It was a great UI for mobile. It just was a terrible UI for a real computer, so people reacted badly to Microsoft trying to force it in there. Mobile devices and normal computers have very different UI needs, and you can't simply paste one onto the other - something Microsoft should've learned from their failed attempts to make a tablet with the older Windows UI.

Yeah. The Windows Phone was an amazing piece of technology. It's a tragedy it did not win at all in the marketplace.

In particular, it was pretty easy to write apps for, unlike the other two big giants.

My first smartphone was a Windows phone with half a gig of RAM and it's still the best phone I've ever owned in terms of software

Same here. I had a window's phone at some point. Would have loved it with a stylus.

One of my high school friends had a Windows phone around this time, the one with the giant camera bit. I thought it looked super cool but he hated the thing. No apps.

They had some cool form factors too. I remember I had one of the phones with a landscape slide-out physical keyboard.

And the Windows Phone 7 had a hard realtime kernel!

Ditto. Metro was the best graphic UI I ever used. I liked even on the laptop.

Same for me. Windows Phone was super smooth even on budget phones with 1GB/512MB of RAM while Android would have been choppy as hell on such hardware.

Also, the Windows 8 tablet mode had better touch and swipe UX than the current Windows 11 when put in tablet mode. What a joke Microslop has become.

Nadella needs to clean house or step down. The only thing he executed well was the cloud/hyperscaler side of the business because he caught the period when everything was moving to the cloud and MS was well positioned to take advantage of that as big companies were already invested into the on-prem MS ecosystem, but on the consumer facing side he fumbled everything, all consumer products are worse than how they were under Balmer: Windows - trash, Office - trash, Xbox - trash, Bing - trash, Copilot - trash.