My memory is completely different. I was an iPhone user, but I bought a Nokia Lumia 710 (I think) to play with and I was thoroughly impressed. It was fast, fresh, the tile interface really worked well for phones - it looked much better than the boring grid of apps and gave useful information at a glance.

But since Microsoft were 2-3 years late, there were not many apps. And then they shot themselves and all people who already bought a Windows Phone device in the foot, by completely forking the ecosystem with Windows Phone 8. Leaving early adopters stranded on Windows Phone 7 and no ability to run newer Windows Phone 8 apps.

> As someone who owned a Windows phone around that time, and knew others who did as well, the shared opinion was that it was a pile of crap.

and had no apps. Windows Phone/Mobile had atrocious developer share. There few apps that were available were of terrible quality. Ironic, considering this happened in the era of a sweaty Balmer screaming "Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!"[1]

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs

Compared with Android, to this day, WinRT development experience is like being in heaven.

It took Android 10 years, for something like AGK to come up, and even then it is a mess of development experience.

While Windows Phone 7 wasn't that great, Windows Phone 8 was quite good.

Used all Windows Phone versions, and they all got more updates than most my Android devices.

Their market was around 10% in Europe when they decided to give up.