Complete List of Lumia 920 pros and cons - feedback welcomed!
After owning my Lumia 920 for over 2 weeks I can safely say that it is one of the worst phones that I have ever purchased. Only a Sony Eriksson phone I bought in the early 2000's has proven worse than this offering. There are little touches of genius thrown in there too, but overall this feels like a handset that is 2 years out of date and too buggy to release to market.
Also, I appreciate that half of this will be down to WP8 and not Nokia, but as they decided to go with that Operating System then it’s all part and parcel of their offering. This is not to knock WP8 for the sake of it; there are some nice innovations and I think Nokia's decision to move away from Symbian and MeeGo was a good move.
The good points:
1. Nokia Music is amazing at finding new music, it’s free and the presentation of it is really well done.
2. Nokia Maps is fast and accurate.
3. The video recording on this device is second to none. I am literally amazed at the quality of the clips that I am shooting. Absolutely amazing.
4. It looks great and is very different from anything out there. I epsecially like the way that the cursor falls down to the next line and the app listings letters bunch up and the top.
5. Some of the live tiles are useful.(ish)
The bad points:
1. Nokia Music is useless, because you can only download 4 playlists onto a 32GB device. You cant forward more than 6 tracks an hour and it doesn’t display a track listing. I know Music+ is meant to address this, but it should be like this out of the box. Plus it’s available on all WP8 devices now – why not get an 8X?!
2. Nokia maps is the least user friendly piece of mapping software!! Google Maps and Apple Maps are both so much more accessible and useful when you’re out and about in a city and looking for somewhere. No compass is another amazing omission. Plus it’s available on all WP8 devices now – why not get an 8X?!
3. The photos are soft and lack sharpness or clarity. Stupid things like not being able to enable / disable location tagging from the actual camera app also makes me realise that they just don’t know what they’re doing.
4. The fact that it freezes monumentally, frequently and in different ways. So far the hardware buttons at the bottom have frozen, but the screen is useable or vice versa! Either way you have to press volume down and power for ages and then it finally resets itself as you can do nothing else.
5. The brightness ‘pulse’ that has been mentioned elsewhere. Unbelievably annoying and terrible.
6. No ability to lock the orientation of the phone. As I often like to read articles in bed this is an absolute nightmare for me.
7. The browser is so bad that it actually makes me want to punch the handset in the face. I can’t even be bothered to go into the various reasons that make it bad, but it is awful. No back or forward buttons, terrible rendering, incompatibility with EVERYTHING … I could go on.
8. Often when using a WiFi connection at a hotel there is a requirement to log in using their custom web login page. Of the 3 hotels that I have had the handset, it has only worked with one. My workphone (Samsung Galaxy S2) worked with all of them, and I have never experienced the issue when I had my iPhone previous to this handset.
9. Runs hotter than Hades in many different situations.
10. No fixed status bar if you would like it to be fixed. Battery indicator is woefully inadequate and third-party apps that address this do not update reliably.
11. On / off button is placed perfectly for me to accidentally press it whenever I pick the phone up. Never experienced that with any other handset that I have owned.
12. Terrible integration of external services. Can’t push to G+ for most apps and often can’t even push to email and only get the facebook option.
13. No unified notification area. I cant even ask for a different tone for WhatsApp which makes it all the worse.
14. Outlook.com account doesn’t allow you to import your addresses from your address book! WTF!? Also the mail client looks awful and I find it totally unusable. I’ve barely checked my email on the move since owning this phone as it’s so bad.
15. Cant turn off ringtone and vibrate from the main menu. You can obviously turn one of the other off from the volume menu … but who cares if you want to turn both off it’s a boring 7 presses, touches or swipes!
16. When in a call, if you try and switch to another app (to find a contact, etc ...) it throws you back into the call screen without any warning. Infuriating.
17. WiFi switches off when the screen is off (with not Portico update), meaning missed notifications if mobile data is turned off.
18. Calendar is relatively primitive, with month view showing just a few letters rather than highlighting events.
19. Sharing a contact via SMS fails. I only tried this twice, but both times the message would not send and I had full signal.
20. Windows Store appears to be down with relative frequency. If it happens regularly with Google Play or the AppStore it's not something that I have previously witnessed, but have done on numerous occasions within the short time I've had the Lumia (I appreciate that this is not a Nokia issue, but it's continues to detract from the overall package).
21. Native media players are awful. No ability to drag the progress bar to fast forward videos or songs, although this is inconsistent. You can drag the progress bar of locally saved videos, but not streaming videos. Completely unable to do so on XBox Music or Nokia Music though; whether local content or streaming.
22. XBox music has a really attractive interface but it's almost unusable. It doesn't display track listings, you cant navigate around quickly, etc.
23. Lack of volume control within Apps vs notifications / ringtones. It's almost unworkable if you use your phone as a true multimedia device.
24. No indication of which Apps you have purchased on the Windows store. If you buy lots of Apps (as I do), you forget which ones you have bought / downloaded.
25. No ability to kill apps. I don't care how clever the OS thinks it is, if I want something killed - let me do it! Even if it's just removed from the running list as it's a core App or service.
20. White or Black solid backgrounds are too limiting. I struggle to read white on black, but the black on white just makes the interface look atrocious. That means I have to choose between either usability or my friends ruining me for having a phone that looks ridiculous!
I could go on, but this is the biggest technological let down for me in many years. I really, REALLY wanted to like the Lumia 920 and WP8 but I'm afraid that (for me) it is completely unsuitable for either personal use or work use ... which basically makes it a complete failure in my eyes!
I hope you can see that this is not a troll post and maybe I’ve missed the point here but I would love to get people’s opinions on my feedback and see how they feel about their handset.