stevenCwong

In my office, i have a wall of mobile devices that i have used.  My first smart device on my wall of fame is a developer edition “Windows CE 1.0 Alpha” made by Casio.  When the fall of windows phone 6.5 occured, i retired my Sony Erricson Windows Phone and purchased an iPhone 3G.  Then moved to an iPhone 4.

When Windows Phone 7 was released, i wanted to go back to Windows, however, being in Canada there was little support for it on the Rogers network.  (ie, lack of device choices – no HTC).

On April 9th, Rogers launched the Nokia Lumia 900.  On April 11, i picked up my reserved phone.  Here is what i miss from the transition, and here is what i love.

1 – FaceTime.  My wife and kids have iPhone’s/iPods/iPads and now have to use Skype to now do the same thing with them.  Skype on the Windows Phone cannot run in the background, so we have to coordinate a call unlike being able to call freely when connected via wifi with FaceTime.

2 – App Store.  There no question the app store rocks on the iOS devices.  Developers of the world, please set your eyes on Windows Phone and start porting/developing great stuff for it.

3 – Tethering – until Rogers fixes this for me, its an issue.  I have the 6GB plan with tethering that worked on the iPhone, but does not on the Lumia.  Rogers said it was related to the Nokia Data issue fix that’s coming out by the 16^th of April.  I bought my phone outright because I was not allowed an hw upgrade.  I do not want to have to change to an LTE plan in order to get this feature.  ITS NOT advertised as such.

4 – Battery Life.  I never turned off my wi-fi on my iPhone and could last a day of serious use.  With the Lumia, my battery is dead by 2:30pm.  With Wi-Fi off, I can go the entire day.

Things I Love abou the Windows Phone 7.5 on Nokia Lumia 900

1-  People First.  I love the social intersection of all my social feeds into one place.  its slick and makes sense.  Saves me much time switching from social app to social app to get up to date.  The “People Groups” feature is also cool to stream info from your social networks by type (Family, Friends, Co-Workers, etc).

2- Apps Integrated – the apps flow from one to another as if it was always in memory.  I use to curse when I launch an iPhone app by accident, they have to back out and switch.  With Windows Phone, moving from one app to another is fast and seamless.  I was worried about speed with the Lumia only having a single processor; it has not been an issue.

3- Core Apps there- all the core apps that I need are part of the phone or as a free download from the marketplace.  This includes: Amazon Kindle, Facebook, Flicker, foursquare, groupon, imdb, Netflix, skype, starbucks card (3^rd party), twitter, vevo, youtube.  Missing is LinkedIn, however, it supports linkedin feed natively as well as a 3^rd party app for linkedin called IN+ Networking (no messaging support).

4- Live Tiles – the home page is useful.  The swipe down “dashboard” in the iPhone is terrible and I never used it.  Live tiles lets you see at a glance real information across all your feeds/apps in one place.

5- Office integration –  it has great integration with Windows Live for your office docs and great connectivity to our SharePoint Portal to access docs, contacts, tasks, etc.  Very slick.

6- Nokia Drive – I was using Navigon on the iPad (now owned by Garmin) and loved the app.   Apart from missing my live traffic, Nokia Drive is a very slick and easy to use app.  And its free!  Even the built in Bing directions is cool (better than the Google driving directions found on the iPhone).

Have you moved over?  What do you think of the experience?