Do You Change Your Phone Or Your Accessories?

It’s a crossroads… An impasse… An impossible dilemma… It is something that every Windows Phone user faces on a daily basis… I love my phone, but nothing works with it.

Yes, I said it. There is so much that I love about my precious HTC One M8 for Windows, yet there is so much I can’t do with it. As for me, I run a small photography business, do some blogging, take a ton of images, and provide tech support for my day job on an on-call basis. It’s quite a bit for one device to handle. Fortunately, I have had my Windows Phone for the heavy lifting and an HTC One M7 running Android for everything else. This week, that M7 went back for a camera repair – and it has really hurt.

With functionality like USB OTG, I can upload photos from my DSLR to Flickr from the road. With Square, I can accept credit card payments and deposits from clients on the spot. With proper DLNA, I can share images right to my TV without fancy hookups or a special dongle. Heck, I can even stream to my Sony Network Speaker without anything special, which makes passing the work time much easier. The final straw has been my desire to drop some weight and get in better shape. The $200 MS Band has been out of stock for months, and is really the only major option for Windows Phone. FitBit has a pretty good setup now, but it was a bit late to the party for me.

As I continued down the list, I found my poor Windows Phone just wasn’t measuring up, and it had nothing to do with it being a Windows Phone. It had to do with connectivity, with Apps and with accessories. Sure, there are ways around it, like spending $100’s on new stuff, but that’s not really a great idea when simply buying a $300 device to replace my M8 would fix my problems. It just doesn’t make much sense to continue to invest in a platform that doesn’t meet my needs.

Does anyone else suffer from gadget envy when their iPhone or Android touting buddies come around, or is it just me? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to fall out of love with Windows, but it’s becoming harder and harder to love it when everything else just keeps getting better and better. It is even harder to love it when there is so much missing from it that I need to keep things running.