Despite having an iPhone since the original model launched in 2007, curiosity sometimes drives us into the arms of competing products -- especially ones as well-hyped as Nokia's new Lumia 900, which many predict could be the first real shot Microsoft's Windows Phone platform has for success.
While curiosity may kill the cat, it certainly didn't do us any harm after swapping our iPhone 4S for the new Nokia Lumia 900 last weekend. It's a big launch for the Finnish cell phone giant, whose brand has waned significantly here in the United States, but also for Microsoft, whose Windows Phone platform has yet to gain traction against iOS and Android after nearly two years.
Why Windows Mobile?
This isn't our first time straying from iOS -- we dabbled briefly with the original Palm Pre at launch and have fondled a number of Android-based handsets as well. webOS was promising but poorly managed, where Android borrows so much from iOS it's hard not to agree with Steve Jobs branding it a "stolen" product in his official biography.
That's why Windows Phone 7 platform has piqued our interest -- Microsoft has created an entirely new concept with its tiled "Metro" interface, which looks and feels like nothing else on mobile. All that's missing is the right hardware to make it attractive to the masses, which finally arrived this month with the Nokia Lumia 900.
Enter Lumia
Nokia has always been known for slick hardware, and the Lumia 900 is no exception. The basic look has been borrowed from the Nokia N9 its more recent cousin, the Lumia 800, but features a larger 4.3-inch 480x800 AMOLED display with ClearBlack technology. Not only does that promise deep, rich black levels, but also a screen that's much easier to see outdoors.
An 8MP rear camera with dual LED flash and Carl Zeiss optics also records video up to 720p, while a 1MP front camera allows for video chat. Available in cyan or black (with a white model arriving later this month), the Nokia Lumia 900 is topped off with 16GB of internal storage and uses AT&T's rapidly expanding 4G LTE network for fast data speeds.
Friday, Part One: A Strange New World
Our journey begins as it usually does: With a small cardboard box delivered by FedEx. We wasted no time tearing into the box and extracting the handset, then it was time to pop the micro-SIM out of our iPhone 4S, which would effectively be relegated to a Wi-Fi only iPod touch for the remainder of the weekend.
The Lumia 900 boots up in just under 30 seconds, which feels like greased lightning compared to nearly 50 seconds for the iPhone 4S. While we were able to make phone calls, our data, MMS and visual voicemail was completely MIA. The solution was revealed over the course of a few calls to AT&T, where they swapped our unlimited iPhone data plan to unlimited 4G LTE. Since AT&T LTE doesn't yet exist in our area, there was no need to swap out SIM cards, and we can easily return to the iPhone 4S (but only at the usual HSPA+ speeds) without a problem, despite warnings to the contrary from Ma Bell's overly cautious tech support reps.
All Windows Phone devices include three capacitive buttons at the bottom of the screen for Back, Start/Home and Bing Search, similar to those made popular by Android. A hardware camera button is also standard for WP devices, and on the Lumia 900 it resides on the right side, below the power/lock button and volume rocker. The lock screen echoes most modern smartphones, showing the time and date as well as any calendar events coming up, with antenna, Wi-Fi and battery levels at top (these are hidden once the screen is unlocked, but a swiping down from the top briefly reveals them). Once you unlock the device by sliding up, that's where the similarities to iOS or Android end.
Sliding this screen left reveals the Application List, an alphabetical view of everything installed on the handset. Once you've installed more than 40 apps, the list gets separated by the first letter of its name; tapping on a letter calls up a grid for quickly jumping to any letter of the alphabet. Apps can be pinned on the home screen or deleted entirely -- and that includes the apps that come preinstalled, unlike so many Android smartphones where you're stuck with them. (Kudos to MSFT for that!)
Friday, Part Two: Apps and Marketplace
Five AT&T-specific apps come preinstalled: AT&T Code Scanner, AT&T myWireless, AT&T Navigator, AT&T Radio and AT&T U-verse Mobile. Aside from Radio, all of these are available to iPhone users as well. Nokia apps don't come preinstalled, but are available in their own section of the Windows Phone Marketplace and include exclusive apps such as ESPN, Creative Studio (for editing photos) and Nokia Drive, Nokia Maps and Nokia Transit for free turn-by-turn navigation.
Microsoft Office is also along for the ride (the mobile version, anyway), allowing users to view and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents saved on your device, a SkyDrive account, Office 365 or SharePoint; OneNote notes are also included. Even with the Lumia 900's big, bright 4.3-inch screen, tweaking an Excel document is a bit of a chore -- but it's even worse on the iPhone 4S using third-party apps.
At first, our Lumia 900 felt a bit desolate and uninviting -- after all, all the apps we have installed on our iPhone 4S is what makes it feel like home. So we headed into the Windows Phone Marketplace -- currently 70,000 strong and growing -- in search of friendly faces that might make us more comfortable in this strange new world. To do so, you'll need a free Hotmail or Live.com account; thankfully we've had an old Hotmail account from eons ago, so we logged in and started shopping.
Thankfully, we found quite a few familiar titles and immediately began downloading them. Popular free iOS apps such as 1Password, Amazon Kindle, Amazon Mobile, Best Buy, eBay, Evernote, Flixster, iHeartRadio, IMDb, Netflix, Shazam, Spotify, USA Today, Vimeo and The Weather Channel are all present and accounted for. Pulse News is also on Marketplace, but sadly this version won't sync with your Pulse.me account, so news sources have to be added manually.
Ironically, Microsoft-owned Skype is beta testing a Windows Phone app as this is written; while it didn't show up in Marketplace on the device, we were able to find it on its web-based equivalent and install from there. (Apps purchased from windowsphone.com get pushed to your device similar to iTunes in the Cloud.)
With a lot of the usual suspects out of the way, it was time to dig in and find third-party equivalents for other favorites. We were able to find decent replacements for iOS apps such as Google Voice (GoVoice), Tapatalk (Board Express), Instapaper (InstaFetch) and Read It Later (MetroPaper); others such as Google Reader client Reader2Go wound up being admirable replacements for apps like Reeder.
There were a few disappointments, however -- we really missed Path, one of our favorite photo sharing apps which has yet to arrive on Windows Phone. Despite decent WP equivalents, we also longed for Echofon, Beejive, Hulu Plus and YouTube (the latter has a Marketplace app, but it's just a shortcut to the mobile website).
One very large advantage of Microsoft's mobile Marketplace is the ability to try paid apps before buying them -- simply tap the "Try" button and the app downloads to your device so you can put it through its paces before committing hard-earned money to it. There's simply no excuse for Apple not to have this after five generations of iOS, but hope springs eternal with iOS 6 likely incoming later this year.
Speaking of paid apps, we have to put in a plug for the Plex app, one of our favorites and a recent arrival on Windows Phone. This media server client is a favorite on iOS and Android, and well worth the $4.99 on Windows Phone, which features a gorgeous UI unique to WP that makes the other mobile apps look positively antique by comparison.
Friday, Part Three: Welcome to the Social
Now it was time to get our various email accounts up and running, including iCloud, Gmail and Yahoo as well as IMAP email for our own domain. Of course, being a Microsoft OS, Windows Live (i.e., Hotmail) and Outlook get the best treatment here, including push email, with Gmail being the only non-Microsoft service to take advantage of it. Other account options include Nokia Mail, AT&T Address Book, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, but any POP or IMAP email account will also work; only AOL/AIM seemed to be strangely absent from the party.
One of Windows Phone's little niceties is built-in support for Facebook and Twitter -- while there are official native apps for both available in the Marketplace (and a few third-party choices as well), the services are so well integrated into the operating system that you may never touch them most of the time.
On the home screen is a "Me" tile which calls up a portal where you can post a message to one or all social networks at once, check in and set chat status for connected services. Tap "add photo" to make this tile a photo of yourself, and the Profile column also displays your last Twitter activity. Swipe left to Notifications and you'll see recent activity from friends, while What's New likewise shows your own posts.
A People hub (which exists as a live tile on your home screen) displays contacts from any or all of your combined services, tweets and recent callers. We used a Mac App Store app called Contacts Sync for Google Gmail to push our iCloud contacts to Google, which then carried over into Windows Phone with ease along with calendars and email.
Even better, Windows Phone linked our contacts to the same people on Facebook and Twitter to avoid seeing the same people listed multiple times. This a feature similar to Synergy from webOS which always gave us pause -- after all, we don't want Facebook friends we don't know in real life clogging up our contacts list! Thankfully, Windows Phone includes a "filter my contact list" option in the People hub for choosing which services you want to display contacts from -- an awesome feature.
Saturday: Multimedia Syncing
The next morning, it was time to focus on getting music and photos onto our Nokia Lumia 900 so we'd feel even more at home with it. Streaming music apps like Spotify are handy, but we were already starting to miss the convenience of iTunes Match, which allows any iOS device to access to an entire music collection.
The folks in Redmond likely knew this would be an issue for Mac users locked out of their Windows-only Zune world, so they dropped a little nugget called Windows Phone 7 Connector into the Mac App Store. This free Mac app allows Windows Phone devices to sync music, videos, photos and podcasts from iTunes just by plugging your handset into the computer with a USB cable. (Yeah, no wireless sync, but beggars can't be choosers.)
Windows Phone Connector for Mac can sync photos from either iPhoto or Aperture (pick your poison in Preferences) including entire projects, albums or Faces, as well as music playlists, artists or genres. Syncing Movies & TV Shows is a bit clunkier, since all of your media is shown in one ginormous list rather than grouped by TV show or genre, for example. Ringtones can also be synced, but they need to be MP3 files under 40 seconds which have been specifically tagged as "ringtone" (lower case, no quotes) in the Genre column -- sadly, no sync is available for existing iTunes Tones.
Last but not least, Windows Phone Connector for Mac allows users to browse media already on the device, which can be selectively previewed, imported to your Mac or deleted from the handset entirely -- convenient for photos and video shot with the Lumia 900, although these get automatically imported into iPhoto or Aperture when a device is connected anyway.
Microsoft has clearly learned valuable lessons from that whole Zune fiasco, which continues to live on here as a music service now that the company has given up on producing MP3 players that support it. We didn't tinker around with Zune much since all of its music is still bathed in copy protection, but a 14-day free trial of Microsoft's unlimited Zune Music Pass is available with the Lumia 900 (the subscription costs $9.99 per month or $99.90 for 12 months).
Throughout the second day with the Lumia 900, we also stumbled across a number of cool options tucked away. For example, at first all of our individual email accounts showed up as separate tiles on the home screen. Thankfully all of your inboxes can be unified into one simply by tapping the three dots at bottom right, tapping Linked Inboxes and choosing which accounts you want to include. Very handy!
Sunday: The Rest of the Story
Easter Sunday gave us a chance to put the Lumia 900 camera through its paces shooting photos and video with family. Unfortunately, the camera is a bit of a weak spot for Nokia here, despite the 8MP sensor which on paper would seem to match wits with the iPhone 4S. It's a bit of a surprise, considering Nokia devices usually feature better cameras, but clearly they had to cut corners somewhere to get this device to $99.99 with two-year agreement.
We didn't have too many complaints with photos and video shot outdoors, especially when the sun was poking out. Colors were rich and contrast was quite good, but there was an overall decrease in saturation and contrast in cloudier situations. Indoors it was a mixed bag, with noticeable grain and noise compared to the iPhone 4S. The Lumia 900 also seemed to be more challenged by situations with mixed color balance. All in all, it's a decent camera more in line with the iPhone 4 than the iPhone 4S which seems to have been carried over as-is from the previous Lumia 800 sold overseas.
Photos and video taken in Windows Phone can be automatically uploaded to SkyDrive, the 25GB cloud storage included free with every Hotmail or Live.com account. While it may not be as convenient as iCloud's Photo Stream, it makes a great way to make sure your precious memories are backed up, and the free SkyDrive app in the Marketplace lets you view or delete them as needed. (Photos can also be viewed or shared from live.com on any web browser.)
While many reviews have dinged the Lumia 900 battery life, we were more impressed than disappointed, especially considering how hard we've been working it over the weekend. We suspect once 4G LTE lights up later this year in our area, it might be a different story, but for now the Lumia 900 gets us through the day a bit better than the iPhone 4S where battery life is concerned.
A quick road trip for Easter breakfast also gave us a chance to try out Bluetooth with our car's SYNC -- like Windows Phone, another Microsoft product. We had no problem pairing the two, but when we started streaming music from the Zune player, it cut in and out every few seconds and finally locked up SYNC completely until we forced a reboot by shutting the car off and turning it back on. SYNC reconnected to the Lumia 900 and Bluetooth streaming worked without a hitch after that.
Heading to Grandma's house for Easter dinner also gave us a chance to put the free Nokia Drive app through its paces (even though we know the route by heart, of course). While AT&T would probably prefer that we use their TeleNav-powered Navigator app, which requires a subscription -- new users get a 30-day trial, and a $1.99 day pass option is also available.
While Nokia Drive is considerably more bare-bones than most of the iOS turn-by-turn navigation apps available, it worked equally well and we didn't miss a lot of the clutter and feature bloat -- which includes the huge downloads required for maps. Nokia Drive allows you to download maps by state (and includes this option for all continents), which means you can download only places you intend to travel while still having everything available on the go should you need it, assuming you have the foresight to download prior to entering areas without coverage. Nokia Drive also features a far wider range of international languages for its navigation instructions, which isn't much of a surprise given the company's products are far more popular abroad than they are here. On the downside, Drive doesn't connect with your contacts, so you have to type in addresses from memory. (Boo!)
We also stumbled across Microsoft Tellme, a Bing-powered, Siri-esque voice search service triggered by holding down the Start/Home button. While Tellme didn't understand us quite as well as Siri does, it seemed to be a bit more reliable than Apple's virtual assistant and at least on par with what Google includes with Android. We found it paid to be more precise with requests -- for example, searching for a nearby park required us to specify "Diamond Community Park" when simply "Diamond Park" failed to work.
Of course, it can't all be wine and roses -- we weren't that thrilled with Internet Explorer, the mobile web browser included with the Lumia 900. Web pages seemed to download slower than Mobile Safari and there was simply no contest when it came to text rendering, which was often chunky and almost out of focus in Internet Explorer, especially when viewing full pages.
We also missed having our favorite bookmarks, but thankfully a quick trip to the Marketplace turned up Xmarks, which we already pay $12 per year to keep bookmarks in sync between Safari, Chrome and Firefox on the desktop. After logging in, we were able to see all of our bookmarks and open tabs; tapping on any of them opened in Internet Explorer. Not perfect, but much better than trying to remember all those URLs!
The Windows Phone software keyboard is a step up from the one included with older versions of Android and even the stock one included with Ice Cream Sandwich, with large, tall keys on an expansive screen, but occasionally we'd accidentally type extra keystrokes while trying to tap a prompt just above the keyboard. This seems to be some kind of calibration with the screen which will hopefully get cleared up with a software patch. Overall, we're still partial to the iOS keyboard but this is a close second.
By the third day with the Lumia 900, we were more confident to leave the house without also bringing our iPhone 4S along for the ride. All in all, using Windows Phone on the Lumia 900 has mostly been a joy -- it's easily the most interesting mobile OS to come along since Palm's now-defunct webOS, and it handily trumps even that.
While it remains to be seen if Nokia, Microsoft and AT&T have a hit on their hands, we plan to keep ours, which was purchased at a no-commitment price ($449.99 plus applicable sales tax) so as to not disrupt our existing iPhone contract. With 4G LTE finally arriving in Northeast Ohio in the next few months, we'll likely get more use out of the Lumia 900 -- at least until a presumably LTE-equipped iPhone 5 arrives, that is.
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