Sorry, but I agree with Paul on this point, 100 percent.
Then you're wrong. It's not just opinion, but fact. He writes "anged: None of these phones will provide a satisfying smartphone experience in late 2016", yet the fact that it actually does for a lot of us proves him wrong. One of the many ways people these days are confusing fact with opinion. It's like we're in the linguistic dark ages of reasoning.
if I'm being completely honest, the 950/XL and W10M are a collective disaster. In my opinion, the software isn't ready for primetime today, much less when it launched A YEAR AGO.
For me, the overall "smartphone experience" provided by my 950 is a completely atrocious.
"disaster" and "atrocious" are pretty strong words to use. As far as I can see, if that's where it's at it can't get any worse really. So if that's the case, and if I were you, I wouldn't even bother hanging on to the phone at all and just get a new one, which I assume you've already done. My personal experience has been net positive, and any issues I've had so far aren't big enough to warrant the words "disaster" or "atrocious".
"Disaster": Possibly I'd use it to characterize a software/hardware glitch in a financial institution's hardware resulting in the loss of accounts and data, irreversibly irretrievable. More likely is I'd use it to describe an earthquake with a subsequent tsunami killing thousands.
"Atrocious": Yahoo's security leading to the intrusion into half a billion accounts.
The 950? Not so much 'disaster and atrociousness'.
- Cheap-feeling hardware -- Pick up one of these Lumias and then handle an iPhone of nearly any stripe and tell me which one feels better... It's no contest. - Except if you put your iPhone into a nice protective case in which case you can't feel how great your iPhone feels. So, again, how many people do that? Next time it's up for conversation at a social event we should all have people put their phones on the table and try to feel the hardware of each other (how's that for a euphemism!?). My hunch is most people cover up their beautiful hardware so it's a completely irrelevant issue in real life.
- Slow performance -- My Lumia takes forever to boot up, launch apps or, especially, to process photos. An old iPhone 6 runs circles around it. - That sucks. For me, a slow boot doesn't bother me. My previous Android (G2X) took longer to boot. Launching apps is fast enough. It seems to take anywhere from 1.5-2.5 seconds for my usual suspects, Edge into a clean page, Outlook Mail and Calendar, Weather etc, and closer to 7 seconds for apps that load data from the cloud when launched, eg Garmin Connect etc. If an iPhone launches my bread-and-butter apps faster than 2.5 seconds then I suppose it's literally faster, but I just don't care about saving that small an amount of time. I'll just pick my nose during that one second. Not long enough to get messy, just to reconfigure the contents inside the nose a bit.
- ZERO meaningful apps -- This one goes without saying... - It's obviously entirely personal. I mentioned it before, but I'll mention it again:
- Outlook Mail
- Outlook Calendar
- Weather
- Browser
- News apps
- Bank Of America app
- Wallet
- OneDrive
- Groove Music
- Wikipedia
etc
- Poor app quality (of the scarce handful that are available) -- The Delta airlines app is useless, my credit-card company doesn't support wallet, etc., etc. - Like I said, it's ultimately personal. Sorry to hear you don't find apps you want and the ones you get don't work. For me, most seem to work quite well. But I will concede that perhaps there's on average a gap in quality.
- Lackluster battery life -- It's almost always warm to the touch for no reason, chewing through battery and my data plan while doing absolutely nothing useful. Yes, I've gone in and tweaked various background tasks, but this made no difference. - I get enough battery life out of mine. Perhaps if my usage patterns changed.
- CONSTANT glitches -- Why can't I smoothly zoom in on a photo without it getting stuck? No, I have to wait at least five seconds for the phone to decide if it wants to allow that. Why did the camera's autofocus on-screen popup randomly disappear today, necessitating a restart? How come the copy-and-paste interface is inconsistent? Why does Edge randomly NOT load pages? With a SIX-CORE PROCESSOR and THREE GIGS of ram, why do photos take sooooo long to finish processing? - I agree that it's annoying to have glitches. My previous G2X got to the point where it was close to unusable. And I mean that literally. And I'm using the word "literally" to literally mean "literally", as opposed to "figuratively". So it's all relative. Leading me to the following point:
Remind me again how these Lumia devices are better than an iPhone or Android handset, because I fail to see how they are... in any meaningful way.
"Better" is a somewhat subjective word. If you want to get an absolute and objective answer to it you'll need to identify exactly which parameters are relevant and then see what they are. I have friends on iPhones that are older than my 950, and my 950 have some specs that are better. I haven't tallied them all up to see what the net outcome is because to me it's not really that important. What I can say though for sure is that there are some features about the 950 and W10M that are appealing to me, and a few things that are unappealing to the iPhone/iOS:
- Price. It's a significant difference. If you can't spend X dollars you can't spend X dollars and have to buy something else.
- Bang-for-buck. I'd argue it's objectively true you get more for your money with the 950.
- User interface: I simply prefer W10M over both Android and iOS. Live tiles are great.
- Connectivity: I can shove a USB-3 connector into my phone and it pops up as folders on my PC. I use my PC for work, so it's super convenient to be able to drag/drop files as I see fit. I plugged my $1,500 headphone amplifier's USB cable into the dock just to see what would happen, and behold; the 950 automatically output a digital stream of audio to the amp. Let's see that with an iPhone (Oh, wait, does it even connect with cables any more?). I can also just plop drives into the dock and they are browsable on my phone, be they hard drives, solid state drives or usb drives. If I'm not mistaken there's a fair amount of drives that will also mount when directly connected to the phone itself.
- Continuum. Yeah, I admit, I haven't tried it, but I will and my
guess is I'll like it. But sure, I might not.
- OneDrive. I just like it.
- Groove Music. Last time I checked it compensated the holders of the rights to the music much better than Spotify. I'm in favor of supporting artists so they can make a living off of their craft. I'll again admit ignorance as to how iTunes or the streaming service compensates, but as I said, I came from Android, so...
- Great camera.
- Iris sensor. I like it. I don't have to worry about people peeking over my shoulder on the subway to see what pin I punch in before they steal my phone. Not that I worry about that all that much anyway, but still.
There's probably more, but my bet is I've written too long a post already, so, time to wrap it up most likely.,...
To the OP's question, I HATE this device and would never, Ever, EVER buy another one; I wouldn't take one if it were free, that's how disgruntled I am about all this. :eck:
I feel your pain. I do think however that your experience doesn't necessarily transfer over to other people as neatly as you imply. Your recommendation is for people to never buy a 950, and mine is for them to try it. We clearly differ on that.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram