Edward Mitchell talks bout his decision to move to a Nokia Lumia 710 smartphone on his blog today. While he picked it up initially to act as a test machine for some software (always test on actual hardware is a sensible rule to follow), he's found the 710 is proving a great choice for his day to day life.

With the battery saver features turned on in the Settings, after a full day of occasional use, phone calls and listening to a moderately long podcast, my battery still has 83% capacity remaining. For a smart phone, that’s quite decent. The 710 is a low end  Windows Phone but it does what I want in a phone very well. I also still use my Android phone, but the Lumia 710 is my default phone.

What's interesting to me is that he's switched to a "pay as you go" plan in the US market, which is arguably an unorthodox way of running a smartphone in the States. The rest of the world would probably agree that a 710 on pre-pay is a smart idea (ahem, Vodafone UK). perhaps this is another way that Windows Phone can leverage a new market to the platform. For that you need to have devices at a lower cost as the handsets are pretty much unsubsidised, and that would need tweaks to the operating system.

Hmm.