The Console Schizophrenic

In mid November, I upgraded my aging Nokia E72 to the new Nokia Windows-based Lumia 800. At the time, I couldn’t find many reviews of the phone that weren’t pretty superficial copy and paste jobs of the press release or spec sheet. I also couldn’t find any reviews from the point of view of people like me - upgraders from previous Nokia smartphones. The Nokia loyalists that presumably are the reason that Nokia keeps going and hasn’t sold its factories for scrap metal and land value. Even we realised that Symbian had gone to the dogs. We are the brand value that Nokia still has. So I thought I’d note down my experiences.
I think my perspective is also different because this is not a “review”. These are some thoughts by someone who upgraded to this phone. I’m not “trying it out for a few days”, as many of the reviewers did. I am locked into a 2 year contract with it. And I have some incentive not to throw it away and get an iPhone instead. Probably about $600 worth of incentive, or whatever iPhones go for these days. I’m also not a phone reviewer. So I haven’t been carrying around 3 other handsets or using a separate SIM. Nor have I played around extensively with iPhones or Android phones. This is my phone. People call me on it and I call them. Every day. The fact I’m not a phone reviewer also means I can’t tell you how many bands it has, how many cores it has or what the manufacturer’s quoted standby time is (what exactly is standby? having it turned off?). I’m sure Nokia’s press department can help.
My contract was up and I had whittled it down to an iPhone 4S or the Lumia. I had excluded Android because the good handsets seemed to be the size of a paperback book, and had a status bar full of icons, a control panel full of controls and I felt a lot of the hardware felt very cheap. It reminded me a lot of Windows Mobile before Windows Phone 7. I was drawn to the iPhone because I knew they were great phones, and Siri seemed “kind of cool”. And to the Nokia because it was Nokia, and also I have a slight gamblers streak that thinks “an unproven phone released a few days before my contract is up on an unproven platform… sounds like a winner!”
The in-store experience
So I went in to compare the iPhone and the Lumia. I’ve seen complaints elsewhere that retailers were really pushing people away from Windows Phone. I found, both in the Orange (network) shop and the Carphone Warehouse shop, they seemed to have similar disdain for me buying either the iPhone or the Lumia. Both models were available to try. I wasn’t pushed to buy either. This could be a problem for Nokia; I get the impression that shops really don’t care about selling you an iPhone. So being on a par on that score is not necessarily a good thing. Why did I choose the Nokia? It felt good in the hand. The contracts were cheaper. I decided Siri was a gimmick only useful in the car (you can’t really use it at work, in the street, on the toilet, can you?). Oh, and also Orange offered me a free xBox 360. Ok, that was quite a big bribe. So having played in store I did the usual thing and rang Orange’s retentions department who gave me a contract that was about 35% cheaper than the best the store could give me.
First impressions
So the postman came and I eagerly unwrapped my new toy. It came charged which was great, and I entered in a few details (my social network accounts and e-mail accounts) and it was up and running really quickly.
There is an annoying bug in the e-mail client that prevents me from reading e-mails from my business’s support ticket system. This marred what would have otherwise been a first-class first impression. I’ve found a workaround, but a phone like this shouldn’t have an e-mail client that can be effectively crashed by certain e-mails. Whether this gets fixed will be a good test of how serious this platform is.
The hardware
It came with a nice slim rubber case that makes the phone feel suitably rugged without being at all bulky, a charger, and a basic handsfree/headphones kit. The phone feels really well built and is the right size in the hand. Nokia’s hardware design has always been great and they haven’t let themselves down here. One thing isn’t great: the battery. I have to charge it at the end of almost every day. Apparently a fix is in the works, but this still seems poor to me. Incidentally, I left my old E72 turned on with no SIM card when I upgraded. How much battery do you think it has left, over a month on? That’s right, 50%. Yes, 50%. OK, when it had an active SIM it didn’t last that long. But you could get a good few days out of it.
I missed a couple of other things from my old Nokia. First, the physical keyboard. In the end, I think the tradeoff for a larger screen is worth it, but typing is definitely more painful. It’s just about OK when you are typing text and the automatic correction is able to guess what you are typing. But if you are typing a name or typing into a web address field, the problems of a small portrait onscreen keyboard become abundantly clear. But whenever I pick up a touch screen phone of any variety I always have this frustration, so I don’t think it’s any worse here.
The second thing I miss dearly is the E72’s glowing/flashing light that would indicate (a) if the phone was on - glowing every few seconds and (b) if you had a text or a missed call - flashing every second. This is such a useful invention, I simply don’t understand why modern phones seem to have gone backwards on this. So if I get the phone out of my pocket I have to turn on the screen to see if I’ve missed anything. Really?? Somebody please fix this.
The OS
I soon realised that my geeky 11-year old self would have hated this phone. There are almost no options to play with. You can change the “accent colour” in the UI. That’s about it. Maybe this is a problem in that the techy early adopter crowd won’t really appreciate the phone and thus recommend it to their less geeky friends. However, the busy 27 year old me appreciates this. This phone has good defaults. It just worked, and I didn’t have to worry about messing around with it. My old E72 had so many options and profiles and themes and blah you could literally spend days messing around with it and somehow get into a situation where between the hours of 9 and 10 am, only on days when the moon was a half crescent, it would automatically go into silent mode. Could you work out how to turn that off? Of course not.
Windows Phone Mango also seems to work really well. It feels fresh and uncluttered, and I like the way the front screen is a set of live widgets (called ‘tiles’ apparently) rather than a giant list of apps, which is all the iPhone seems to offer. At a glance I can see how many texts and calls I’ve missed, my boyfriend’s latest Tweet (that tile also acts effectively as a speed dial), the time my alarm is set for in the morning and today’s calendar events. My only criticism of the OS is that sometimes the graphical style makes it hard to tell what is “click”able and what isn’t. There’s some fancy UX term for this but I call it “you keep tapping and sometimes nothing happens”. I don’t think they would have to lose much visual simplicity to have some kind of consistent visual cue that something is “click”able.
It feels odd pressing the IE icon for anything other than browser testing. But the built in browser is great. It feels quick, fluid and seem to support websites well. Maybe because I am coming from an old Symbian smart phone I feel spoiled. But I do feel spoiled using mobile IE.
Apps and the people app
The People app is my standout favourite smartphone app I have ever used. Maybe other phones also do this but it feels like the future to me. I had to hand over all my social network credentials, but my phone’s contact list is now able to show me: each person’s latest activity across Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, all their contact details from the above, my history of communication with that person, their photo, their job title, their address, their photos from Facebook and more. Not in separate screens but a single, cohesive, contact record. Like the ultimate CRM for all my friends, all presented in a very slick interface. This feels like a great way of working. Separate social networks for the different uses - recruiting, people I know and people I want to know - all with their own features and clients for when I need to actually do something complicated, but an app that integrates all of them with my own address book. Brilliant. I don’t think until you have connected this app with your real data you can ever properly test this. In store, Nokia/Microsoft have loaded a fake person onto the demo device. This doesn’t tell you how good it will be with your real contacts.
In other news, there aren’t many apps for Windows Phone yet (kudos to the developers of “Next Bus UK” though for a very useful little app). As an ex E72 user who rarely used any apps other than ones built into the phone, this doesn’t bother me as much as perhaps it should. See later for my brief thoughts on whether it is doomed never to have any. What I will say though is as a developer, Microsoft is great at writing programming tools, APIs and documentation. I see no reason why they won’t be able to take that capability and apply it here. Having dabbled with the Android SDK (please, never remind me of that experience) and XCode (do I really need to learn a whole new way of managing memory by myself), Microsoft can absolutely kill it in comparison in terms of ease and power of development if they can replicate their existing PC .NET development environment. Note: I haven’t looked at the SDK yet. Maybe it’s awful.
Nokia Drive
I thought it worth including a little bit on Nokia’s free included turn by turn navigation app. This is one of the reasons I chose my old E72, as it offered this as well. In fact, it offered an absolutely superb feature set for a bundled app. Not only did it do turn by turn navigation, it did traffic, it did speed camera warnings, and it even gave helpful instructions like “At the roundabout, take the second exit onto the A272 towards Winchester”, and showed me which lane to get into at complicated junctions. However, the E72 did have an infuriating bug that manifested itself in the screen suddenly lighting up a route that appeared to zig zag all nearby roads several times, and increasingly erratic instructions being given. Once, late for a meeting and faced by this in an area I didn’t know, I did scream out in my car that were I ever to meet the Nokia CEO I would take the opportunity to insert the phone into his body, forcibly.
Thankfully, the Lumia seems to have fixed this bug. The app is actually much simpler and lacks some of the E72’s functionality, but it does work smoothly. One crazy omission is an indicator of how long it will take to get there. It will show you how many miles, but not how long in time (the phone clearly knows this as it is shown when the route starts but not afterwards). Nokia, please fix this. At the moment, if I need a time check I have to stop the navigation and then start it again. It’s one of the mercifully few times you can just see the meeting where the programmer got told “It’s got to be done by Christmas”.
Is it too late?
There has been quite a lot of comment that Windows Phone is offering too little too late. It’s clearly not streets ahead of the iPhone. I’m sure it lacks some of the iPhone’s features (like VPN for example) and some of the configurability of Android. But I always remember a sticker a friend had at school when I was young which read “Windows 95 = Apple 89”. In some senses there was some truth to that. But whatever you think of Windows 95, it did pretty well in the end.
I do think Microsoft is resilient. And it’s in it for the long haul. Phones are the new truly personal computers. Microsoft HAS to have a phone OS, and it has to be a success. Let’s not forget this may be a fast moving industry, but in the scheme of the history of the world, or even technology, it’s incredibly immature. There are a WHOLE lot of twists and turns in the story of smartphones yet. Microsoft is good at making life easy for developers. If it can bring this to Windows Phone, and a steadily growing bunch of customers, I think they can get traction. Maybe it hasn’t quite got the right business model yet. Maybe they need to buy Nokia and control the whole experience. I think Microsoft can and will figure this out. As something to build on, the new Windows Phone seems to be a pretty solid foundation.