zyme

They Brought back WinRT, or rather this month's new Desktop RTM build has an ARM64 version. It'll probably run low-power low-cost tablet/phablets, maybe even be put on a phone if 10 starts seeing more metro apps at some date.

I mean that capability is where the desktop version of windows keeps getting more features matching; each version of Phone and Desktop have been more and more like each-other.

That's how much my mom's Lumia 640-LTE cost a few years ago - I think right after it was first released. Such a good price for the hardware if only it could run something useful, the latest 10 Mobile build does count...

They need something built into the OS that supports HTML/HTML5, its what a lot of system interfaces and apps especially internet based ones like to be build from.

Plus how would you download another windows browser - it would have to be in the app store first lol.

I know the feeling; several years ago my mom bought a Windows Lumia phone for $30 new, the hardware specs were nice, but the apps were just non existent, and though it's gotten 1000 times better its still very lacking. Also the camera is surprisingly high quality and fast.

My 5S is going to cost $50 for a new battery and screen - and it's still worth a few hundred more new; however her phone's HW specs are still mostly better than mine, except I think the RAM which is the same.

A year ago I remember thinking If microsoft wanted to save windows 10 mobile's life I think they should have put a large amount of that cross-platform smartphone programming effort into trying to make Win10 Mobile capable of running some android apps, the desktop version has a linux subsystem after all. that way they could have expanded their user base and made it a more attractive platform, especially with the lower cost.

Making 10 Mobile decently Popular for any reason would have given developers a good reason to switch to xamarin for developing native apps on every platform, win-win.

Alas they didn't do anything encouraging enough to grasp that potential double benefit...

Personally I remember the biggest pull to windows 8 for me being Games that ran on both 7 and 8/8.1, seemed to perform alot better on 8.1; they didn't advertise that it was a preferred OS or that it was designed for it.

I suspect it was related to streamlining by removing the oldest backward compatibility features, as the only apps that broke were those that ran on windows XP, most frequently they were games that weren't programmed with Vista+ in consideration (often because it didn't exist when originally released).

I specifically remember a bunch of games capping at about 20 FPS on Windows 7 and going 60-100fps on 8 when it was new using my nVidia Quadro SLI setup at the time, and having no luck finding anyone else report this on google (likely because so many people weren't giving 8.x a chance so they didn't notice).

I actually loved 8 and thought that 8.1's gui was a step backwards, the gui was extra easy to use and originally had me going back and forth between windows 7 and 8 when the performance difference eventually won me over completely as my default environment. I still kept 7 installed on another drive for the infrequent use of incompatible apps.