TL;DR version
I'm a longtime Android user who bought a Windows Phone, experienced a problem that I didn't have time or energy to resolve, and went back to my old Android phone.
TL version
This will be a long post, but I wanted to share my very brief experience with Windows Phone, along with some background to go with it. I welcome advice and ideas for what I could or should have done. If some of my problems or concerns could have been resolved somehow, I would very much like to know how. I want to like Windows Phone, and am willing to give it another chance, though at this point I may wait until next year for 8.1 to release.
Background on me
I have used Android phones and tablets exclusively for around five years. I also have a lot of experience with iOS devices due to my job, but my own devices have been Android. Over the past several months, I've been tiring of Android and the hassles that often accompany it. The very inconsistent UI even among Google's own apps, the lack of timely updates for nearly all devices, and a few other issues have really gotten on my nerves.
I am on Verizon because they are the only carrier with usable service at my house. Switching carriers it not an option. I have a Samsung Galaxy Nexus, which I bought the day it was released in December 2011. Despite typical long delays in OS updates from Verizon, this was still the best phone I had owned until the 4.2.2 update. (I'm certainly not saying it's the best phone, only that it's the best I've owned.) When Verizon finally released the Android 4.2.2 update for the Galaxy Nexus, things took a major turn for the worse. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi problems are common, memory management is very poor, and the device gets to be very sluggish during use. Despite having a Nexus device, I do not run third-party builds of Android. To that, I know the Android community will say "you're doing it wrong."
On Monday of this week (October 7, 2013) I upgraded to a Nokia Lumia 928. This followed two weeks of pretty extensive research, soul-searching, and attempting to transition from Gmail to Outlook.com to help guarantee what I assumed would be the best Windows Phone e-mail, contacts, and calendar experience. That experience did not turn out as I'd hoped.
I returned the phone to Verizon the next day. I freely admit that I did not give it enough time, but I experienced a deal-breaker problem which I do not have the time to try to fix. (This problem is described in the "Bad Things" section below.) Despite being angry and stressed out for much of my time with the phone, I got to really like Windows Phone. Going back to Android feels very clumsy by comparison. If I had the time and desire to try to "fix" my contacts, I definitely would have stuck with it longer. I could see Windows Phone becoming my daily driver if I could get everything to sync.
Here are my observations. I compare this with Android many times because that's what I was coming from.
Good Things
Okay Things
Bad Things
So there are my long-winded first impressions of Windows Phone. As I said, if I had time to spare to try to fix whatever contact sync issue caused this problem, I would have almost certainly grown to like Windows Phone and adapt to the differences. Since Verizon is unlikely to get another Nexus phone or any additional official updates for my Galaxy Nexus, I may finally give a third-party Android build a try to tide me over until Windows Phone 8.1 is out and then revisit Windows Phone at that time.
I do welcome the thoughts and opinions that WP users can offer in response to this long post. If you actually read all of this, thank you!
I'm a longtime Android user who bought a Windows Phone, experienced a problem that I didn't have time or energy to resolve, and went back to my old Android phone.
TL version
This will be a long post, but I wanted to share my very brief experience with Windows Phone, along with some background to go with it. I welcome advice and ideas for what I could or should have done. If some of my problems or concerns could have been resolved somehow, I would very much like to know how. I want to like Windows Phone, and am willing to give it another chance, though at this point I may wait until next year for 8.1 to release.
Background on me
I have used Android phones and tablets exclusively for around five years. I also have a lot of experience with iOS devices due to my job, but my own devices have been Android. Over the past several months, I've been tiring of Android and the hassles that often accompany it. The very inconsistent UI even among Google's own apps, the lack of timely updates for nearly all devices, and a few other issues have really gotten on my nerves.
I am on Verizon because they are the only carrier with usable service at my house. Switching carriers it not an option. I have a Samsung Galaxy Nexus, which I bought the day it was released in December 2011. Despite typical long delays in OS updates from Verizon, this was still the best phone I had owned until the 4.2.2 update. (I'm certainly not saying it's the best phone, only that it's the best I've owned.) When Verizon finally released the Android 4.2.2 update for the Galaxy Nexus, things took a major turn for the worse. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi problems are common, memory management is very poor, and the device gets to be very sluggish during use. Despite having a Nexus device, I do not run third-party builds of Android. To that, I know the Android community will say "you're doing it wrong."
On Monday of this week (October 7, 2013) I upgraded to a Nokia Lumia 928. This followed two weeks of pretty extensive research, soul-searching, and attempting to transition from Gmail to Outlook.com to help guarantee what I assumed would be the best Windows Phone e-mail, contacts, and calendar experience. That experience did not turn out as I'd hoped.
I returned the phone to Verizon the next day. I freely admit that I did not give it enough time, but I experienced a deal-breaker problem which I do not have the time to try to fix. (This problem is described in the "Bad Things" section below.) Despite being angry and stressed out for much of my time with the phone, I got to really like Windows Phone. Going back to Android feels very clumsy by comparison. If I had the time and desire to try to "fix" my contacts, I definitely would have stuck with it longer. I could see Windows Phone becoming my daily driver if I could get everything to sync.
Here are my observations. I compare this with Android many times because that's what I was coming from.
Good Things
- The Windows Phone UI was very nice. During my pre-purchase research I came to understand how the live tiles work and it actually got me using some of the modern UI apps in Windows 8. (Although that experience without a touchscreen is far from ideal. But that's another topic entirely.) The constantly changing "People" live tile was incredibly annoying and distracting, but the other ones were overall quite good. Getting a simple count of unread mail, new texts, etc. was helpful and not something that stock Android provides. It was great to be able to show important or useful information in an efficient way.
- The consistent UI was a welcome change from the UI chaos that is Android. Almost all apps behaved the same, most used my chosen theme colors, and you interacted with most apps in the same consistent way. Very refreshing.
- The UI works well for one-handed operation. So many Android apps now require proficiency in thumb gymnastics to reach buttons in the upper-right corner of a 4.7+ inch screen. I did not have this problem with Windows Phone and really appreciated that. Android's tendency to have controls at the top of the phone screen makes larger screens difficult to navigate one-handed.
- The OS was fast and responsive. There was minimal lag moving around and between apps. Everything felt very fluid. The back button worked in a consistent and logical way, unlike the back button in Android.
- The screen was great, and all the fonts were very readable.
- The keyboard was awesome. Almost no typos, easy to use, and accurate word suggestions. Google really needs to step up its game in the keyboard department. Android does a good job of correcting typos, but with Windows phone I had fewer typos to be corrected. I miss that keyboard even after only a few hours of use.
- A nearly system-wide dark color theme is nice. Android has white, black, gray. You never know what app will use which theme. It's really annoying.
- The lock screen is nice and provides quick access to useful information. I can get close to this with Android lock screen widgets such as DashClock, but Windows Phone is great out of the box.
Okay Things
- It was annoying to be unable to group things into folders. Endlessly scrolling up or down a long page of tiles is a bit tedious, but over time I'm sure I would have found a way to arrange my most-used tiles near the top.
- Feature parity between Outlook.com on the web and the Mail app in Windows Phone is nowhere near what Gmail on the web and the Gmail Android app offer. The current Google Android app is probably the closest thing I've seen to the perfect mobile e-mail experience. (Aside from the staggeringly stupid inability to send e-mail to contact groups.) The Windows Phone e-mail experience was okay, but not great. For example, with my Outlook.com account on the web, I can quickly archive a message to get it out of my Inbox. In Windows Phone's Mail app I have to move the message to the Archive folder, which requires several more steps.
- On Android once you setup an account, other apps can use that stored account information to authenticate. On Windows Phone, even when signing into other Microsoft apps, I was forced to log into each one separately, often having to enter a two factor authentication (2FA) code or an app-specific password.
- The camera, despite all the hype it got, was not that great in low light even with the xenon flash. While balance was awful, the edges of photos were dark. I was not impressed. This was very disappointing to me as the photos I'd seen online were much better than what I was getting. It was still MUCH better than the crappy camera on my Galaxy Nexus, though, and having a dedicated physical camera button with the half-push to focus functionality was pretty cool. More time with the camera would probably have helped here.
- During pre-purchase research I found there are Windows Phone versions of most of my must-have apps, which was good. Some of them are lacking features present in their iOS and Android counterparts which was disappointing, but not the fault of Microsoft of Windows Phone.
Bad Things
- This was the deal-breaker that resulted in me returning the Phone to Verizon less than a day after buying it. Google contact syncing was completely broken for me and could not be easily fixed. Sadly, I did not capture a screenshot of this error, which I regret, as it would have been helpful for follow-up troubleshooting or discussions such as this. The error I received during syncing of the Google account was that the phone had insufficient memory to sync at this time with error code 8007000E. [WP Central forum post about this] [Possible temporary fix for this] Speculation by some users online was that it's related to the size of some contact photos. Indeed I do have some high-res contact photos in my Google contacts, but I was not about to go through all of them to remove the photos. Admittedly this is not a widespread issue, but searches turned up a lot of people having the same problem. I do not know whether this is a Google problem or an issue with Windows Phone's new CardDAV implementation.
- Exporting my contacts from Google and importing into Outlook.com was also not successful due to the fact that many contacts had data that did not get exported. I'd guess at least a third of my contacts were missing info that Google did not export into the CSV file. I did not have time to manually compare each of my contacts in both services to resolve the discrepancies. This specific point is not a criticism of Windows Phone, so I don't want to dwell on it too much.
- As a power e-mail user, I found the surprisingly basic functionality of Outlook.com's rules to be insufficient for my needs. And I gave it a good two weeks to try to adapt before even buying a Windows Phone. Gmail's tabbed Inbox and powerful filters just work much better for me and I really missed the Android Gmail app while trying to work with the Windows Phone Mail app.
- All the Mail account tiles look the same in small tile mode. Not even a different icon to differentiate between an Exchange and a Google account, for example. I tried to get my most important info on tiles placed on the first screen of start page tiles, which meant some of them could not be large tiles. I do know that I can link mail accounts into a single unified Inbox, but I prefer to not handle mail in that way and the identical small tiles made it tough to know which one was for which account.
- The whole account setup and app logon process was needlessly complicated and very tedious. Those of us who use long random passwords are at a huge disadvantage with Windows Phone given the number of times you must enter credentials into apps during initial setup. I could understand this for third-party apps, but Microsoft's own apps should at least provide the option to use the device's primary Microsoft Account to streamline the process as much as possible. This was really a disappointing and frustrating experience.
- IE10 in Windows Phone does not have the ability to save passwords. I use long, randomly generated passwords, managed using KeePass on the desktop and KeePassDroid on Android. I also use two-factor authentication on any site that offers it. While researching Windows Phone 8 I was pleased to see the Authenticator app from Microsoft which would nicely fill the role of Google Authenticator. I do all this to keep people out, but for some sites I have no problem allowing trusted browsers to save my username and password to make logging in less tedious with these complex random passwords. I understand LastPass may offer some kind of workaround for this by using its own browser, but I'm not sure I would be happy with that. (I didn't try this.) I use desktop features of KeePass such as very customized autotype sequences, which would make moving all my credentials into LastPass difficult.
So there are my long-winded first impressions of Windows Phone. As I said, if I had time to spare to try to fix whatever contact sync issue caused this problem, I would have almost certainly grown to like Windows Phone and adapt to the differences. Since Verizon is unlikely to get another Nexus phone or any additional official updates for my Galaxy Nexus, I may finally give a third-party Android build a try to tide me over until Windows Phone 8.1 is out and then revisit Windows Phone at that time.
I do welcome the thoughts and opinions that WP users can offer in response to this long post. If you actually read all of this, thank you!
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