Windows Phone 8 Review ⇥ theverge.com

Calgary is an interesting city. We have the second-largest land footprint of any city in North America, just behind Los Angeles. For a city of little more than a million people, this means that the vast majority of the city is very low-density. Downtown, for example, isn’t highly populated. At around 5:30 on a weekday evening, barely anyone is wandering around, and most of the shops are shut for the day, and won’t be reopened until the following morning.

The stores close early because there are few people living and shopping downtown. There are few people living and shopping downtown because there are no amenities to support it. It’s a cycle.

This is the problem Windows Phone has. People aren’t warming to it because their favourite apps aren’t on the platform. And their favourite apps aren’t on the platform because developers don’t want to put a lot of time and money into porting their app for a platform few use.

Like Calgary’s downtown core, there’s so much to love, but it’s marred by its lack of liveability.