Microsoft’s Windows 10 Mobile, which it once declared “buries the competition”, is officially on its last legs, with its upcoming End of Support scheduled to start June 11, 2019.
The company has advised Windows 10 mobile users to switch to an Android or iOS device ahead of the end of support.
Microsoft has published a FAQ page which details what the end of support for the Windows 10 Mobile will entail.
It states that all Windows 10 Mobile users will no longer receive “new security updates, non-security hotfixes, free assisted support options, or technical content updates from Microsoft for free” from December 10, 2019.
Any devices that are running Windows 10 Mobile version 1703 will stop receiving support from June 11, 2019.
After the device reaches the end of support, the phones will still function, for a time. As the features slowly stop working Microsoft will not provide any support including any and all automatic or manual device backups, which are scheduled to end on March 10, 2020.
Microsoft Office products are available on both iPhones and Android and thanks to its partnership with Samsung, many of the Galaxy smartphones have Office products pre-installed.
Ironically, back in 2010 when Windows launched the Windows Phone 7, held a funeral procession for the Blackberry and iPhone, declaring that their device “buries the competition”.
“We had a differentiated experience, but it’s so clear in hindsight that the disruption in business model which Android represented was enormous, and that building our early versions of Windows Phone on an incomplete Windows CE platform, designed for small embedded systems, left us too hobbled to ever catch up,” said Terry Myerson, the former head of Windows Phone, to CNBC.
