phone has less than 2% of the market. No one is going to write any more apps for it and the existing apps will likely never get updated.
So I was facing a choice between Android and Apple. I am not an Apple fan. My few interactions with them in the laptop arena were a disaster. Years ago I regularly tried to buy music from iTunes and found it unusable. And you can always count on iAnything to be overpriced. It was going to be Android for me.
The upside of that is that I was able to kill Verizon and get on the nascent Google Fi carrier service. Google Fi is both cheap and interesting. First, it does a very clever thing whereby it uses either the Sprint network, the T-Mobile network, or Wi-fi, whichever signal is strongest, for all functions, including talk and text. That's pretty cool. It's also very innovative (and inexpensive) with respect to data: You are billed for a certain amount of data per month -- in my case 1GB which, along with unlimited talk and text, costs me $30 per month. But the cool thing is after the month is over they adjust your next month's bill to match the amount of data you actually used: up or down. That's right, they actually credit you for unused data, in real money, on the next bill. That is astounding.
To get this service you have to buy a Google Nexus phone, which I did -- a Nexus 5x. The knock on the Nexus 5x is battery life and while I had an early scare on that front, I think it was mostly because I needed to update the system multiple times and about 20 apps to get them current. Since then, it's been on par with my previous Nokia, still that only puts it on par with a 4 year old phone.
The real downside is the fact that the Android operating system is a usability dumpster fire. The elegant and beautifully simple tile interface of Windows Phone is forever gone, replaced with a haphazard stew of icons and notifications of varying shapes and sizes, none of which are consistent or discoverable. It is abysmal. I'm sure given the abundance of apps and services around Android I will eventually be able to get my phone to be as convenient as Windows Phone. But it's gonna take a while until I figure it all out.
As an interface, Android is a big step backwards and it's kind of sad that it is everyone's default experience through sheer numbers. Something tells me it's going to be many years before someone puts a coherent face on it. Maybe Microsoft?
