So, my phone contract had run out after about 30 months with my iPhone 4. I decided that I would get a new phone instead of taking out another SIM-only deal, so I decided to look around and I got myself the Nokia Lumia 920. Like most iOS->Android/WP converts, it was mostly because I wanted a change and was simply fed up of iOS. So, I got myself a white 920 and I've been using it for about 2 weeks now. I'll write here my thoughts and views on the phone, along with an extract or two about why I picked it over the iP5.
The phone itself
The 920 is a really beautiful phone. The glass is slightly curved and touching it feels terrific. The 4.5" gorilla glass screen is also incredibly responsive, being able to be used even when wearing gloves, and is also full 720p with great colours, viewing angles, and can even be used in direct sunlight.
The body it a single piece of polycarbonate, and it feels really solid (although ever so slightly slippery). It's quite weighty; it has a big of 'clunk' to it, but personally I actually like that; it feels solid, and well built. If I am to drop it, I dont fear that the screen or body is going to end up cracked or scratched. While I was holding the iP5, I actually felt it was a little too light. Im not 100% confident that if it was to accidentally slip out of my hands while I'm taking it out of my pocket that it would end up in the same condition as it was 10 seconds ago. I've also heard that the back panel is very scratch-sensitive, while this 920 certainly doesnt feel this way.
Windows Phone 8; Basics
Shortly put, I really like WP8. The live tiles are a really good, innovative GUI which are not only pretty, but useful. There are quite a lot of 3rd party apps that take advantage of the live tile features, and it means that you dont have to open apps/get your information/go back. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it certainly works. WP8 itself is beautiful and heavily based on typography. The OS makes really good use of different font sizes to separate menus into sub-menus, making it easy to navigate around and such.
The phone has 3 software buttons; back, home, and search. Back does exactly that, but also if you hold in the button you get the multitasking screen. I much prefer this to having to double click the iPhone button; its a lot easier. Also, software buttons (I feel) are definitely the way to go.
The 'search' button brings up Bing, which you use as a search engine. Its actually more useful than I anticipated, and Bing works really well. You can search for something and it will bring up the search results; swipe left and right will bring up Bing images, videos, local related news, etc. However, what is really good is you can actually make Bing scan text, and it can do all sorts of stuff like recognise the words, and then translate the entire text! My girlfriend is a native French speaker and she assures me that the French it came out with is understandable after test translating a few English pages. It might not help you out every day in life, but it could be useful on a holiday or whatnot. It recognises printed words 100%, although hand writing can be a little iffy.
Another nice Bing feature is you can tell it to listen to background music, and it will find the song that is playing. I know there are 3rd party apps in iOS that can do this, but its still a good built-in feature.
My final point about Bing; voice recognition. I'm Scottish, and Siri simply does not understand me. It doesnt understand my brother. It doesnt understand my mum, my dad, my aunt, or anybody. As a general rule, Scottish people dont do voice recognition. But Bing on the other hand figures out my voice perfectly! This might not sound like a big thing to Americans who have been privileged to having voice recognition based upon their accents, but its truly a marvel to behold in Scotland
.
Built in Apps
So, Nokia/Microsoft include a few apps out the box, and also a quite a lot for you to download (if you wish). Theres a full office suite, OneNote, Nokia Maps, Nokia Drive (a sat-nav), 'Nokia City Lense', Nokia Music, and a few other bits and pieces which I wont discuss here.
Nokia Maps/Drive is decent. OneNote works well as a note taking platform, and syncs across your account. Having full office capabilities built in is nice, but you arent going to do any serious work on a 4.5" phone. Still, its good to be able to read .doc, .ppt, etc all from standard. Nokia City Lense is a really cool augmented reality app that brings up the location of nearby attractions like restaurants and gives you directions to them. It uses the Camera to see the environment you are in (difficult to describe, imagine just opening the camera app), then places the landmarks on the screen so you can follow them. Neat.
What I will say is a terrific App is Nokia Music. It's an app which streams music for free. The entire song, no adverts, nothing like that. You just open it, select a genre, and it will play random songs. It has a huge amount of genres as well. I like quite heavy metal music and didn't expect the metal section to be very expansive; when I went into it, there is about 12 different sub-genres for me to choose from! The same will be true of all the other main genres, I'm sure. The app also allows you to save the song for offline listening. Overall, its great. There might be Apps on iOS like this, but I never used them; to have it built in and designed specifically for the OS is great.
About the marketplace. A lot of people are critical of WP 'lack' of Apps. I havent found this to be the case in the sense that there are no apps that I need, and that arent there. However, I am not the the most app-heavy user, so this could still be a stumbling point for some. This is based on your usage. However, WP is growing and I expect even more developers to start supporting WP8.
There is one negative here, and it is actually quite a big one. There is no built in PDF reader. You have to go the app store and download one which is designed by Microsoft, and let me tell you; its garbage. You can download PDFs and open them, but you cant delete them afterwards. No, seriously, you read that right. You cant delete any PDFs you download. I expect this 'feature' (or should I say, basic function) to be added in the future via an update, but its horrendous that it isnt there now. I mean, it isnt as if WP8 is brand new; its been out for months, and this should have been fixed asap. I use PDFs a lot for University, and I'm already clogging up the PDF library, making it annoying to find the PDF I'm looking for. Also, the App takes an age to open up very large PDFs; I keep one of my text books on my phone, and it will take about 4 minutes to open it up. Admittedly it is over 1,000 pages, but still.
Syncing Across Devices
Nowadays this is critical for smartphone users. I use an iMac as my desktop computer, and it was essential that this should sync up with my phone. This is where iOS is great; everything is cross-platform and will be pushed to all your devices. I wasnt sure if WP could do this.
Overall, it makes a very good job of it. I have my calendars in sync by using Google Calendar (as opposed to 'Calendar' of OS X) and then using this as input source for my phone calendar. The good thing about this is that you can also set the OS X Calendar app to use Google Calendar as its input, so everything still syncs perfectly across, and you can still use the OS X Calendar app.
Windows have an App available from the OS X App store which allows you to sync music/photos/videos/etc from your iTunes library very easily. You can set it up to do this automatically, or you can do it manually. Equally, it has a function for you to transfer over files from the phone to your computer. The only thing missing compared to iOS->Mac OS X integration is syncing over WiFi, but that certainly isnt a deal breaker for me.
Anyway, thats about all I'm going to write now. I might come back and add an update if people are interested, or answer any Qs from people. I just thought I'd write a small review incase there are any others thinking about making the iOS->WP switch.
The phone itself
The 920 is a really beautiful phone. The glass is slightly curved and touching it feels terrific. The 4.5" gorilla glass screen is also incredibly responsive, being able to be used even when wearing gloves, and is also full 720p with great colours, viewing angles, and can even be used in direct sunlight.
The body it a single piece of polycarbonate, and it feels really solid (although ever so slightly slippery). It's quite weighty; it has a big of 'clunk' to it, but personally I actually like that; it feels solid, and well built. If I am to drop it, I dont fear that the screen or body is going to end up cracked or scratched. While I was holding the iP5, I actually felt it was a little too light. Im not 100% confident that if it was to accidentally slip out of my hands while I'm taking it out of my pocket that it would end up in the same condition as it was 10 seconds ago. I've also heard that the back panel is very scratch-sensitive, while this 920 certainly doesnt feel this way.
Windows Phone 8; Basics
Shortly put, I really like WP8. The live tiles are a really good, innovative GUI which are not only pretty, but useful. There are quite a lot of 3rd party apps that take advantage of the live tile features, and it means that you dont have to open apps/get your information/go back. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it certainly works. WP8 itself is beautiful and heavily based on typography. The OS makes really good use of different font sizes to separate menus into sub-menus, making it easy to navigate around and such.
The phone has 3 software buttons; back, home, and search. Back does exactly that, but also if you hold in the button you get the multitasking screen. I much prefer this to having to double click the iPhone button; its a lot easier. Also, software buttons (I feel) are definitely the way to go.
The 'search' button brings up Bing, which you use as a search engine. Its actually more useful than I anticipated, and Bing works really well. You can search for something and it will bring up the search results; swipe left and right will bring up Bing images, videos, local related news, etc. However, what is really good is you can actually make Bing scan text, and it can do all sorts of stuff like recognise the words, and then translate the entire text! My girlfriend is a native French speaker and she assures me that the French it came out with is understandable after test translating a few English pages. It might not help you out every day in life, but it could be useful on a holiday or whatnot. It recognises printed words 100%, although hand writing can be a little iffy.
Another nice Bing feature is you can tell it to listen to background music, and it will find the song that is playing. I know there are 3rd party apps in iOS that can do this, but its still a good built-in feature.
My final point about Bing; voice recognition. I'm Scottish, and Siri simply does not understand me. It doesnt understand my brother. It doesnt understand my mum, my dad, my aunt, or anybody. As a general rule, Scottish people dont do voice recognition. But Bing on the other hand figures out my voice perfectly! This might not sound like a big thing to Americans who have been privileged to having voice recognition based upon their accents, but its truly a marvel to behold in Scotland
. Built in Apps
So, Nokia/Microsoft include a few apps out the box, and also a quite a lot for you to download (if you wish). Theres a full office suite, OneNote, Nokia Maps, Nokia Drive (a sat-nav), 'Nokia City Lense', Nokia Music, and a few other bits and pieces which I wont discuss here.
Nokia Maps/Drive is decent. OneNote works well as a note taking platform, and syncs across your account. Having full office capabilities built in is nice, but you arent going to do any serious work on a 4.5" phone. Still, its good to be able to read .doc, .ppt, etc all from standard. Nokia City Lense is a really cool augmented reality app that brings up the location of nearby attractions like restaurants and gives you directions to them. It uses the Camera to see the environment you are in (difficult to describe, imagine just opening the camera app), then places the landmarks on the screen so you can follow them. Neat.
What I will say is a terrific App is Nokia Music. It's an app which streams music for free. The entire song, no adverts, nothing like that. You just open it, select a genre, and it will play random songs. It has a huge amount of genres as well. I like quite heavy metal music and didn't expect the metal section to be very expansive; when I went into it, there is about 12 different sub-genres for me to choose from! The same will be true of all the other main genres, I'm sure. The app also allows you to save the song for offline listening. Overall, its great. There might be Apps on iOS like this, but I never used them; to have it built in and designed specifically for the OS is great.
About the marketplace. A lot of people are critical of WP 'lack' of Apps. I havent found this to be the case in the sense that there are no apps that I need, and that arent there. However, I am not the the most app-heavy user, so this could still be a stumbling point for some. This is based on your usage. However, WP is growing and I expect even more developers to start supporting WP8.
There is one negative here, and it is actually quite a big one. There is no built in PDF reader. You have to go the app store and download one which is designed by Microsoft, and let me tell you; its garbage. You can download PDFs and open them, but you cant delete them afterwards. No, seriously, you read that right. You cant delete any PDFs you download. I expect this 'feature' (or should I say, basic function) to be added in the future via an update, but its horrendous that it isnt there now. I mean, it isnt as if WP8 is brand new; its been out for months, and this should have been fixed asap. I use PDFs a lot for University, and I'm already clogging up the PDF library, making it annoying to find the PDF I'm looking for. Also, the App takes an age to open up very large PDFs; I keep one of my text books on my phone, and it will take about 4 minutes to open it up. Admittedly it is over 1,000 pages, but still.
Syncing Across Devices
Nowadays this is critical for smartphone users. I use an iMac as my desktop computer, and it was essential that this should sync up with my phone. This is where iOS is great; everything is cross-platform and will be pushed to all your devices. I wasnt sure if WP could do this.
Overall, it makes a very good job of it. I have my calendars in sync by using Google Calendar (as opposed to 'Calendar' of OS X) and then using this as input source for my phone calendar. The good thing about this is that you can also set the OS X Calendar app to use Google Calendar as its input, so everything still syncs perfectly across, and you can still use the OS X Calendar app.
Windows have an App available from the OS X App store which allows you to sync music/photos/videos/etc from your iTunes library very easily. You can set it up to do this automatically, or you can do it manually. Equally, it has a function for you to transfer over files from the phone to your computer. The only thing missing compared to iOS->Mac OS X integration is syncing over WiFi, but that certainly isnt a deal breaker for me.
Anyway, thats about all I'm going to write now. I might come back and add an update if people are interested, or answer any Qs from people. I just thought I'd write a small review incase there are any others thinking about making the iOS->WP switch.
