NYPD dropping Window Phone for iPhones

NYPD dropping Window Phone for iPhone

A New York Post report that one of Microsoft’s more celebrated U.S. business customers for Windows Phone is dumping the platform raises some interesting questions about Redmond’s future mobility plans.

The Post reported on August 28 that the New York Police Department (NYPD) is going to scrap the 36,000 Nokia phonesrunning the Windows Phone OS that it has been rolling out for the past two years.

Microsoft dropped support for Windows Mobile 8.1 in July 2017. But the two handset models the NYPD purchased, the Lumia 640XL and Lumia 830, both were among the Windows Phones that were upgradable to Windows 10 Mobile. (Of these two, only the newer 640XL will also be eligible for the coming Fall Windows 10 Mobile update, however.)

As of October 2016, the NYPD was planning ot migrate to Windows Phones running Windows 10 Mobile. But the New York Post is reporting that the NYPD, instead, is likely to move to iPhones by the end of this calendar year.

Microsoft has been working to get out of the phone business for the past couple of years. The company is not currently manufacturing any new Windows Phones. And Windows Phones that are still being used won’t get the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update coming out later this year. Instead, some subset of existing models will only get something internally known as “Feature 2,” which is believed to be a dead-end branch of Windows 10 Mobile.

So if NYPD does not share Microsoft’s mobile productivity as well as the other features, is there any point in keeping the Windows Phone alive and compete against Android and iPhone ?

At the moment the Windows Phone user base sold since 2016 is less than .5 percent while 99.6 percent are purchasing Android and iPhones.  Maybe the writing is on the wall that this is a dead product and time to put it to rest.