Looks good certainly better but there are two things are that still important as a consumer in relation to wp.

Are there better phones yes.
Can I ignore that fact and go with wp os anyway? Problem is I don't see anything about wp that makes it a must have.

Down to 3.6% in July - Comscore.

Nokia/MS seem to go out of their way to kill the market for their own products. They announced that all new smartphones would run windows on the same day they launched a range of Symbian phones, which not surprisingly didn't sell well, even though the Nokia Windows phones were over a year from availability.

Then they announce that all existing Windows phones will not support Win8, killing sales for several months.

For experts in the industry, they seem to keep making some very silly decisions.

That's almost certainly down to people finally retiring their old Windows Mobile phones and getting new Android/iOS/other devices. The only people I know in the US with Windows Phone devices are tech bloggers, and I've only met 1 person in the UK who actually bought a WP7 device (and then promptly broke it so went back to her BlackBerry)!

If I'm right, I think Windows Mobile is actually counted as a separate OS on all the graphs, as at one point it had a higher marketshare than WP7...

I really do think that MS will just end up buying out Nokia's hardware division and letting go of the rest. These new Lumia phones just do not look interesting, and there's nowhere near as much hype as there was for the release of the iPhone 4S, Galaxy S3 or even the HTC One X. It's not going to sell well, even despite their best efforts to promote it, consumers have so far indicated that they just don't care.

Nokia have ZERO presence in the US, they've never been popular there, and right now only Nokia have really made any headway with WP7 in terms of sales here. As they have no carrier sway in the US, it'll be near impossible for them to establish a market there. I've seen loads of comments online from Americans joking "do Nokia still make phones"?

Yes I have used it which is why I said it felt like a feature phone. I did not say it was a feature phone. You could take it as a compliment as WP7 is very simple to use. I am actually waiting for a Lumia 710 to be delivered, not that I will be using it though it is being sold straight away but I will use the sim in my GNexus.

I am looking forward to WP8 though and may get one in the future.

Nokia are heading the same way as Palm and RIM Blackberry. Sad but true....all three of those companies were at the top at one point, but they all failed to react and one by one they will all disappear. I've said before that the Lumia series is just like the Pre/Touchpad series that Palm did...one last hurrah, but ultimately spelling death for the company.

Microsoft have nothing to lose but a bit of cash which they can easily make back in Windows sales, and even if this Nokia venture does not take off, they've set themselves up with the Surface. The only loser here is Nokia, and I can't say I feel sorry for them either. They forced themselves into this situation.

I still maintain that they would have been much better off doing what Motorola did and pair with Google to use their enormous sway on the industry to at least secure a moderately successful device. Microsoft have been out of the mobile game for years and years, so if this tanks, which it is doing as we speak, Nokia have nobody to blame but themselves.

Google bought out Motorola for all the patents they had, they've since promptly ignored it, other than the promotion they get on Verizon, they are pretty ignored as a brand now.
HTC is making a small profit on Android. Only Samsung is making a profit on Android and its Galaxy S series only got prominence by copying Apple's iPhone ridiculously closely.

When looking at all the OEMs Android already has, there is no guarantee Nokia would have survived that market either - especially as most of those OEMs are lower cost than Nokia has been until next year.

I'm talking about before the buyout, when Google threw all of their weight behind the Motorola Droid, and got Verizon involved in the project. Had they not done this, Motorola would probably be finished by now, and Android would not be in the place it is now...

Likewise for HTC, had Google not endorsed them by creating the Nexus One with them, other devices like the Desire etc may not have been as well received. If Nokia received similar endorsement, or even became a Nexus OEM, they'd still be doing a lot better than they are now.

You're right there is a pattern - that whoever Google champions at a moment in time wins in Android. HTC got a massive benefit from the Nexus One as they ripped it off to create the successful HTC Desire - in my mind this is the point when Android really got into the mainstream and started its rise.

But then Google moved on to Samsung and HTC has been floundering ever since. Samsung is a company that not only sells these phones but has its memory, processors, screens technology and manufacturing - a highly desirable partner for Google. Would they have turned away from Samsung and championed Nokia? Highly questionable given that until the actions of this year, Nokia's cost base for manufacturing phones was significantly higher.

Let's not forget even Samsung doesn't love Google - they are all trying as much as possible to build their own brand loyalty rather than customers attaching to android itself - all the S applications etc.

Google went to Asus for the Nexus 7 - they seem to really be after cheap manufacturers more than anything. I think Nokia made the right choice going for MS when they did, simply that by the time they made the move it was already too late and MS has just been far too slow in their execution. WP7 needed to be released a year earlier than it was and it needed to ramp up its features and things much, much faster than they have done. It's only with WP8 that they are getting to feature parity with Windows Mobile 6.5.

All that said, I think Windows Phones are the right phones for lots of people - doing some core things really well like email, social network integration and simplicity. But of course, most people don't care about phones and they look to hype in geeks and store staff and numerical differences to try and figure out what is best - so hardware specs, app counts etc become focal points rather than overall user experiences.

I HAVE A SAMSUNG OMNIA 7 WINDOWS 7.5 PHONE
its the best phone i have owned....and i have had alot...iphones & roid
in 12 months the phone has not let me down once...not froze or crashed
i will be moving to windows phone 8

I had a windows 6.1 phone a few years ago and it is the worst smartphone I've ever owned. Even the one and only blackberry phone i've ever owned was better.

Completely different. That's Windows Mobile :yawn:

Its not though really is it many people will associate windows mobile phones across the range like anything a bad experience stays with you. I know they are worlds apart so do you but many won't or have already moved on to another platform.

But wasn't it a forerunner to windows phone?

I was put off by an earlier experience. Just like I was put off by the blackberry. A lot of the time you only have one chance to make a good impression. If not buyers move onto something else.

The Windows Phone 7 OS and Windows Mobile 6 and before are completely different. WP7 was re-built from scratch, which is why none of the apps for WM6 are compatible.

I loved my WinMo 6.5 phone (HTC Raphael)

Im not saying that it was good, but i loved it none the less .....
It was almost fun how random it was .... you genuinely never knew what it was going to do next !!!

Phones are much too sensible these days

Maybe its just me remembering it fondly, a bit like remembering all Summers when i was young being sunny ....

I've used them. by any objective standard they were crap. i can still see it now, with it's battery cover missing.

the thing going for WP8 is the ecosystem. there will be some advantage to the branding around the launch of windows 8 but the main strength will be as consumers get used to windows 8's metro interface and the opportunities for exploiting the back and front end similarities.

It might have been a "political" decision. WP7 uses a Windows CE kernel and I am pretty sure they reused some parts. The apps are written in Silverlight and XNA framework, which was not a technical decision. But making a cut saved them possible compatibility problems.

Your talking in technical terms and that's fair enough but to many they are still just windows phones.

Couple of people I know had the HTC HD2 and won't go back to 'windows' now, this may not be much of the market just one little obstacles W8 has to overcome along the way.

It's the same way that people look at the shiny Mac in the Apple store and compare to the ten year old Windows XP computer they've used and abused and then dismiss Windows as rubbish without even trying it.