starkers, ye ol' pirate, i agree with you completely. the app situation is overblown. windows phone has every app i need and then some.

That's exactly right... Apple and Android fans make it out to be such a big deal... that their stores have so many more apps and they can do more shit than me on my choice of phone.  Like that was the deal breaker!  I didn't like IOS at all, so a billion apps isn't going to sway me over.  And I had an Android phone before I got the Lumia 820... didn't like it much at all. 

Apart from the UI being ugly as a bucket full of bollocks, it was buggy and nowhere near as fluent, free moving as my W8 phone.  I had someone say that on better hardware... blah, blah, blah... and I cut him off with "look at this"... as I demonstrated just how responsive and fluid the W8 phone is.  I saw him a few months later, sporting a Lumia 620 that he was ever so proud of... and there was no mention whatsoever about not having as many apps, just a thank you for the demo that changed his 'phone life' for the better.

AAAARRRGHHHH, me 'earties, 'tis time fer IOS ta walk tha plank.

Absolutely.

I was just more curious than anything else with regard to what might be coming up once Microsoft actually takes the reigns of Nokia's device manufacturing.

Maybe they'll make a Surface phone.

Hmmm, you pose a good question there, what will Microsoft do, given Nokia is a well established brand with established product lines.  It's own manufacturing standards were quite exacting with the Surface tablet, so I don't know that a lot will change.  The Lumia range lends itself well to the Windows Phone platform, so it's conceivable that any replacement line would likely not stray too far from what has been successful thus far.

That is quite within the realms of possibility and something I would like to see.  If Apple can manufacture its own phone, then why not Microsoft?  I do not have a Surface tablet, but my niece has one of the 2nd generation ones and it is quite a nice unit, and if that is anything to go by then a Surface phone would be a very interesting proposition.  Yes, I could see myself switching from a Nokia phone to a Surface model if it came to fruition.

i'm betting the low-end and mid-range phones will be called lumia and the high-end will be called surface. i haven't seen that in print anywhere, i'm just guessing. i'd be all over a surface phone, to be honest. this red 1520 and 64 gb micro sd card will be sold quite quickly.

I don't think anyone has seen it in print as yet, and only MS and Nokia know, but I think it's a reasonable assumption that a Surface phone is on the horizon.  I mean, why would Microsoft have bought out Nokia otherwise?  To own the manufacturing process of the most successful Windows phone, or was there a much bigger picture, like having an established manufacturer with the necessary infrastructure in place to produce its Surface phone? 

The latter is a most inviting prospect... let's hope it's so.