So back in November I told you that I was suffering app withdrawal and between the new Galaxy watches and Note 3 I had switched to Android.  Well, the fortunes have turned.  I’m tired of iffy performance (apps crash, I swear there’s a countdown timer that takes a small bit of performance off the phone every day).  Battery life is just abysmal, and not entirely the fault of the hardware — the carriers have to get their bloatware off of these phones, it’s just ridiculous to punish the consumer.

And lastly, I just find myself spending an inordinate amount of time fining apps, widgets, widgeapps, and whatever to make my phone do the the things that Windows just does…. out of the box.

From the standpoint of imparting information at a glance it’s night and day.  Microsoft has all other vendors beat.  Sure the original Windows phones were a joke.  I mean clicking start and then running apps with a little pen?  Try to do that while you’re driving! (just kidding). Apple started the revolution with the clean interface with … <gasp>  … little numbers to tell you the number of phone calls you missed or messages begging to be read. But after years of tweaking icons and color schemes, the 4 x whatever rows of icons marching on the iPhones screen just seem so….. bland.

So let’s look at what Windows has done.  In Windows phone 8.1 they pretty much have pulled all of the must have features from their competitors (now that they have a true notification center).  And what do they do different?  Well how many of you have email and when you look at the icon it says 99+.  I mean how useful is that?  I *do not* want my phone to force me to read junk mail so I can luxuriate in a new email counter that tells me how many new messages I have.  When I look at my Windows phone and it says “34” I know I have 34 new messages.  When I click on the message icon, and swipe through the messages Windows *brilliantly* — yes I dare say it — resets the counter so when I go back to my main screen (desktop???) the counter is now zero.  Is Microsoft the only company that’s figured out how people work?

I mean Apple introduced the little pop-up number concept (I know there’s a technical name for the bubble but it escapes me and frankly I care little). But at the same fell swoop that they introduced it, and hundreds if not thousands of developers copied it to their apps, they also missed a critical point.  As a user I want to know what’s NEW.  Not what’s unread (“hello thank you for checking into your voice mail, you have 999 new messages — all marked URGENT”).  

This one paradigm captures the essences of usability versus mere prettiness.  In the end Microsoft has garnered onto the fact (I’m sure by accident) that most people utilize their phone in productivity like “use cases” and where that process flow can be assisted in a normal humanesque manner it should be.  My phone shouldn’t make me change how I work.  When I get home and toss a stack of mail onto the other stack of mail waiting to be opened, my “house” shouldn’t force me to look at all of the old mail too. I look at the mail under the door slot and say “that’s new”.  That’s how I work.  That’s how my phone should work.

If that were the only difference then I wouldn’t be writing this today.  Microsoft still suffers from a lack of key apps.  Many of the big players have released apps but many more have not.  I love my Sonos music system but I’m relegated to a look-a-like app called Phonos (which interestingly enough seems less buggy than the official Sonos app … take note million dollar companies!!!). And in many cases there simply isn’t an app.  No more taking pictures of my deposits with USBank (though USAA who invented that concept does have a Windows app — thanks guys!).

So what drives me back to Windows phone?  Two things.  Number One: live tiles.  

Now if you look at the history of Microsoft they’ve been trying to figure out how to spoon feed live information to us over, well, decades.  Remember active desktop?  Other than a few RSS feeds and a gazillion different clocks it never worked out (and it dragged the system performance into the gutter too) – total fail.  There have been as many live feed widgets for windows as their are apps for Android and they’ve all suffered from the same illness — they are at best add ons, at worst critical eaters of screen real estate.  And nary a one has done what it’s supposed to which is to unobtrusively provide information to the user. Unobtrusively. 

In comes Microsoft with tiles.  Who would have thunk it?  Such a simple — one might say elegant — interface.  Square blocks.  Each block representing an app and giving rise to a bit of space to share live data.  But that’s not all folks … the block… okay tile… can FLIP to reveal other info, or scores of pieces of info. And in this A.D.D. world of ours what’s more attractive then a phone face with many, many tiles all flipping in random yet synchronized dance and imparting tons of information to us.  And flick of a finger takes us straight to that relevant information.

And the Microsoft native apps?  They … just…. work.  Arguably the out-of-the-box Windows mail app is hands down the best I’ve ever used on a phone. It works against every mail provider I’ve tried and manages to have a clean simple workable interface.  Amazingly I who utterly loathe (I mean HATE) the concept of grouped conversations and I actually like it…. okay, I’ll say it… LOVE it … under Windows Phone.  They’ve made the conversation flow seem so natural.  Their phone app…their message app — they all are robust, clean and make me happy to use them.

And the new Cortana?  Who would have thought that stodgy Microsoft could one up Apple and Siri.  But out of the box it just blows Siri away.  I mean “remind me to pickup my dry cleaners when I get home” means something to Cortana… with the additive of location awareness, the *tight* integration into calendaring and the speech recognition engine that’s as good as anything Google or Apple put out I finally have a P.A. that’s actually useful and that I use (and not just to show off that hey, my phone can understand me).  Also not to be understated, the talking text when I’m driving in my car via bluetooth where I can reply by talking is literally a life saver and is done better than anyone elses I’ve seen (or rather heard).

But I said there were two main reasons (and I gave you a bunch of small ones which I all group together as “1”).  The other main reason is that Windows Phone just works.  

I don’t believe I’ve ever had the phone crash, and while some knock off third party apps may abruptly close, I never feel the need to reboot my phone to fix anything.  It…. just…. works.  And it’s rock solid.  Apple might have held that torch for awhile but I think Microsoft figured it out better; set strict interface standards and acceptable hardware and stick to your guns.

Microsoft over the last few years has ‘bet the house’ on the cloud and making all end point devices (desktop, tablet and phone) try to look the same.  They’ve utterly failed time and time again to do this.  As I previously remarked in other blogs, I don’t want my phone to run a desktop and I don’t want my desktop to run a phone.  But I think with Windows Tablet and the metro interface as well as Windows Phone they’ve come the closest.  Oh, metro will fail.  You can’t convince millions of business users to relearn an interface just so they can get to their same old productivity app, but the seed’s been planted and Microsoft can use their juggernaut of being on most everyone’s business computer to continue to carry the flag to ever device we use. Eventually we will all be in an applet world and the interfaces on phones, tablets and desktops will be similar enough for someone to say they’re the same.

Will Microsoft succeed finally where they’ve failed so many times before?  I don’t know. But as a betting man I’m convinced, Microsoft has become cool — and that, my dear Apple, should make you quake in your boots like nothing else.