9300 is not that old

i came from 9700 (with a small detour on Android, but that was'nt pretty so I wont go there) and now finally on My Nokia Lumia 800.
Where should I start? Well, I could start with what it does not do compared to the BB. Backing up with Zune does not back up your setting, save games etc. But it does a good job keeping your synced items up to date and notifying updates when they bcome available. Lingering on OS updates, on BB I was used to just downloading the newest software and load it to the phone, we could even slice out specific parts of the OS or go with hybrid builds, no unlock or special tools needed. That cannot be done in WP, You have to wait until the updates are released by Your service provider or centrally by Microsoft and Nokia (there are two kinds of updates: Software Updates from MS and Firmware Updates from Nokia).
What it does do is to give You a less stressed user experience. On BB, even if I turned off all notifications and the LED, I would get them on the top of the screen in different colors of Yellow, red, green, blue or whatever. While some people actually prefer this and give WP some critisism that it does not have a central notification are, I actually prefer the more laid back approach of having the notifications splitted out over the different tiles and in the subtle white text as the icon. It is still easy to see them, but they do not draw unneeded attention to themselves like with other OS's.
I put it like this; "The Phone is here to serve me, i'm not here to serve the Phone. !"
The whole UI is complety different, exciting and very effective. You instantly feel the same cohesivenes as I loved in BBOS. There more routes to complete a task and usually the options you expect are where You expect them to be. You might miss folders, but they will come (supposedly) in a later update. You will also also miss Universal search if You used that in BB6.
Accounts integration. BB tried this with Social Feeds, but I never really bought it. With WP it is the People Hub and that is a completely different story. All the feeds are there, and you can interact directly with the contacts to get an overview of history etc, pics, etc. Especially I like the Family group which I have added on the home screen to se updates from them without having to open any app first and You can do the same with any other group you choose to create.
Pictures uploads automatically to Skydrive if you wish to do so. So even the pictures that You delete of the phone will always be available there, at least until You delete it there as well. Picture albums also shows your online albums from Facebook, Skydrive etc.
Mail has a nice flow to it, if You are on an Exchange Server You will appreciate the same options with moving to folders and flagging mails as with BB, but much more visually appealing. The only place the whole PIM is a bit disapointing is the calendar if You are used to working with weeks overview, but I have managed to embrace the Agende view which is very good and fluent. Another let down in the calendar section is the fact that You cannot search for appointments, at least not in the native one. There is one in Marketplace that makes it possible.
Internet Explorer is fast, I mean really fast compared to BB6, and it does a really good job rendering the pages. You will miss kayboard shortcuts for tabs, goto, search and so on, but that is the price for leaving the keyboard behind...
Marketplace is soooo much better than AppWorld. at least in my oppinion, but i'm from a small country in Europe and we have absolutely no development for BB. Marketplace is moving fast these days and MS is dedicated to bring as many of the top apps from other platform to this one as well. So far i'm not really missing anything specific, well may be a good third part browser.
Hardware wise. I'm not entirely sure if the screen on the 800 and the 710 is the same, but wauw, it is bright and colourful even in sunlight. Batterywise you will certainly feel that You go from a small screen to the bigger 3.7 inch 480x800. It takes its toll on the battery. But leave it on auto brightness and dial down the time out and it will last as good or better than the Storm and Torch series. On normal use I have 40-50% left in the tank at the end of the day, that is 10-15 less than i did on my Bold. One thing more about the screen. It touch responsivenes is amazing, i almost never miss a click, click wrong link or click instead of scrolling. It just works. Boot times well below 30 seconds is also veeery nice.
Summarized: I used to say that the BB Bold 9700 was the best phone i had ever had. Well... It WAS!
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