Speaking from experience, I think WP is a good platform. Overall experience is positive and I'm convinced by two current Lumias. One for work, the other leisure. Some background before continuing, I come from all the platforms that you can think of. It all started with the delayed release of the BB OS 10 last year and seeing that BB going down ways, we decided evaluating our mobile email solution was a high priority project. I don't want to start talking about the devices I've previously used/worked/evaluated/tested on but the devices I have and done all those in this year alone are iPhone 5, Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One. In addition to all the devices mentioned, we also tested the Lumia 925, which we decided on. We retired our BES4.7/BES5 infrastructure that served us really well for the past 7 years, not to mention that the BES5 was a recent upgrade. And so I got my first WP8 device then, the Lumia 925. And that experience went on to convince me to buy the Lumia 1020 when it launched this month as my personal phone.
The WP platform is really easy to ignore when we talk about hardware specs, amount of apps available, the popularity or attention it gets from consumer products reviewers and developers as such, but again, it is a well thought out platform in my opinion. Considering a platform that is just 3 years old, WP has come a long way and it did a really good job. If you recall Android and iOS in their third year or version, you will get what I mean. Of course, WP has it's bugs here and there but none of them are life-stopping or major ones. All platforms has their strength and flaws. But if you understand the design of a WP device and see the reason behind it, you will love it for what it is.
Smartphones have come a long way. In the beginning it was for emails and organizers, then it became a boom when iPhone came into the arena touting apps. From then on, we use a smartphone for only a few reasons. Now, a smartphone blends in with a balance of work and play - some emails/calls/messages here and there throughout the day, some social activities or personal indulgence in taking a few photos, reading some news or articles on the go, a few games to kill time, catch an episode of serials or pick up where we left off of a movie or YouTube. It balances that. In the quest to find a smartphone to suit our lifestyles or tastes however, seems to be such a difficult choice. So, as human as we are, we rely on other's purchase experiences or marketing ads or brand loyalty from the start. Some may consider a smartphone based on popularity of the manufacturer, the platforms, the apps and for some, the hardware specifications. But honestly, who needs all that?
When I think of the apps available out there, I think to myself, do I need them all? What are the ones that I really need and what are the ones that I can do without? WP may not have all of the major ones, but some are compensated with quality ones provided by third party developers. I'm not saying that I don't miss my iOS/Android apps, because I do, but the WP platform just needs some time to mature. Honestly, I miss the integration of Google apps in Android (I'm an Android user before this) but I've migrated to Microsoft/Windows Phone platform as I speak. It's not difficult nowadays to migrate your files using cloud services or your contacts or forwarding your emails. It's the question of wanting to do so or not. I tend to be the kind of person who adapts easily so I may be speaking for myself, but it is possible if you want to.
Hardware specs are just for benchmark junkies or those who just wants the latest and greatest. If you really think about it, do you really need to have Full HD on a smartphone when you can't even view all that glorified pixels in such a small screen and tell the difference? Do you really need Quad/Octa-cores to get an insane 40K points in Antutu just to gain bragging rights? Do you need all that 2GHz CPU cores to ramp up (if they are ever ramp up) to get blazing browsing experience speed, when your bottleneck is your broadband or 4G connection? Do you really need more than 5 hours of screen time out of a single charge on a ~2000mAh battery? Because if you do, you must either be a very unproductive office worker, or a travelling business man who's very bad at your time or the devices' power management. And finally, do you really need to crush that many candies with your phone? (Just joking)
Enter Windows Phone.
Speaking about the things I appreciate about WP, I have to start with the Start screen. No paginated icons in rows and columns (though you can line the Tiles up that way but where's the fun in it). I personally love the interface a lot. Its clean, neat, and uniform. You swipe up or down, panoramically, the list can be as long or as short as you want depending on how many Tiles you have on your Start screen. When you move to the furthest left or right, you jump back to the first tab. Intuitive. And again, across apps designed with the Metro/Modern UI. This is good UI design. To quickly go to an app if you have a long app list, tap on any alphabet indicator in the app list and tap the alphabet the app starts with and it brings you there close enough. The only flaw in this design is, you need to have at least a certain number of apps before the alphabet shows up (if I remember correctly, 45 items)
The Oh-My-God Live Tiles. The person/team who thought this out should be given a medal or something. This is godsend functionality. It is more meaningful to me this way. The Live Tile shows me if there's a notification or not, for the apps that I want to get notifications from. Straight forward. Period. If I am available at that moment to respond to it, I just open the app to see what's going on. I don't need notifications from all apps to show up when I turn on the screen of my phone. I don't need a notification center for me to pull down and scroll/swipe to see a half preview of what's the message about, then tap/swipe the message to discard or access the app to read it. Redundant. This is also the reason I prefer iOS badges instead of the notification center introduced in the later versions of iOS. The notification center never got me excited. The toast notification also serves the purpose well here in WP. When I'm in the middle of something, an incoming message/text triggers a toast notification that appears on top of the screen. I get a preview and if I want to discard it, I swipe it away. If I want to respond to it immediately, I tap on it and it brings me to the app/message. If I'm not available at that point to see that toast, I get a number indicator on the Live Tile of the app. I don't need a list that tells me what I've missed because eventually, I'll need to deal with them in the app itself. I also know when I'm away from the phone, it's for a good reason. Simple expectations, simple life.
Email management is great on WP. The Office integration is there, if you are those that needs viewing of Office documents on-the-go. I personally do not believe in on-the-go document editing, at least not on any smartphone yet. Those who needs that functionality is probably better off with a tablet or a laptop. Photos Hub, Music Hub. Who needs File managers? You copy a file to your WP device from the computer and use the app to open it. If you don't have an app to open it, why would you want to view it on your WP? I can understand some people use their smartphones as portable storage and the files stored in there are probably for them to attach and send when they need to. However, I also believe that people travels with their laptop computers and it's easy to use Internet Sharing to tether a WiFi connection for them to send from the laptop computer itself. Not to mention free WiFi hotspots available all over the place nowadays. And the file types that they want to send are probably not Office suite documents, which can be heavy in size as well.
People Hub, on top of your Microsoft account contacts, it's a good integration of Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn, all in one place. You are able to get feeds and post from here. Hell, you can post to all sites at once. You get updates from your contacts, you can create Rooms and Groups to segregate your contacts by Friends, Family, Coworkers, etc. It's really great contact management. You can of course gain access from the native apps, but for the quick stats updates, you probably don't need to fire them up and save a few packets off your data plan.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, WP platform is a great platform that delivers the functionalities as a smartphone as any other platform. However, the way you enjoy a WP device may not be the same as you enjoy an Android or iOS device. And it really depends on what you want to enjoy on that device. For me, I enjoy it's simplicity and practicality. And the device is enough for a day's out use for that.
Meanwhile, the HTC One is locked up in a server rack in the server room until a new leak is out. We've pretty much given up on Android as our mobile solution due to the diversified versions and manufacturer devices available in the market. We can't possibly support each and one of them. The iPhone survived only 2 weeks of iOS 7 and is keeping the HTC One company.
The WP platform is really easy to ignore when we talk about hardware specs, amount of apps available, the popularity or attention it gets from consumer products reviewers and developers as such, but again, it is a well thought out platform in my opinion. Considering a platform that is just 3 years old, WP has come a long way and it did a really good job. If you recall Android and iOS in their third year or version, you will get what I mean. Of course, WP has it's bugs here and there but none of them are life-stopping or major ones. All platforms has their strength and flaws. But if you understand the design of a WP device and see the reason behind it, you will love it for what it is.
Smartphones have come a long way. In the beginning it was for emails and organizers, then it became a boom when iPhone came into the arena touting apps. From then on, we use a smartphone for only a few reasons. Now, a smartphone blends in with a balance of work and play - some emails/calls/messages here and there throughout the day, some social activities or personal indulgence in taking a few photos, reading some news or articles on the go, a few games to kill time, catch an episode of serials or pick up where we left off of a movie or YouTube. It balances that. In the quest to find a smartphone to suit our lifestyles or tastes however, seems to be such a difficult choice. So, as human as we are, we rely on other's purchase experiences or marketing ads or brand loyalty from the start. Some may consider a smartphone based on popularity of the manufacturer, the platforms, the apps and for some, the hardware specifications. But honestly, who needs all that?
When I think of the apps available out there, I think to myself, do I need them all? What are the ones that I really need and what are the ones that I can do without? WP may not have all of the major ones, but some are compensated with quality ones provided by third party developers. I'm not saying that I don't miss my iOS/Android apps, because I do, but the WP platform just needs some time to mature. Honestly, I miss the integration of Google apps in Android (I'm an Android user before this) but I've migrated to Microsoft/Windows Phone platform as I speak. It's not difficult nowadays to migrate your files using cloud services or your contacts or forwarding your emails. It's the question of wanting to do so or not. I tend to be the kind of person who adapts easily so I may be speaking for myself, but it is possible if you want to.
Hardware specs are just for benchmark junkies or those who just wants the latest and greatest. If you really think about it, do you really need to have Full HD on a smartphone when you can't even view all that glorified pixels in such a small screen and tell the difference? Do you really need Quad/Octa-cores to get an insane 40K points in Antutu just to gain bragging rights? Do you need all that 2GHz CPU cores to ramp up (if they are ever ramp up) to get blazing browsing experience speed, when your bottleneck is your broadband or 4G connection? Do you really need more than 5 hours of screen time out of a single charge on a ~2000mAh battery? Because if you do, you must either be a very unproductive office worker, or a travelling business man who's very bad at your time or the devices' power management. And finally, do you really need to crush that many candies with your phone? (Just joking)
Enter Windows Phone.
Speaking about the things I appreciate about WP, I have to start with the Start screen. No paginated icons in rows and columns (though you can line the Tiles up that way but where's the fun in it). I personally love the interface a lot. Its clean, neat, and uniform. You swipe up or down, panoramically, the list can be as long or as short as you want depending on how many Tiles you have on your Start screen. When you move to the furthest left or right, you jump back to the first tab. Intuitive. And again, across apps designed with the Metro/Modern UI. This is good UI design. To quickly go to an app if you have a long app list, tap on any alphabet indicator in the app list and tap the alphabet the app starts with and it brings you there close enough. The only flaw in this design is, you need to have at least a certain number of apps before the alphabet shows up (if I remember correctly, 45 items)
The Oh-My-God Live Tiles. The person/team who thought this out should be given a medal or something. This is godsend functionality. It is more meaningful to me this way. The Live Tile shows me if there's a notification or not, for the apps that I want to get notifications from. Straight forward. Period. If I am available at that moment to respond to it, I just open the app to see what's going on. I don't need notifications from all apps to show up when I turn on the screen of my phone. I don't need a notification center for me to pull down and scroll/swipe to see a half preview of what's the message about, then tap/swipe the message to discard or access the app to read it. Redundant. This is also the reason I prefer iOS badges instead of the notification center introduced in the later versions of iOS. The notification center never got me excited. The toast notification also serves the purpose well here in WP. When I'm in the middle of something, an incoming message/text triggers a toast notification that appears on top of the screen. I get a preview and if I want to discard it, I swipe it away. If I want to respond to it immediately, I tap on it and it brings me to the app/message. If I'm not available at that point to see that toast, I get a number indicator on the Live Tile of the app. I don't need a list that tells me what I've missed because eventually, I'll need to deal with them in the app itself. I also know when I'm away from the phone, it's for a good reason. Simple expectations, simple life.
Email management is great on WP. The Office integration is there, if you are those that needs viewing of Office documents on-the-go. I personally do not believe in on-the-go document editing, at least not on any smartphone yet. Those who needs that functionality is probably better off with a tablet or a laptop. Photos Hub, Music Hub. Who needs File managers? You copy a file to your WP device from the computer and use the app to open it. If you don't have an app to open it, why would you want to view it on your WP? I can understand some people use their smartphones as portable storage and the files stored in there are probably for them to attach and send when they need to. However, I also believe that people travels with their laptop computers and it's easy to use Internet Sharing to tether a WiFi connection for them to send from the laptop computer itself. Not to mention free WiFi hotspots available all over the place nowadays. And the file types that they want to send are probably not Office suite documents, which can be heavy in size as well.
People Hub, on top of your Microsoft account contacts, it's a good integration of Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn, all in one place. You are able to get feeds and post from here. Hell, you can post to all sites at once. You get updates from your contacts, you can create Rooms and Groups to segregate your contacts by Friends, Family, Coworkers, etc. It's really great contact management. You can of course gain access from the native apps, but for the quick stats updates, you probably don't need to fire them up and save a few packets off your data plan.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, WP platform is a great platform that delivers the functionalities as a smartphone as any other platform. However, the way you enjoy a WP device may not be the same as you enjoy an Android or iOS device. And it really depends on what you want to enjoy on that device. For me, I enjoy it's simplicity and practicality. And the device is enough for a day's out use for that.
Meanwhile, the HTC One is locked up in a server rack in the server room until a new leak is out. We've pretty much given up on Android as our mobile solution due to the diversified versions and manufacturer devices available in the market. We can't possibly support each and one of them. The iPhone survived only 2 weeks of iOS 7 and is keeping the HTC One company.
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