To be fair, they were pretty ahead of the competition when it came to the hardware specs of their phones. The Lumia 950 released in 2015 and had a 1440p AMOLED screen, 3GBs of RAM, biometric unlocking with an iris scanner, and a pretty incredible camera for the time. It also had a removable back cover and battery as well as an AUX port. It was also the first phone I'd seen with USB-C and wireless charging.

Just listing these makes me a bit nostalgic for WP...

Windows Phone's problem was Steve Balmer, and it was insurmountable. They delayed entering the market for too long and without a large enough user base, there was no way forward to get any real traction in attracting large enough numbers of application developers.

Not enough app developers means dismissal app marketplace means inferior overall user experience relative to Android and iOS, no matter how good the overall hardware or OS was on Windows Phones.

Those last gen windows phones were really good though.

Same with blackberry and their last gen qnx phones. The passport was such a good device.

You can argue that Microsoft was early to the game - they had a smartphone/PDA OS out for years, well before Windows Phone. What they were ridiculously late in doing was reacting to Apple's moves that completely transformed the market.

Early or late, they're hardly ever on time anymore. It also feels like they're going the way of Google and starting to abandon projects.

Development tools completely changed ~yearly as well.

I was talking about when the modern touchscreen smartphones entered the market. After BlackBerry and Symbian. Microsoft partnered with Nokia to create some pretty nice smartphones that were well equipped. Their UI was really nice, too. It would have been a great competitor to Android phones and Apple's iPhones had they kept in the game.

The more competition, the better.

Dude the Mixer situation was so weird to me, they were clearly serious about it, bought out a bunch of big streamers for ridiculous amounts of money and then just... gave up. They needed more ways to engage the community of streamers, like Twitch Rivals does, because people are not going to use your platform if they have no-one they want to watch, but Mixer never attempted to try and get people to watch new streamers.

I did try Mixer when I still watched livestreams often, the video quality was so much better, the player was snappy and was such a breath of fresh air from Twitch. But my god did they butcher the chat/viewer experience. I don't want visual clutter and fireworks flying over my screen all the time, it was the most dogshit thing ever, so back to Twitch I went. I mean Twitch without FFZ is also disgusting now, give me that simple IRC chat back!

Squirt me some tunes, bro!

Dog poo brown and mushy peas green

Charcoal black and spider blood blue

Ice chunk white and transparent glass

Incase you're wondering what all this is, it's how I describe the color options of the Zune 30. You can tell that they're all the same length in terms of syllables.

Right???

I don't think VR can truly take off until it's a standard commodity device like a TV.

All back and forward compatible like HDMI. Pair of hand trackers, head tracker, two eyes, maybe extensions for face detection or other limbs.

That way we can be done with all this nonsense exclusivity.

I mean, the Oculus exclusives are literally fully funded. They are games that otherwise wouldn't even exist. There are no games that were going to be made for other platforms but were steered to oculus only or anything like that. So how anti-competitive can that really be? Should mario games be on other consoles? Is Nintendo anti-competitive for making first party games?

Facebook/meta is terrible, but they are terrible for real reasons, not fake reasons.

Oh wow, how out of the loop am I. 😆

Hopefully it’s supported for years to come.

I had the first HP WMR headset and as far as I can tell, the G2 has the same damn controllers. The tracking was awful outside of the rather small cone (compared to the Quest 2 and PSVR2 imo) in front of the headset. Did they really never address that or am I just being pessimistic?

but once plugged into SteamVR, it was another story

This was the core of why it was a poor product. It's only job was to pop up, annoy the user, while the user figured out how to minimize it to get to SteamVR.

WMR offered headsets for every budgets

If WMR was simply drivers or optional software it would have been fine all while still offering headsets for all budgets. Instead WMR is a required software which got in the way of actually using the product one bought.

When one plugs in a keyboard, they don't want the manufacturer's software to open on-screen just to use the keyboard, same for mice, same for monitors, same for VR headsets.

Nope. It would popup, the user would close it as it did nothing useful, then open SteamVR.