Yes, I know the OS (and its successor, Windows 10 Mobile) died many years ago but what if you got someone a Windows Phone for Christmas? This article from 2013—when it wasn’t dead but certainly wasn’t thriving either—offers some ideas:
Those who receive Windows Phones as gifts as Christmas will be measuring different areas of use in their handsets, and for the majority of these, Windows Phone is well suited. When the wrapping paper comes off, and the SIM card is popped into the machine, Windows Phone should be a popular and well-recieved Christmas present for millions of users around the world. Here’s why.
Let’s start with the out of the box experience. Apart from the need to have a Microsoft account (and I think the majority of people will probably have a Hotmail account lurking somewhere in their digital world), a Windows Phone will head online and start to populate the address book, email client, and social networks with just the initial account details. Perhaps it would be nice to have the option to add Facebook and Twitter during the setting up process after the first switch on, but I can see why that might feel like overloading the first-time user. Nonetheless, once you add the Microsoft account, Facebook, Twitter, and perhaps Google, you have a handset ready to go with the majority of your online world and personal data synced to the handset with almost no intervention required.
I owned a Windows Phone between 2012–2013 and while the experience started well, it went downhill quite quickly when they released an update that my then-6 month old phone wasn’t compatible with. What was the reason?!