Another feature I neglected to mention that I miss is announcing incoming caller names. Android phone does do this, but only on the very first ring. I like that the Windows phone has the option to have the name announced, and that it keeps announcing. When not near the phone or in an environment where you can't hear clearly you will certainly almost always miss that first announcement. What was best about that feature is I could decide if I want to walk into the room to grab the phone, or not. Now I have to stop what I'm doing, go look at the phone to see if it's a call I need to take now, or if it can wait until a later time.
Yea, it's little things like that which I find generally annoying.
I hate that everything tries to force you onto using a fingerprint scanner, because the pin is not optimised. For instance, my pin is 8 digits, android forces you to still push an enter key. While not end of the world, it takes some getting used to. I don't think some brute force hacker is going to be greatly inconvenienced that they can't tell that my pin is 8 digits, like it's still a 100,000,000 combinations.
Also, WP had a great feature of not requiring you to enter your pin for a few minutes. Android has this as well, but it doesn't work as it should, because it behaves more like a hack rather than a feature. It just disables the lock screen for those minutes, meaning that the display is switched off. Apps don't send notifications if they are on top, until the few minutes elapse and the lockscreen comes back. What's worse, with double tap to wake, and the fingerprint scanner always working, touching any of those things just wakes the phone up, and without a lock screen, it just goes into the home screen. I switched off the double tap to wake, but can't disable the fingerprint scanner from still working, despite not having a finger print scanned.
The notifications drawer also doesn't quite work as well. Now I'm not sure if my nokia phone is interfering, because its
supposed stock android comes with their own super aggressive app killer (evanwell if anyone is interested), I suspect this interferes far more with notifications than it should. In any case, WP after 8.1 did notifications extremely well. I
suspect that apps get too much say in how they behave there, whereas WP had a really consistent approach. Biggest annoyance is how slow it is to clear up emails, have to tap this tiny box to expand the email to bring up the action buttons, which leads me to my next point.
I don't know if it's the device, or android, but very often, you find the boxes to register a touch or manipulate things is really poorly optimised. Moving icons on home screens, always feels bad, particularly with a large phone. A lot of apps seem to have tiny controls which don't like registering. This is something that WP just seemed to get right, where you didn't have to be incredibly accurate, yet it somehow got it right more often than not.
The volume controls are idiotic in my opinion. WP, again, eventually got this right, as it wasn't initially. When I have headphones in use, for some reason, it doesn't produce all the volumes at one level, they're still independent as per the 4 controls. So when an email, or notification comes through, it pauses my music or podcast to play a notification sound, but, since my phone speaker is quite loud, I have it set to low, so in headphones, I barely hear it, so the pause is rather annoying. Don't know how to switch off the pausing function, looks like you can't.
So, there aren't really any features that make the platforms stand apart from each other, it makes me think, I can only presume that google actually got worried with WP, which is why they actually put effort into undermining the platform.
A big problem that I have with android phones is that you really need to do your research to figure out what you're getting into. My nokia 8 works fairly well, but knowing what I know now, I wouldn't have bothered, and what's worse, it's the same problems as my first foray with android back in 2011; lots of bugs, lack of polish and lack of support with updates.
I try to discern between lack of familiarity and genuinely worse function, and I just consistently come up with worse function. Where I can praise the phone is in its speed. So many apps didn't work well on WP, where they do work properly on android. It's a real shame that WP/W10M is over, it was a great while it lasted though. It'll be my concorde moment; it exits service without there being anything better to replace it.
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