You may have seen my recent stills shootout between the elderly Nokia N8 and the new Sony Xperia Z? What I hinted at in that text was that I took the same shots with the 2012 Nokia 808 PureView and Lumia 920 as well, i.e. the best and fastest of Symbian with the generally-considered Windows Phone flagship. This being a camera result comparison, I'm expecting the Nokia 808 to win, of course, it's far more camera-centric than the other two and has a relatively huge sensor (plus proper flash), but I'm interested in the margin of victory and also as to how the best camera phone on Windows Phone matches up to (more or less) the best on Android, given that the sensor sizes are the same. Read on!
Microsoft's Joe Belfiore has acknowledged via Twitter this weekend on the issue of Windows Phone handsets not releasing temporary and cached files from the 'Other' storage. While not labelling it as an 'issue', he notes that improvements will be coming in future updates. But in my view, that's not a fast enough response for an issue that is starting to strangle the platform.
It's fair to say that most people agree that Windows Phone 8 is a great, if not perfect, starting point for people who are new to smartphones - it's slick and everything the beginner needs is there from the start. What's more contentious is how well Windows Phone 8 works for anyone coming from a Symbian or Android handset - such people are used to a lot of flexibility in terms of interface, hardware and the interaction between applications. Can Windows Phone 8 currently satisfy, as at the end of February 2013 with the 'Portico' update now rolled out to all? How much is still to come? In this heavily updated article, here's my honest assessment, based on months of use of both the Symbian-powered Nokia 808 and the Windows Phone 8-powered Nokia Lumia 920...
While the timing is not exact to the day, I'm drawn back to some of the more rational conclusions made on Feb 11 2011, the so called 'Burning Platform' day when Nokia's new CEO Stephen Elop took to the stage and committed the Finnish smartphone manufacturer to Windows Phone exclusively. "If they push hard they can get a phone out in a year, but it'll take two years to change course." MWC is the two year mark, so how's that course change looking? Rather well, if we're honest...
Regular readers of AAS and AAWP will be used to periodic 'Xenon rants', in which I lambast the industry for producing phones that, over and over again, have cameras which frustrate normal end-users when trying to snap people indoors or after sunset. These devices test fine with static subjects, in the hands of reviewers, but then in the real world, results of LED-flash-shot photos are almost always disappointing. And now we have the announcement of the Nokia Lumia 720, with the specific angle of being a camera-centric smartphone pitched for 'young and design-savvy crowd with busy social lives'. If ever a handset deserved a Xenon flash....
I joked earlier in the week with Steve and Rafe that I was going to write about how much I wanted to upgrade to Windows Phone 7 from my current handset - which is a Nokia Lumia 820. And while it's unlikely that I will be personally retiring my WP8 handset from Nokia in the near future, right now this Lumia is not one of my favourite handsets for a simple reason. Trust.
The trendy thing to talk about in the smartphone world is 'market share', of course. Thinking about the industry as 'business', its' all about current sales, how many units were shipped in the last few months, how much profit was made, and so on. Flip this on its head, looking at smartphone platforms from the user's point of view though, and a slightly different picture emerges. What I consider below is the 'active installed base' of each platform, i.e. the numbers of compatible handsets being used on a daily basis around the world.
Anyone watching the online coverage of smartphones over the last month can't have helped but notice something peculiar. There's a huge amount of love in the room for BlackBerry (formerly Research in Motion) and their 'comeback' smartphone the Z10. That love has given BlackBerry a fair amount of leeway over many issues in the handset (not least battery life and the unfocused UI elements), and I can't help wondering how Windows Phone's last two years would have been with the same love in the room.
Well, in contravention of my headline, actually these data technologies and speed aren't totally irrelevant. But they are most of the time, as I'll explain below. In fact, the whole concept of needing ultrafast mobile data all the time is horribly flawed, but it turns out that such data is, at least in part, a kludge solution to something our intelligent smartphones are supposed to be doing for us all the time, when we're not actively using them...
As Ewan pointed out recently, after wiping or replacing your phone, there's a very limited opportunity to accept Microsoft's automated help in restoring your applications and set-up. And, if you hadn't allowed Windows Phone to 'backup' your app list in the first place (it's a setting) then you'd be screwed anyway. Having had to completely wipe my Lumia 920 (for self-inflicted reasons I won't bore you with), I had to find a painless way to get all my apps back and, having jumped through a few blind alleys in the process, thought it worth documenting as a 'how to' for others.
