It was amazing. Ran circles around Android on weaker hardware, but because duopoly duo didn’t want to accept competitor it was artificially hamstrung and subsequently killed.

Same here. My Lumia 635 was one of my best purchases ever, it was so capable for the price. It's a shame that they stopped believing in it.

I liked it too. But it never was great. E.g., I remember that the calculator had date computations, but the year input was a dropdown going from 1900 to 2100 or something like that.

Look at all 5 of us reminiscing here...

The Lumia Icon/930 I had was genuinely the best phone I have ever used, from both a hardware quality and software perspective. It made the competing iPhone 5 look like garbage.

the Nokia hardware was pretty great, too!

I honestly think that the windows phone development experience is where Microsoft majorly shit the bed. The sheer volume of breaking changes (and the severity of those breaks) meant rewriting a non-trivial amount of your app from version to version. I know multiple developers that just dropped support for windows phone as a result.