"Your files are exactly where you left them"

I found something very HALish about that screen. A vague somewhat reassuring statement with an ominous tone. I mean, great, they're right where I left them but will you grant me access them?

The sad thing about that screen is when you login only discover windows has uninstalled some of your software.

I've experienced more loss of data and programs when upgrading minor versions of Android, iOS and OS X than I ever have upgrading to Windows 10, which is running on no less than seven computers in my house.

My wife upgraded her laptop and the TV/Kodi computer that I built for her on her own. She's an elementary school teacher and by no means is she a computer professional. It wasn't scary at all. She didn't lose anything and she has a LOT of apps on her laptop.

If she had lost something, it wouldn't have been lost for long because A) we had backups and B) when Windows removes a program during an upgrade, it doesn't remove all of the app data so at worst you have to run an installer...big deal.

"...but for an hour, you can't get at them. haha.gif"

Priceless. (Especially when you actually need to use the computer and the files. Business hours? Nope, YOU WANT THE X)

> "your files are exactly where you left them"

That was my favorite message during install. Thanks Windows, I had never once worried about that previously but I have to say you specifically mentioning that it wouldn't be a problem definitely made me wonder.

> When I tried a pre-Win10 Lumia in a store I actually found it very impressive, but I heard that the Win10 mobile launch had a rocky start.

It's been solid since, but the first month or so of Windows 10 on a Lumia 950 was rough going. Store was unreliable, battery drained in ~6 hours (same hardware/usage will now last me 24+ hours), and auto-updater got permanently stuck at 0%. Only way to move to a working build was to factory reset the phone.

Roughly the same experience here. I still get more application crashes (wherein the application simply closes and needs to be restarted) than I did with WP 8 and 8.1. However, most apps that exhibit this behavior are holdovers that weren't refreshed for Windows 10 Mobile, such as the Podcasts app. And while app crashes are annoying, the OS is fine and the application restarts quickly enough.

That said, I remain a user who isn't interested in the latest trendy apps. I don't feel an urge to play Pokemon Go (although I find the phenomenon hilariously awesome). For the basics—web browsing, e-mail, text messaging, maps, calendaring—Windows 10 Mobile is great.

Continuum—the feature that converts the phone into a "regular" computer—is quite nice, although I don't use it much since I have more than enough computers already.

I am hopeful that a Surface Phone will eventually arrive and make Continuum more compelling. I could get into the idea of carrying a lightweight keyboard/display thing instead of a laptop. The HP Elite x3 already works this way.

Overall, I remain a bigger fan of Windows Mobile than I was of Android or iOS before that. When I use a modern Android device, Android feels sterile and clunky; meanwhile modern iOS feels too little evolved since iOS 1.

> battery drained in ~6 hours

So, parity with Android then? (I kid, I kid....kinda.)

My Galaxy Note 2 still has a battery life of about a week, still running on the original battery. I just need to remember to enable Wifi only on when needed, or it'll drain the battery in two days.

Actually in my experience, leaving Wifi on saves the battery, compared to telco network. Wifi seems to be more power-efficient than 3G or LTE.

Of course, if you want a week on the battery, you must have data off, both wifi and mobile.

>given up on mobile

I don't know about that, they sure have been pushing a lot of new builds lately :

https://www.reddit.com/domain/blogs.windows.com/search?q=bui...

though I guess they did sell part of Nokia or something.. Sad because those phones are super durable for someone like me who breaks devices constantly

They gave up by not mentioning it even once at the last BUILD. That's when even as a dev, I realized the platform had been virtually abandoned.

Well, I wasn't there so idk about that, but it looks like 3/7 of the "most important announcements of build 2016" are directly related to windows 10 mobile ^[1]

1. "Microsoft is launching its latest version of Windows 10"

(you realize this is for pc and mobile?)

3. "Facebook committed to bringing native apps to Microsoft's Universal Windows Platform"

7. "Windows 10 Mobile users will be able to "beam" Continuum sessions to compatible monitors."

The point I take from this is that they seem to be considering windows 10 as one platform (desktop and mobile), which makes sense to me since the several apps I've written for UWP worked on mobile/desktop with the same code. Also I think the react-native-windows news isn't listed there, but I personally consider it fairly huge news for win 10 mobile (and desktop) as someone who uses react-native for android / ios

[1] http://www.windowscentral.com/most-important-announcements-b...

Unfortunately, Lumia's are not durable. The screen of my Lumia 620 broke after just a few months of use.

Nokia's legendary durability died with the feature phone.

Well, I haven't used the 620, but my anecdotal experience has been the opposite.

List of recent devices I own that are unbroken:

lumia 521, 950, and Kyocera Rise.

broken:

nexus 7 (screen after 2 months), asus fonepad note 6 (screen after ~1 year), galaxy s4 (won't connect to tower, probably my fault for installing roms incorrectly)

In particular the 950 has been dropped in the river in breckenridge, and the 521 in a natural hotspring / taken on many rainy hikes / dropped more times than I can count.

My 820 took one hell of a beating over the time between purchase and replacement. Its replacement seems pretty hardy too. Though I get the impression the build quality and sturdiness were far more variable between models than found around the 3110/3210/3310 era.