First of all i hope you have a bit of patience with my English, it is not my native language.
I should start with saying that i have owned alot of different Android devicves and so far no WP device until the L830, the one thing that has bugged me about Android is the quality of apps and software that comes from other sources then google directly (and i don't mean from other then the playstore). Quantity is no issue on Android though... last i checked i think i found 57 different flashlight apps, all of them with just on/off feature...
But best i move on before i ramble to much about Android, i have had my new shiny Lumia 830 for 24 hours now. In that time it has impressed me greatly, during the initial setup i tasked the phone really very hard by doing all updates on apps & system while installing new ones and using pretty much all of them and setting up accounts and so on. Not once did the phone feel sluggish in any way while doing all this and not once did it "flake out" in any way.
The actual process of setting upp all accounts such as email and Facebook, Twitter, dropbox and so on and so forth is really very simple. Also getting contacts from all account sources happends smoothly, even from google. Even the calendar syncs perfectly from accounts that has a calendar. As a new WP user it takes about no time at all to feel at home with the UI and layout, there is however a few things that has been placed in somewhat weird places, like disabeling the SIM lock, this is found under the dialer/settings/sim protection. I'm not sure for whom this makes sence...
All in all i must admit that WP works really well and anyone claiming Android to be superior in any usage way is simply lying, both have their strong and weak points and if i'd have to choose i would most definetly choose WP over Android, which i also have :wink:
Moving on to the hardware, the look and the feel of the phone reflects a much higher price then the device has now and this will only get better when the price drops after the L830 has been on the market a while. On my 830 all buttons sit perfectly, there is no play in them and the travel is just right. When you see images of the 830 it might seem a little thick but whe you have it in your hand you will see that it is infact very slim, and while we are on the subject of the design i can say that i enjoy it alot. I chose the "silver" sides with orange backplate, and the orange is really orange, think "reflective vest" orange but matte.
The actual feel in the hand is well weighted and by that i mean the weight is evenly distributed across the device, you can with ease balance it on one finger on the back, another thing is the slight curvature of the backplate, it makes for a very comfortable grip. The weight itself feels just right, not to heavy and not to light, it feels "premium" and yet light. The size of the screen makes it almost to big to use with one hand and i don't have small hands, but I can still rest the phone on my little finger and reach the top with my thumb. The backplate takes a bit of fiddling about, it needs to be inserted at an angle in the top end first, then one peg at a time you work your way down to the bottom of the back, every peg needs to be fully inserted before doing the next one down. After doing this mine fits perfectly without any gap on any side, also it does not move or creak when pressure is applied.
The first time i booted up the phone i was a little apprehensive about the screen, it looked a bit bright in the blacks but that has a simple reason, the backlight is stuck on maximum during the first init. After that is done it will be set to automatic backlight and with that the bright blacks will almost dissapear all together. If you control the brightness/backlight manually you can however boost it so high that it will raise the blacklevel to much if it is dark around the device, in full sunlight it will be harder to see. And let's face it, the only time you would want full backlight is in direct sunlight. You can also change a few settings for the screen like; adjust the automatic backlight, set it manually, change colour profile, set a profile manually with temprature and hue and so on. The capacitive buttons under the display work well, the backlight for them follows the display illumination, so in darkness the buttons will not blind you and in sunlight they are still clearly illuminated (they can turn off in direct sunlight and return when needed). When pressing one of them the buzzer gives a gentle hum as tactile feedback, it is not a strong fedback but rather a more soft one.
This brings us to a feature i find very usefull and one that isn't very common on smartphones, the glance. Some say that it is hard to see on this device, to that i say bollocks. You can clearly see it, perhaps oled screens are more ideal to display glance but that dosen't change the fact that you can clearly see it on the IPS in L830. To get the "Jedi wave" to work you do need to get pretty close to the device but it does work. Other features such as doubletap to wake are also here and they can be toggled aswell and they also work fine. You also have an option to wake it using the camera button and that will take you into the selected camera app directly from sleep, this can also be toggled.
Another hardware component of this device is the speakers and microphones, the call quality is very good and if your carrier supports HD talk then the quality is close to perfection. The loudspeaker on the back also works well, not as well as some of the best on the market that have stereo front facing speakers but it makes a clear and undistorted sound, it is also fairly loud and does go fairly deep in frequency. Audio in video recordings done with the 830 is among the best you can find on a smartphone, by far.
The camera can be summarized quite easy; Bloody great. It lack the megapixels of the 1020 but the quality of the 10 you have are very good, especially in low light, you can take pictures in almost complete darkness and still have them come out usable. This is about as far as i have come for now but i will add more later on the great Nokia Lumia 830.
Edit:
I have now spent a little more time with the device and I'm still very pleased with it. I have tested the 4G capabillitys today and even in these remote areas I am able to get reception where even the maps say i shouldn't and they tend to paint a prettier picture then what really is. The speeds i was able to get ranged between 10-20MBit down and 3-10MBit up which ain't bad cosidering that it is the lower spec 800MHz country side band here and my service provider promises 20/10 at most, in other words not the phone limiting here. And this was with poor to sh*t reception. Moving on to 2G it's the same, it picks up Edge and the only phone i have that give better GSM reception is an older Ericsson with external antenna. Will it loose connection at some point, yes but it will do so long after others have. It could be that this device has very good reception on 800 & 900MHz bands and crap on the rest, i don't know. But i am very pleased with since i live very remotely and cell towers are few an far between.
The GPS behaved equally well, it was able to pinpoint my location faster then any device has done that i have owned, even dedicated car gps's. The accuracy was impressive aswell, i did a short navigation while driving and it gave no issues, having the maps locally on the device is a very, very big plus. While driving i also decided to hookup the bluetooth to my car stereo, this did give some issues (as you can read in another thread) but after what transpired this is very unlikely the phones doing. Besides the minor hickup it did stream music quite well and the phone did sync up phonebook and cal logs smoothly, i will get back to this when i can test a bit more (after i get my headunit back from service...)
The WiFi portion of the 830 also does it's job admirably, i have tried connecting it to two different N devices, one ASUS router/modem and one ZyXEL AP. In both cases it was able to connect and maintain a stable connection, big file transfers went smoothly and ZyXEL it gave me around 40-50MBit of real transfer speed, on the ASUS it landed at very nearly 100, keep in mind neither of these are dual band but they do both use 2,4 and 5GHz. The poor performance on the ZyXEL isn't less nor more then i usually get from that one, on the ASUS it was a bit more then i usually get on wireless devices. If you have many devices attached to your net it will degrade the performance ofcourse. One minor thing is that when you turn on WiFi it doesn't always immideatly connect, this could be because of me though since the phone can pickup three different nets that are saved and that might give it pause while selecting which one to connect to.