I suppose I've always been a Windows Phone guy... things were golden back in the day of the HTC TyTn II P4550... but I went defected to iPhone, then Android. But all since I came back, I've been kind of trigger-happy on the Buy It Now button trying to find the "right" phone.
Lumia 520: I had a Focus Flash before, but this was my first WP8 phone. It wasn't the crappy screen I minded or even the crappy no-flash camera... but the fact that there was no front-facing camera and 512MB of memory. That meant I couldn't even utilize a lot of what was on the store... or properly Skype. I get that they were going for the cheapest, most minimalistic phone they could... but would a crappy little VGA front-facer have really jacked up the cost that much?
Lumia 1020: This camera was gorgeous... and while it was middle-of-the-road as far as performance goes, it was a nice showcasing of what WP8 was capable of... but the thing I tried to forgive and couldn't was the lack of external storage. This phone's capabilities gave you a lot you can do. It had enough memory to handle anything on the store and the power to run it. It presented nice speakers which would encourage you to use it for music listening... and it allowed us to shoot RAW. That doesn't even get really deep into it, yet that's enough to eat that 32GB within a week. I found myself constantly connected to my computer to get my pictures/video off of it.
Lumia Icon: This was easily the most beautiful Windows Phone... hell... it was beautiful even outside of Windows Phone standards. The extremely high pixel density made everything that worked look outstanding. It was a step down in camera quality (which ended up being a lot more drastic than I expected) but I felt really good about having the "flagship" Windows Phone. I'd come into this expecting that: since I was on AT&T, I'd lose LTE and MMS so that actually wasn't bad. Things went sour after realizing that the screen may be too good for the ambition of WP devs. Order & Chaos got monumental glitches, and Chaos Rings was simply unplayable... but I decided to ignore that. Things got even more sour when I started experiencing the WiFi issues everyone's fuming about... and the wake delays... and the overheating. I'd convinced myself I would cope with the lack of external storage by cloud streaming my pictures and music... which would've been great if the phone's radio issues would've let me catch a break. Me and this beauty had to bid adieu to each other.
Lumia 1520: I'll admit, I spent a long time convincing myself this phone was just too damn big... but after the fallout with the Icon I embraced it and found myself having the same "It's really not hard to adjust to" reaction that everyone told me I'd have. From the moment it arrived, things were glorious. Despite what I'd said earlier, I was SO damn happy to have my LTE and MMS back. Having high-end specs paired with external storage put me in heaven... as did the outrageous battery life. I never cared about putting PLEX or Netflix on a mobile phone before this... but things went on and I realized swipe-typing is harder than ever on this monster, and found that even more of my favorites were getting wrecked or letterboxed by the same 6in 1080p panel I was in a love-hate relationship with.
...then I had someone recommend me the 820. Concerning specs, it seemed to be on-par with the Lumia 1020 but had a screen res closer to the 520... and it appeared to be fairly unimpressive after having the Icon and 1520 which currently beat every iPhone, Android phone and other Windows Phone in Basemark... but I figured that I've already blown so much cash... what's $80 just to try it out?
What did I find? ... this thing is quite possibly the most *balanced* Windows Phone experience there is!
Screen res is lower than everything else I've had as of late... but since it's OLED, it at least creates the (arguably inaccurate) illusion that it's a good screen instead of having the viewing angles of a decade-old gaming device. Oh, and believe it or not, the low screen res is actually working in my favor. With the same CPU and GPU, Order & Chaos would lag horribly on a 1020... but with less work to do on a lower-res panel, it's a significantly smoother experience on my 820. Colors aren't as accurate as I had on the 1520's IPSLCD, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't find pleasure in those super-deep blacks... and it's in the same size range as the 520 so it's easy to swipe on (while having that front-shooter that the 520 lacked). It's got 1GB of RAM, so I can access everything on the Windows Store, LTE, NFC (that caught me off guard, thought this would be way too old for that), I didn't have to jump through hoops to get it working on AT&T... and it has my beloved external storage for Storage Sense.
I'd like the camera to a little better than it is... but outside of that, this thing is kind of a killer! I can't help but wonder how I'd gone through so many Windows Phones and heard of 720, 920, 1320... but never heard this one mentioned once until just recently.
I'd figure this phone would be the one that has all the spotlight the 520 has.
Lumia 520: I had a Focus Flash before, but this was my first WP8 phone. It wasn't the crappy screen I minded or even the crappy no-flash camera... but the fact that there was no front-facing camera and 512MB of memory. That meant I couldn't even utilize a lot of what was on the store... or properly Skype. I get that they were going for the cheapest, most minimalistic phone they could... but would a crappy little VGA front-facer have really jacked up the cost that much?
Lumia 1020: This camera was gorgeous... and while it was middle-of-the-road as far as performance goes, it was a nice showcasing of what WP8 was capable of... but the thing I tried to forgive and couldn't was the lack of external storage. This phone's capabilities gave you a lot you can do. It had enough memory to handle anything on the store and the power to run it. It presented nice speakers which would encourage you to use it for music listening... and it allowed us to shoot RAW. That doesn't even get really deep into it, yet that's enough to eat that 32GB within a week. I found myself constantly connected to my computer to get my pictures/video off of it.
Lumia Icon: This was easily the most beautiful Windows Phone... hell... it was beautiful even outside of Windows Phone standards. The extremely high pixel density made everything that worked look outstanding. It was a step down in camera quality (which ended up being a lot more drastic than I expected) but I felt really good about having the "flagship" Windows Phone. I'd come into this expecting that: since I was on AT&T, I'd lose LTE and MMS so that actually wasn't bad. Things went sour after realizing that the screen may be too good for the ambition of WP devs. Order & Chaos got monumental glitches, and Chaos Rings was simply unplayable... but I decided to ignore that. Things got even more sour when I started experiencing the WiFi issues everyone's fuming about... and the wake delays... and the overheating. I'd convinced myself I would cope with the lack of external storage by cloud streaming my pictures and music... which would've been great if the phone's radio issues would've let me catch a break. Me and this beauty had to bid adieu to each other.
Lumia 1520: I'll admit, I spent a long time convincing myself this phone was just too damn big... but after the fallout with the Icon I embraced it and found myself having the same "It's really not hard to adjust to" reaction that everyone told me I'd have. From the moment it arrived, things were glorious. Despite what I'd said earlier, I was SO damn happy to have my LTE and MMS back. Having high-end specs paired with external storage put me in heaven... as did the outrageous battery life. I never cared about putting PLEX or Netflix on a mobile phone before this... but things went on and I realized swipe-typing is harder than ever on this monster, and found that even more of my favorites were getting wrecked or letterboxed by the same 6in 1080p panel I was in a love-hate relationship with.
...then I had someone recommend me the 820. Concerning specs, it seemed to be on-par with the Lumia 1020 but had a screen res closer to the 520... and it appeared to be fairly unimpressive after having the Icon and 1520 which currently beat every iPhone, Android phone and other Windows Phone in Basemark... but I figured that I've already blown so much cash... what's $80 just to try it out?
What did I find? ... this thing is quite possibly the most *balanced* Windows Phone experience there is!
Screen res is lower than everything else I've had as of late... but since it's OLED, it at least creates the (arguably inaccurate) illusion that it's a good screen instead of having the viewing angles of a decade-old gaming device. Oh, and believe it or not, the low screen res is actually working in my favor. With the same CPU and GPU, Order & Chaos would lag horribly on a 1020... but with less work to do on a lower-res panel, it's a significantly smoother experience on my 820. Colors aren't as accurate as I had on the 1520's IPSLCD, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't find pleasure in those super-deep blacks... and it's in the same size range as the 520 so it's easy to swipe on (while having that front-shooter that the 520 lacked). It's got 1GB of RAM, so I can access everything on the Windows Store, LTE, NFC (that caught me off guard, thought this would be way too old for that), I didn't have to jump through hoops to get it working on AT&T... and it has my beloved external storage for Storage Sense.
I'd like the camera to a little better than it is... but outside of that, this thing is kind of a killer! I can't help but wonder how I'd gone through so many Windows Phones and heard of 720, 920, 1320... but never heard this one mentioned once until just recently.
I'd figure this phone would be the one that has all the spotlight the 520 has.
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