As someone who takes a lot of photos with my phone, this interests me a lot. Though as someone who has previously used Windows Phone, I'm very skeptical about going back to it.
This is the first device that makes me wonder about Nokia's WP-exclusive decision. They didn't go with Android to avoid becoming "yet another" Android manufacturer, and I agree with that sentiment (look at how few are turning a profit). However, there are no Android devices that really excel at stuff like photography- I think that Nokia could have carved out an interesting niche in solidly built, feature-focused devices.
I've had the Lumia 928 for 3 weeks now. My three previous phones were iPhone 3G, iPhone 4 and iPhone 4s.
Part of me wishes that I would've gone Windows Phone sooner but the realistic part of me realizes that Windows Phone 7 was still nowhere near the quality of iOS.
Windows Phone 8 is a completely different matter though. It's superior to my old iPhones in almost every way. Live tiles, SkyDrive integration (much better than iCloud especially if you get the 25 GB free from Microsoft), much better maps application, tight OneNote integration, native Office support, excellent Remote Desktop support. The other thing that's important to note is that the web browsing is just as good and email is just as good. I actually do those two things more than any other function on my phone.
As a long time iOS guy who's been using Windows Phone (Nokia) for over a year, I can honestly say it has the best UI in terms of usability for the form-factor. You're right - the map smokes all others. The only issue I have is the non-webkit IE browser and lack of a few key apps.
IE 11 will include WebGL support [1], and due to Microsoft's 'core systems' sharing across big Windows and Windows Phone, this is likely to propogate down to the phone.
> Doesn't WebGL essentially use root access to your gpu?
Only in badly-designed, non-conformant user agents. :)
The WebGL security issues have, for at least a year, been FUD. The spec is essentially fixed, drivers have become a whole lot better, and browsers have become a whole lot stricter in their validation code. WebGL is not OpenGL nor OpenGL ES.
Examples: while the OpenGL ES spec is silent on buffer overflows, WebGL mandates user agents to signal errors; while OpenGL ES doesn't specify the state of freshly allocated textures, WebGL requires them to be blanked out; WebGL textures can never be from non-origin-clean canvases.
Except on Linux. As an anecdote, as recently as January, visiting any WebGL sites that used any shaders would reliably panic my kernel with NVidia hardware and the NVidia binary blob. I then switched to Intel hardware which is much more stable but also shows how much variance there is here.
For me to be comfortable with WebGL, we'll have to really train graphics card manufacturers to take security issues as seriously as web developers do. That isn't going to happen any time soon.
Huh, if you don't mind me asking, which video card? I've used linux+nvidia pretty exclusively for work and never seen anything near as bad on linux (I do run higher-end cards than the average PC, though).
FYI, Android devices will soon not use WebKit, as Chrome is changing to Blink. Whilst Blink is a fork of WebKit, I believe that the differences between mobile Safari and mobile IE will be as small as the differences between Safari and Chrome.
At the risk of starting a device war, I'd agree with everything you've said, except that Android does a lot of those important things better still. Maps in particular- Google Maps is utterly unparalleled.
But it's all down to the user- I have no requirement for Remote Desktop support, so that doesn't matter to me. I don't use OneNote or Office, and use Dropbox for file syncing.
Long time ago I had an old Windows phone, HTC Diamond and some other wierd pda/phone type thing that was awful. Since that I went "Android" - I've used HTC Hero, Desire, Xperia Arc and Xperia S. Now I'm using Lumia 920 I got from my workplace.
I used to think that Google Maps was great, but after using Nokia's HERE maps I have to say, HERE is better. Not sure if it's the hardware, but first of all it's A LOT faster than Google Maps ever was. Secondly, HERE maps work offline (altough I just heard Google is finally enabling this with their maps).
Without wanting to sound like fanboy, the 920 is a great phone: it just works. The UX is better than in android, mainly because different apps all follow same guidelines on how to implement UI navigation/actions.
On the android phones I had, most of the time it was "free for all" with the UX as different manufacturers and devs implemented their own ideas on how nav/actions should work.
Other things I can say about 920: battery time is great, wifi (and wifi sharing) work flawlessly, sound quality is great both ways and the _camera_ is best I ever used in a mobile phone. It just puts all other mobile phones to shame.
I'm looking forwards to 1020 and hope to get one when they are available.
Only bad thing I can say is the Windows store and apps. I miss quite a few apps I used on my android phones. It's a shame so many devs only focus on apple/android.
Offline maps has been available since at least 2 years. I think you had to long tap a point, choose Save offline from the menu, choose the dimensions of the square that pops up and the square becomes available offline.
Yes, but that downloaded map data is useless. You cannot search in it, find any routes in it or anything. You have to use the net and query Google. So it's more caching of the view than actual map data.
Not only that, but every now and then Google Maps want to check something over the Internet and just locks itself with an undismissable spinner and "Loading" message until you find a connection.
Well, it is seems like caching of the actual map data, but the application itself is not capable of performing the searches or figuring out routes. Since the device I am talking about was really not that powerful enough to perform that kind of computation, it could be intentional.
Nokia Maps is _amazing_ and has been since the Symbian days, even more so by the fact that you can download maps beforehand (whole countries) and use them offline. Utterly unparalleled might be a bit harsh.
I can vouch for this, Nokia Maps is just amazing. The ability to download maps offline is extremely convenient, not just when you are out of the country and don't have a data connection, but also when you are running low on battery.
However, I am still surprised how we got here, we went from having offline maps on all GPS devices in the beginning of last decade to online only maps by the end of it! Now we have to tout the ability of having offline maps as a feature?
Last time I tried Nokia Maps (on a WP7 device probably a year ago, admittedly) I tried searching for a nearby location by entering a partial address. It failed. I tried searching for a cross street without using name suffixes. It failed.
Point is, everyone has different needs from a Maps app. I don't drive, so don't need navigation. I just need to enter an address quickly and find out where it is, so offline downloads don't really do anything for me.
I don't drive either, so walking/public transit directions are INTEGRAL to my survival. I haven't played with a Windows Phone in almost two years, though.
Google Maps can download maps beforehand, but for some reason it won't let you plan a route without an internet connection. Probably because their route-finding algorithm would crush a phone or something :)
In the latest update, 7.0, there's quite a bit of conversation that this is no longer possible. It's recently come out that it can be done with a gimmick, typing 'okay maps' I believe, but it remains unintuitive as a primary task let alone worthwhile feature.
That is definitely a thing that you don't appreciate until you have to use it. We were on road over the long weekend and were lost with no network connection. Thanks to offline maps on my Lumia 920 I was able to find the nearest road offline and get back on road to our destination.
I don't ever post here but figured I'd add my two cents to this.
I got a Nokia Lumia 928 about 40 days ago (just passed time for insurance). This past weekend I went on a trip from Seattle to Yellowstone. We had four people in the car and in most of Idaho and most of Montana there was very sparse 3G or LTE connection. My phone was the only one capable of doing offline GPS navigation.
I've been quite surprised with how much I've enjoyed my Windows 8 phone and only become angry with the lack of games when I'm on the toilet.
I recently returned back to the UK from a 2 week long US road trip, covering 2000 miles. We downloaded the Nokia Drive data for the states we were visiting in advance onto my girlfriend's cheap Lumia 710, as we wouldn't have any data connection (not wanting to incur roaming charges). We were utterly dependent on the Nokia Drive app, and it performed exceptionally. Definitely recommended in place of a dedicated satnav.
I agree. In fact, I'm still using a Symbian phone, and the maps still work. (Offline maps are essentially the only smartphone-esque feature that I make use of on a regular basis, so I feel no need to upgrade.)
I was working at jimmy johns as a driver about four months ago. One of the drivers there had a Nokia phone, I had an android, and obviously delivering you often get addresses that are sometimes slightly incorrect etc. Google maps never failed me, the windows phone guy would get lost constantly. I don't know why, could be just bad driving, but one thing that the google maps seemed to be better at was determining the location of businesses and for traffic and TRAINS (since the town I was in had 2 different tracks).
In short, I'd have to agree that google maps is unparalleled (important to note that the iPhone people didn't even bother using their maps).
Maybe the iPhone people just knew where they were going?
I used to deliver pizza. If you had to stop and look up addresses you lost money to the drivers who didn't. It was to your advantage to learn your way around the delivery area.
+1 I haven't been able to get maps to work at all on my Nokia 920, I can't even figure what the map app is....everything is prefixed as Nokia something app with some weird names that don't work. Suffice it to say, I'm forced to use my old iPhone for anything that involves a map.
Windows phone would be much better if they offered a google map app for it.
Lets just to with an example...I wanted to find the nearest post office, typed it in, I got a result about 9 hours flight away from where I lived. Google maps was able to return something down the street.
The HERE Drive+ is designed specifically for in-car-use (to work as standalone satnav replacement), but they also have "HERE Maps", which will give you public transport and walking directions: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/here-maps/6c2863...
What is available for the cn market? My phone is locked to that even though I'm American myself.
I was use ping here maps, or HERE whatever, there are a lot of them and I'm not sure what each does. It didn't help me find something as simple as the post office when I needed to mail off tax forms last month, which google maps and apple maps had no problem with. Very disappointing.
I actually care more about having competition and choices than just openness. Open source softwares suffer from stagnation just like the closed ones when they are left with no competition. Which is why I am actively rooting for Ubuntu Mobile and Firefox OS. I am also hoping with more Mobile OSes, we will start seeing standards to interact and share data between them.
Windows Phone is more open than iOS in the sense that you have multiple OEMs making multiple types of phones targeting different markets unlike the iPhone. For example, the Lumia 521 is just $130 off contract in the US. Also the walled garden prevents the malware problem that Android has. So it can be considered as a happy medium between iOS and Android.
Yup, I managed to grab a new one at a Microsoft store for $86 (had a gift card and they had in store promos I abused). Most bang for the buck consumer product I have ever purchased.
"It's superior to my old iPhones in almost every way."
Unless you count battery life, GPU, probably CPU, form factor, build quality, the wildly superior app, media and accessory ecosystems. But other than that what have the Cupertianians done for us lately?
CPU and GPU for the end user isn't important. What is important is the perf of the UI, which WP7/8 have always been buttery smooth when compared to iOS and Android devices with better hardware.
I'd also say Nokia is very closely behind Apple in build quality if not on par. And their form factors have been great as well.
iPhone/iOS definitely has a better ecosystem, but the apps on WP8 are getting better.
Sure bring whatever you want. The build quality of iphones is attested to in scores of independent reviews and it's not the same thing as drop test resistance.
For me: When a phone 'requires' a case to protect it from gentle use, even of putting it on the table so it will not get scratches is absurd. My iPhone 5 got scratched up before my case arrived, and I was so careful with it. I attribute this to 'build quality' also, it's not just how it feels.
I think Nokia phones are more "sturdy", exemplified by its cheap phones that just won't break. Apple is more meticulous I'd say. I have a Lumia 920. There are just tiny little seams and creaks that one wouldn't find on an iPhone.
"WP7/8 have always been buttery smooth when compared to iOS and Android devices with better hardware."
I'm not sure why you've lumped iOS with famously jittery Android (at least historically, 4.2 seems to have solved lag) since iOS is usually cited as the standard for smooth interface as in this initial WP 7 review from Josh Topolsky: "probably the most accurate and nuanced touch response this side of iOS4."
The battery life metric I care about is: how long will the battery last after I've been using all kinds of weird apps for a year.
That's where iPhone seems to excel. On a fresh install of Android, using just one built in app, it seems fine. But eventually the phone fills up with stuff that seems to drain it. Not sure how Windows Phone fares on that front.
Absolutely that's a problem with Android. It's a natural consequence of having a platform where apps are free to access pretty much any hardware in the background with no review (that's a good thing if you're a developer though).
However, Android gives you tools to see which apps are using the most battery, and you can uninstall them if they're a problem.
Recently I noticed much worse battery life on my nexus 4, opened up the battery stats, and saw 30% of my battery usage was the consequence of a messaging app I don't use, deleted it, and got back to normal.
In this regard WP8 is very much like iOS and not even close to Android.
Apps are 'tombstoned' when they are not the visible app. So no matter how many apps you install, when they're not open, they won't use battery.
Battery, build quality and form factor are not better for the iPhone. Battery's about the same, build quality is similar, but iPhone loses points for being either easy to scratch (black 5) or easy to crack (4, 4S). Apple in general makes stylish but not robust phones.
iPhone loses on the form factor because it really has only one that is acceptable - the 5. I am typing this on a 4s and the screen is too small and the shape does not feel as good in the hand as the round polycarbonate Lumias.
CPU and GPU don't seem to be so different subjectively. Both are smooth.
The apps are vastly better on iOS, even the ones that are on both platforms e.g. one cannot insert rows in Excel for WP 7 or add annotations in Kindle.
Support seems better for Apple, as Lumia 800 and 900 customers did not get WP8, while the older iPhone 4 will get iOS 7!
The image stabilization and a proper optics set seem nice, but honestly 41MP sensor is practically useless itself. Even professional cameras with high quality sensors are not usually sensor resolution limited - i.e. increasing resolution wouldn't be much use since at the pixel level the image is already at a significant noise level/optics limited. For such a small sensor and f-number, I guess 41MP is not only useless, it's detrimental, because you're paying for nothing. Although it's possible it may improve quality a bit wrt lower resolutions due to downscale averaging.
... and by white paper you mean "marketing material"? I had Nokia PureView 808 and I agree that it is nice and helps making good photos when downscaled. Idea to use sensor in this way is really interesting but in the end that just covers one little thing from many that are important in photography. For the same (if not lower) price you can buy good compact (if it must be pocketable) or system photo camera (if size matters but can be slightly bigger) and enjoy all benefits of photography like high ISO numbers, big sensor (not in megapixels but by area that is more important than megapixels), possibility to change aperture (this one is big for me because of bokeh) and some other.
It is just a little bit bigger sensor in the end with one smart idea that is not contributing much.
The 928, Windows8 mobile and Nokia Maps are amazing. Best decision I made was waiting for Nokia to get its act together. Windows 8 phone could be the best mobile OS if they release some more APi's for musical production and get some better applications in the market.
I've got to echo these sentiments, I've got a 900 and am "upgrading" today to a 920. It's a killer phone, I've really enjoyed it, though I came from the BB Torch so...
I switch between iOS and Android, but the Lumia phones do seem attractive to me despite WP. They could have really differentiated in the android market, or at least forced Samsung to make some better hardware choices.
WP, especially WP8 got pretty got reviews. Why the hate ? Especially with Nokia phones where you get Nokia Maps for free. I don't know of any Android phone where you get an offline quality GPS for free.
I went from iOS Google Maps->Apple Maps->iOS Google Maps on my iPhones. The Google Maps worked really well.
The HERE Drive+ from Nokia Maps though is fantastic. One nice feature (of many)... it shows you the current speed limit on every road that you're on. It also shows you your current speed and it is dead-on accurate. It can even be set to give an alert if you exceed the speed limit by x MPH.
Hands down, the built-in Lumia 928 maps application is better than any maps application I ever used on any of my three iPhones.
Maps app or Driving Navigation app? Because they're extremely different use cases. My experience with Nokia Maps was very poor, but I don't need to drive, so never got to try that out.
>My experience with Nokia Maps was very poor, but I don't need to drive, so never got to try that out.
I'm amazed by that. In London the mapping is top notch, it has pedestrian paths and such which gmaps is missing. However for Soho where bars come and go in weeks, its often out of date for POIs. But as normally if I'm in a place that changes often, I'll have data, that isn't an issue (one can always fall back to gmaps data).
But outside of London Nokia maps are hands down the best I've found. This holds true in the countryside of England, France, Spain, Italy, Morocco, Vietnam... I mean in the middle of nowhere Vietnam, I've good offline all the directions I need to my cycling. Amazing, gmaps didn't even have a road there, and bing, well lets not talk about bing maps. The only one that comes close is the Open Street Map project. But they lack POIs pretty much completely. On my motorbike in Thailand, I had not just Fuel places shown, but also coffee places. With no mobile phone signal...
Whilst I use windows phone as my primary device, I have some uses (SkyDemon) that require me to have an Android too, but I will say that the Nokia mapping is so bloody good, I bought a 720 (as in the UK they were £120 off contract!) for a friend as a travel phone, only for the mapping.
However, I don't use it when driving in the UK, because it doesn't have 'accident black spot warnings' or speed trap locations.
you can adjust the limit at which point it alerts you. You can set when the alert will go off area that have below 80km/h speed and those with speed over 80km/h. Mine is set to ping on 15km/h+ on the slower areas and 18km/h+over on the higher.
And that's the problem with Nokia and their phones. People are buying them for the hardware, despite the OS. They could sell so much more with Android.
I'd say they could even beat Samsung in sales eventually (again). But right now I can't even extrapolate how much time it would take them to ever do that, if even possible.
For a normal user, how much does the OS matter in 2013?
The OS playing ground is much more level today than it was in 2008.
I'll be upgrading my iPhone 4 soon, and frankly, I'll be considering everything OS out there. I'll actually be choosing based on hardware more than OS, because all the web services that I use are supported by every operating system.
I guess if you're really into apps, the ecosystem might matter, but I suspect a normal, non-geek really doesn't need access to hundreds of thousands of apps if their core needs are satisfied.
WP8 is getting a native Vine app, and with Instagram playing "me too" on video this may force them to develop a native WP app.
There is a feature equivalent WP app that uploads to Instagram that is an unofficial Instagram app, can't remember the name now though, but for users that want Instagram the reviews have been good. It's pretty much everything Instragram is sans name.
its called instance [1], and yeah, its pretty damn good.
third-party devs really are the lifeblood of the wp ecosystem and continue to amaze me with the quality of the apps many of them put-out. coupled with an increasing capable mobile web, its made the app gap virtually non-existent for me.
The public Instagram API is read-only and it looks like the Windows Phone apps that support uploading do so through something called Instagraph, which seems to be an unsupported method of getting photos onto Instagram.
The "Windows Phone lacks apps" meme is getting old very quickly. But then again there is a grain of truth there. Most applications that you use day in and day out are probably already there natively or as a very good clone. The part that might hurt you is when the next hot application comes along it is likely that a native or clone for Windows Phone may not exist right away and you might have to wait for a few weeks to get it. Android also has this problem to some extent. If you are always chasing the new hot apps on your iPhone then you might stick to iPhones a bit longer until app makers warm up to Windows ecosystem.
Try being locked to an obscure marketplace region like china, and it's much more painful. Facebook, Skype are all MIA, and you can't change your marketplace even if the software says you can (it just ignores your config options).
iPhones sold in china don't have this problem, so they are a safer buy.
I agree completely, and in my opinion the stated reason not to go with Android - ie "being different" - is moot, when you consider that every phone maker can make windows phones too. Having a differentiation that you can't protect at all is not worth having many less apps to offer.
I agree completely, and in my opinion the stated reason not to go with Android - ie "being different" - is moot, when you consider that every phone maker can make windows phones too.
They can, but they don't. And Nokia is indisputably the king of Windows Phone world, even though HTC have created some perfectly great devices. It's unlikely that Nokia could ever topple Samsung from the Android top spot.
How is WP compelling at all for other OEM's when Nokia has 80 percent of WP's market share? That's much worse than Samsung with 30 percent in the Android market. I wouldn't even consider it worth my time, especially when besides the extremely dominant market share of Nokia within WP market, it also means very few devices per total being sold. the numbers just aren't compelling at all for others. Plus, you have a lot harder time differentiating, too.
Nokia has such a big market share because nobody wants a WP, but still enough people want a Nokia. If many people will start wanting a WP, many others will want in - especially the low cost manufacturers, which can simply differentiate on price.
Samsung wasn't the first mover for Android (HTC was the one), while Samsung was among the first movers with WP - the other ones were HTC, Dell, and LG. Nokia wasn't among them.
So much for the first-mover advantage...
I am glad that there's more competition in the marketplace rather than just Apple and Android and that there are companies looking beyond earnings in their next quarter.
Apple could have probably made more money over the years by selling Macs with Windows and retiring their own OS.
Competition is good, for example see the flat look and concentration on typography that both Android and iOS borrowed from Windows Phone.
That's why I don't get all the deriding of Firefox OS and Ubuntu Phone. Android has plenty hardware OEMs behind it.
I've had my Nokia 928 for about 6 weeks now. Like poster 300bps above, my previous 3 phones were all iPhones (we're like .. phone twins or something)
Overall, I like both the device and the OS. So far any nits I have are minor -- Only one volume setting for all the apps, touch screen is overly sensitive, polymer case is too slippery.
So far, the WP app store has had the applications I care most about. And since you can write apps in C#, it's more approachable to write for.
True - I doubt that any of the hardware manufacturers for Android have the technology to top what Nokia did with Lumia 1020. Nokia is completely invested in camera unlike HTC, Samsung, Motorola etc.,
Samsung makes Android cameraphones as far as I know and they do it right IMHO. 41Mp are nice, I don't say anything (I had PureView 808 until I dropped and destroyed it), but it is not the most important thing in photography.
The only Android manufacturer that seems to care at all about camera quality is Sony, and even they haven't really put their full emphasis on that lately.
This is the first device that makes me wonder about Nokia's WP-exclusive decision. They didn't go with Android to avoid becoming "yet another" Android manufacturer, and I agree with that sentiment (look at how few are turning a profit). However, there are no Android devices that really excel at stuff like photography- I think that Nokia could have carved out an interesting niche in solidly built, feature-focused devices.
But oh well.