I bought a G1 back in the day and had always been an android apologist up until last year. I had seen the Windows Phones and never really considered them for the simple reason I went with what I knew. And as we progressed from 2 to 4 it was becoming standard practice to have a task killer,a battery monitor, and quick toggles for radios to make it through the day on a single battery charge. The lack of real standards on apps caused memory leaks everywhere and just generally poor performance (which continues into 5).
I was venting fustration one day and a good friend of mine suggested I pick up a 521 on ebay and repair it. Then use it for two weeks. Challenge Accepted!
Looking at the specs I expected disaster. Dual core 1ghz, 512 ram, 8 gig ram, and a tiny 1850MHA battery. On Android 4 this would be the doggiest of dogs and run like utter crap. I was expecting this very thing. I bought a broken screen one for $10 and a new screen for $13 determined to not spend to much money on a certain failure. Parts arrived and I was pleasantly surprised to find the repair simple. So in my sim card went, put in my hotmail account and waited for the worst.
I decided to NOT turn off radios and let it sink or swim. Found the UI to be very smooth and loved the podcast app. loaded up multiple things at once and while it was multitasking things slowed down some but not bad at all really. I actually went and verified the specs at this point, I could not believe a dual core was handling this load like a champ. I also noticed (and this impressed me) that while on wifi the phone shut off 4g, went down to standby mode 2g, and routed calls through my WiFi! BY ITSELF! This lead me to the discovery it was actually turning not only cell radios on and off as needed but GPS and bluetooth also! My first day with the 521 consumed 22% battery of a tiny 1850mah.
Day two I decided to punish it, loaded Pandora and let it run until my lunch break. Surely it will be at half battery or lower by then, so I brought my trusty backup battery pack (a must have for android users) to top it up while I ate. Lunch came after six hours and...wtf 70% battery after SIX hours of constant cpu and 4g drain? Unreal!
By the end of the two weeks I had a shiny new 1520 and my greatest friend had a case of beer and a case of wine. The android flagships have come and gone and the specs keep growing but Android is still what it is; an amalgamation of open source and bloated google apps that will never get the best out of the hardware it runs. I had thought iOS was the only place to find a system that "just works" but no, Windows Phone does too. Best of all its there at every price point, for everyone, if they just give it a chance.
You'd have drag me kicking and screaming back.