What was it like to be a Windows Phone fan, in the beginning?
Exhilarating!
Windows Phone 7 Series, as it was called then, was first shown off in February of 2010 at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. I had become a fan of Microsoft products a year earlier after spending most of my life bashing the company. Windows 7, Zune HD and what was going on in the Xbox 360 world made me take another look. Then I started reading articles about this new mobile operating system which looked nothing like iOS, Android, Blackberry or Microsoft's previous effort, Windows Mobile 6.5. The Live Tiles, typography, landscape user interface, flat clean design made me a believer. Granted, I had seen some of this on the Zune HD, but this made the software on the Zune look very basic.
Later that year, in October, Microsoft released Windows Phone to the public. At the time, I was using something called the Peek. This thing was nothing more than an email device, though it could do a couple other things like email-to-text. I was holding onto this until I could get my hands on a Dell Venue Pro, a device I had been following since it's prototype days when it was known as the "Lightning." In June of 2011, I finally got one and I was finally able to say I was a Windows Phone user.
Leading up to that and after, Microsoft would tease us with new features and devices from manufacturers. And when it came to advertising, Microsoft went all out. Those were the days when Steve Ballmer ran the company. He had no problem having Microsoft, which had billions of dollars in the bank, throw money at something until it stuck. At the Windows Phone launch, they had Katy Perry perform a concert.
In November of 2011, Microsoft went to New York City and built a fifty-five foot tall Windows Phone. No lie! Okay, it wasn't an actually Windows Phone, but it was a building that looked and functioned like a Windows Phone. Check out the video below and see for yourself.
Around this time, Microsoft worked-out a partnership with Nokia. This would give Nokia a lot of say about the software and direction of Windows Phone. And for Microsoft, Nokia would produce some beautiful hardware. To celebrate this collaboration Deadmau5 put on a concert sponsored by Microsoft and Windows Phone. This event was amazing. They projected video onto a building and, well, check it out.
Windows Phone never caught the public's attention like iOS did, but most of the blame was on Microsoft not getting this OS out sooner. Had it beat Android out the gates, things may have turned out differently. Still, in the short time it was here, I couldn't get enough news, videos, ads or commercials for Windows Phone. Heck, some fans even made their own commercials.