My Lumia Experience
Hi,
after using a Lumia 800 for a couple of weeks, here's my two cents:
I have gone through all iPhone-Generations (and some symbian-stuff before) and currently own a bunch of current phones, among them the SGS2 (custom firmware, admittedly) and an Lumia 800. My company is developing apps, that's why I get to play around with smartphones a lot.
The Lumia 800 is hands down one of the best looking phones around. The size is perfect and it feels just right. I also dig the responsiveness of the user interface and I really like the approach of smart tiles in Windows Phone. Not as cluttered as android widgets and much smarter than the iOS counterpart (there is no such concept).
Unfortunately, there are a lot of real show stoppers that make me pick up my SGS2 in the morning, instead of the Lumia. Let's start with basics like calendaring and e-mails. Handling of calendar invitations does not work most of the time, the phone does not even handle .ics-files, which makes me pin down invitations, then go to the calendar and create a new entry manually - c'mon, this is basic stuff!
If you are setting up Google Mail on the phone, you will see only the first level of tags (a.k.a IMAP-folders). If a tag has sub-tags, it won't be displayed in the list, making the whole concept useless - bummer.
Syncing your contacts with google works in such a way that all your contacts do actually appear on the phone - except for random phone numbers that just will not be synchronized. If you really want to have all your contacts' phone numbers on the Lumia you better go through all those contacts and make sure the phone numbers are labeled in a way the Lumia can understand. I am not sure which labels work reliably. Updating all contacts just for a bug like this really is a tedious task!
The integration of facebook is pretty well done, unless you have a name that is so common that there are other people you know on facebook that have the same name. In this case, messages and profile pictures of the other people of your name are displayed as _your_ messages and profile pictures. Guess some developer decided to ditch unique IDs and go for names instead - another bug!
Talking about bugs: most apps that I really got used to on other platforms are sub par or not available at all on Windows Phone. Remember The Milk, evernote, spotify, rdio or even facebook - those apps are in no way comparable to their counterparts on iOS or Android in terms of features and stability.
And then there are a lot of other, small things:
- No tethering (ok, this is supposed to come in a future update)
- no image scale-down possible when sending via e-mail
- mute does not mute all sounds
- no ABC-bar in contacts list, you have to search or scroll a thousand times to find a contact
- Marketplace is slow and often inresponsive. Is there a way to list the apps I have bought? I have not found such an option
- battery runtime: though much better after last update, it is still tough to get through an entire day
- Once you install many apps (like I do) you will start to miss folders or other means to organize your smart tiles and the application list - a general problem of Windows Phone.
I have to admit that some of the trouble is certainly due to the fact that I use google services instead of Exchange, which might yield a better experience on Windows Phone. Then again, this phones' target audience is more likely to use free google services than Exchange.
That being said, I still like the phone, but it has way to many quirks to be a reliable business phone. I really hope Nokia and Microsoft get these wrinkles straightened out because the interface surely has a lot of potential.
Until then I will stick to my ugly Android that gets the job done ;-)
Cheers,
Dan
