The year is 2079. Humanity now largely dwells in crowded underground bunkers, having scorched the surface with nuclear war. Subsisting on recycled protein paste and mildly-irradiated arthropods, humanity endures, driven by an endless yearning for the one thing that can unite all cultures, creeds, and class divides: Windows Phone.
What year is it again? I am here today to write about Windows Phone as though it was 2015. It’s also Sunday and there are no other editors around who can stop me. 👋
Windows Phone 8.1 just got its first ChatGPT-style interface app, named after my favorite Lumia typo: Lumina. Yes, Windows Phone 8.1. And no, Cortana doesn’t count.
Shared in the Windows 8 Group Discord and developed by an individual called Logan, our long suffering comrades at the Windows Phone subreddit shared the project, which is currently in beta testing for those who have jail broken their beloved Lumia devices.
Leveraging Meta’s open weight Llama model, Lumina sports a simple interface inspired by the Metro UI we all love and miss dearly, with the ability to ask questions as you might do with Microsoft Copilot or ChatGPT.
AI chatbot ‘Lumina’ for Windows Phone 8.1 by Logan from r/windowsphone
Windows Phone itself might no longer be officially supported by Microsoft (grr), but much like when it was alive, creative and enthusiastic developers are keeping the platform going with jailbreaks and homebrew apps. Remember MyTube, 6Tag, or Tweetium? Those were the days.
Microsoft unceremoniously announced Windows Phone’s demise in a random tweet reply, after spending years upon years and millions of dollars carefully curating a passionate, albeit small fanbase. Its subsequent attempts at building Android-based phones, like the Surface Duo, were staggering failures.
For the life of me, I can’t understand why Microsoft didn’t just open source the OS and let the community keep it alive instead. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has previously lamented killing off Windows Phone and given how much of Microsoft’s aspirations around cloud, AI, and gaming revolve around mobile endpoints, it’ll never stop seeming like a short sighted decision to me. No Microsoft apps and services come pre-installed on Android or iOS by default, nor will they ever, giving Xbox, Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Copilot, and Microsoft 365 a huge disadvantage in the modern default computing modality.
But hey, there’s nothing to be done about it now. Now excuse me while I bask in some Lumia nostalgia with my irradiated cockroach paste.
