So now that I’ve spent the better part of the morning/afternoon messing with my new Lumia 920 I am starting to get familiar with some of the quirks, and differences between it and my 4 years with an iPhone.
Pros:
- Fast – this thing is so smooth on every action. Strangely so.
- Wireless charging – I love you. I got a Nokia Qi charger from the local ATT store for $25 cant beat that.
- Adding apps is a breeze. Similar to the Xbox where you can go and add apps on their website and they will be uploaded to your phone automatically. Very refined.
- The screen is outstanding, bright/crisp, every bit as good if not better than my iPhone 4 screen. This is the IPS LCD screen not the OLED Screen. Higher res than my iPhone 4.
- Finally a phone with 5ghz N wifi. Very happy about this.
- The Camera – yep its pretty damn impressive. the integration to replicate to Skydrive automatically works better for me than iCloud does!
- I have found all but roughly 5 apps that I wanted. The name brand, real deal apps. pretty happy with that. Overall I spent probably $25 today on the app store replacing apps I had in the iTunes store now in the Windows Store. Not bad at all.
- Navigation – full offline maps for North America. How f’n nice is that?! The Nokia Drive app is truly impressive.
- NFC – already playing with a NFC tag they send in the box, and I can now script events to happen when I put the phone on a certain charger. Like at night I can automatically have it turn on White Noise when I place it on the Qi charge pad which is also a NFC device.
Neutral:
- Live tiles – and the whole start screen interface. I feel quite claustrophobic working in the current start screen. I will figure it out, but its going to take some time to get used to the primary way I used my phone before.
- Semi confusing integrations between mail accounts, contacts, facebook, twitter, etc… I am still trying to find where the boundaries are and when it uses those services.
- Cant access your Xbox music unless you pay a monthly fee. I knew this going in, but still its more expensive than Amazon Cloud and iTunes combined. Just waiting for Amazon to get an app on this phone.
- Apps – Some app analogs of the real name brand apps are needed. Like to use Latitude, RDP tools, etc… are all facsimiles of real name brand apps that haven’t made it to the app store yet. They don’t work bad, they are just not quite as good.
- Great hand feel, if a bulky one. Its a big machine, and heavy, but it actually feels pretty good.
Con:
- Some functions, menus, and short cuts lack intuitiveness that Apple mastered. I found some of Apple UI’s to be very self guiding. the MS solution is a bit more convoluted for someone looking to heavily customize their phone.
- Battery – Slightly concerned about battery life given how much I drained it configuring it today. Not a good sign, but with a few Qi chargers around it should just be able to set it down at my desk and have it charge when I am not using it easily.
- Lack of full integration with the windows eco system. I know this changing, with the upcoming phone update, and the Windows 8.1 there are already news of fixes, but the fact I can replicate my favorites from IE in WIn8 to my win 8 phone is stunning… how was that not a red flag?
- Going with the last thing, there seems to be only a semi consistent Windows Login pass through around the phone. I have had to re-login dozens of times in various apps where I would think it should be just grabbing some hash from the OS for SSO.
- App’s slow to come to market. The key apps I cant find are:
iTap RDP (they don’t plan to make WinPho apps anytime soon)
LogMeIn (says they will eventually)
Amazon Cloud Player (Said they were, then nothing)
Authentic Google apps
Much more to come down the road…
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