Day 4 after dumping iOS and going with the Lumia 920 / Windows Phone 8

I didn’t plan to keep posting about this, but I’ve had some pretty good feedback on Twitter and here about this so I figure why not.

Today will be brief, just wanted to post some observations:

• Battery life – I was worried about this, I read about some horror stories where the Lumia 920’s were dumping in a few hours.  I had one instance where something was running in the background draining the battery so far.   Since then I’ve been pretty liberal in shutting down /blocking background tasks and with that I’ve seen some great battery life so far.  Easily a full day with lots of use.  That’s with GPS, BT, Wireless, LTE all enabled full time.
• UI  – I am getting more and more used to how stuff works on this phone, and am figuring out the MS method to the madness.   The funny thing is how similar to iOS Windows Phone is at its core concepts.   The walls on this garden are quite high, and MS does everything it can to keep you out of the back end of the system.   Let’s hope they are faster on adopting change / adding features /  and growing than Apple is, or it has no chance against Android.
• Notifications –  Maybe its just me… but there seems to be a distinct lack of visual notifications for mail events.   If you are in an app working, there is nothing more than a noise or vibration if an email comes in.  No way to see who it was from.   MS has a nice “Toast” notification system built into the OS, yet their email client doesn’t seem to use it.  This is something that must be fixed to be useful.
• Grouped Inboxes – I love this… This is a feature every phone should have and is very handle for those of us with multiple accounts.   To be able to group work focused inboxes together, and group personal ones together in their own Mail icons, unread mail totals, etc… keeps stuff nicely organized.   The ease to add accounts to these groupings and remove them is also quite nice.  Only issue I saw was when you have a Gmail or IMAP account in a group with an ActiveSync mail account, there seems to be a delay in the Gmail/IMAP mail sync/refresh.

That’s about all I have.  I also abandoned Gmail last night for Outlook.com due to the client features, and also to better leverage the MS ecosystem better on the new phone.   

This also puts me square in the territory if being called a MS Zealot now since I am pretty much 100% MS now for my tablet, phone, PC, Servers, Email, etc…    But coming from using GMail/Google Apps, iPhone, iPad, and even a MacBook Air a year ago… I don’t regret it at all.  The Apple devices have their perks, but I just feel like the whole iOS platform has gone to sleep on growing.  Maybe iOS7 will impress… or catch up to what Google and MS are doing now.

Eager to see if I bring home a Surface RT from TechEd in a week as well 🙂