First, let me give some background on the devices and OSs that I've been using the past 2.5 years. I'm from Bangladesh and I work with mostly web stuff.
I've been an Android user from early 2011. My first device was HTC Desire and I used that for around 1.5 years. Sometime during that, I got an HTC Titan which ran WP 7.5 Mango. I switched to the HTC One X last May which has been my go-to device over the past year. I also own an iPad 3 as my primary tablet.
The day I saw the Nokia press conference announcing the Nokia Lumia 920, I decided that I need to get my hands on one, The features seemed great and the device itself looked brilliant. I fell in love with the grey one and managed to get my hands on it after managing the bring one over from Thailand 3 months ago.
I was looking forward to WP8 and the awesome camera that came along with the 920. Some of the features that I've had from this is superb. The email experience is the best out there bar none. The camera is also the absolute best out there. The 'People' hub makes my life much easier compared to what I have to go through with my Android phone.
Sadly, I've had to go back to my HTC on a lot of occasions for features that were lacking.As a power user, I can live alone on my One X but I can't do that on my Lumia 920.
I'm listing the issues that I've had with the overall experience over the past few months. These will cover issues with the phone, apps from the marketplace and WP8 itself.
Here goes -
Apps -
Facebook -
This is probably THE MOST IMPORTANT app for any mobile platform that's out there. It's a sad fact that the app for WP is WOEFUL. The UI is clunky and significantly slower compared to Android or iOS. Posting to groups and pages is also significantly more painful. It's almost a breeze for the other platforms. The Facebook Beta app has improved the overall experience considerably but issues still remain. The Facebook integration baked into the system makes up for the shortcomings somewhat. Notifications for groups, pages, user accounts work seamlessly through the 'Me' tile.
The key issue is messages and that's prevalent in the beta app as well. There is nigh non-existent support for message notifications if you're not online. The integration with the system messaging app also wonky. I only appear online on chat for a few people in Facebook. If they send me a message, I sometimes get a regular message in the messaging hub. But for other people who send me a message, I don't get any notification whatsoever, not in the live tile or the messaging app. The web app can show me messages but as there are no notifications for the web app, it kinda defeats the purpose.
Twitter -
I've tried a lot of Twitter clients on WP and most of them work quite well. I've tried Twitter (official), Mehdoh, Rowi, Peregrine, Gleek, Cowlick etc. Rowi is crap. It didn't even let me see my Twitter lists. Waste of $1.5. All the other ones are quite nice.
Curiously enough, all of them have the same shortcoming that a power user is almost sure to face. I use 4 accounts on my phone. Two personal and two for work. Whenever I get a mention or a retweet to any of these accounts, I get a toast notification saying, "XX has retweeted you" or "XX has mentioned you". The live tiles also get updated with the same message. None of the apps say which 'you' are they referring to. And whenever I click the live tile, it takes me to the home screen of whichever account was last active. In other platforms, the app switches the account to whichever one received the notification and shows me the relevant tweet. The notification (on other platforms) also show me straight away which account it's referring to. But none of the WP apps do that. Bummer for power users such as myself.
Skype -
This is a weird one. Skype is owned by Microsoft itself but the service isn't up to the mark. For example, whenever I get a message on Skype, the WP app is the last one to show me that. The live tile on my phone (or my Win 8 PC, for that matter) is the last one to be updated. I can see the updates on my iPad as well as my One X. I've personally seen missed call notifications on my iPad that skipped my Lumia altogether. I find this very weird, indeed.
Kindle -
I prefer the Kindle app for reading books on all my devices because of a simple reason - sync. Whenever I'm reading a book on that, I don't have to remember page numbers or start converting one page reference to another. I usually read books on my iPad. Whenever I'm commuting or something, I can readily switch to my One X and continue where I left off on my iPad. It's brilliant.
Sadly, the WP8 app doesn't even support personal documents. That's a shame as most of my stuff are personal documents.So, in my Lumia 920, I have to use other book readers and convert one page number to another causing a major inconvenience. Personal documents are supported by Kindle (obviously), iOS and Android devices. I talked to Amazon and the customer care said their developers will work on this but could give me no time frame.
IE -
It's quite a nice browser and quite fast as well. The UI is a bit outdated as bookmarks can't be launched easily. There's an extra tap that I need to go through. UC Broswer is quite nice as it has a speed dial option and bookmarked pages can be launched very easily.
The main lacking for me would be the absence of cloud sync. With such a robust could storage utility such as Skydrive, it's baffling why Microsoft wouldn't support this. Chrome has been doing it successfully for the past year and even Safari does it now between OSX and iOS. Not being able to see the tabs I had open on my phone in my PC isn't good enough anymore. I don't need to see the tabs in another browser, being able to see them in IE on my PC would be good enough.
News Readers -
I've tried quite a few ones and none of them are as good as Pulse. This is focusing too much on a single app but Pulse is just that good. The absence of Pulse in WP8 is quite baffling as they used to have an app for WP7.
I've tried most of them i.e. Fuse, Weave, Collector. Fuse doesn't let me choose custom feeds. It throws me whatever it has listed under each category. Weave let's me configure custom categories (which feeds I want to have under Tech, Fun etc.) but it doesn't provide me any nested navigation. For example, whenever I open the 'Tech' tab on my Weave app, it shows all the stories from all the feeds. I can't see the 'Engadget' stories separately but I can do that in Pulse. Collector is the same, no nested navigation.
The Pulse web app is barely adequate as pressing the back button once while inside a story causes me to go to the Pulse homepage and almost making the nested navigation invalid.
Kik Messenger -
This was by far my favourite messenger app on my One X. But sadly, I was forced to move to Whatsapp as Kik notifications are very bad for WP8. The live tile for Kik doesn't update frequently and there is no lockscreen notification. Not having lockscreen notifications (as there isn't any centralized notification panel) makes the 'instant' in 'instant messenger' a moot point.
System Issues -
Games -
It's a complaint against WP is general. But the fact that I can only play one Temple Run on my Lumia 920 (April 2013) whereas I can play four ones on my One X or my iPhone is a fact that can't be overlooked. Microsoft needs to pay and/or push developers to start working on games. I have bought a Lumia 920 despite very few popular games being available, millions wouldn't.
Nokia Lenses -
These are very nifty features that make the already brilliant camera on my 920 even better. The problem is that sharing/viewing these outputs is a bit difficult. I captured a image by Photosynth but showing that to someone else requires me to open in in Photosynth. I can't do that from the pictures hub. It's the same for Cinemagraph. Cinemagraph is even worse. I can make animated images but I can't export them as gif files. It's cool indeed but not being able to show it to someone who's on some other device kinda defeats the purpose.
SMS Scheduler -
A feature that I use regularly on my One X. It's very good for sending birthday texts, farewell texts and such. The ones for Android work seamlessly. There are a couple of ones available for WP8 but they basically give me a reminder to send the text, the apps don't actually send the text.
Traffic counter -
This is baffling. Why wouldn't my phone be able to show me how much data traffic I've used over a specified period of time? Why do I have to dial a number that my mobile operator has set up to see my monthly data traffic? Why can't I have any idea how much data I've used through wi-fi over the past week? It's 2013, for ****'s sake.
No MKV palyback -
MKV has become a standard video format these days. No OS supports it natively, true. But not having a third party app for seamless MKV playback is definitely a shortcoming. People sometimes argue that MP4 is a better format compared to MKV. These people are just trying to change the subject.
SMS as email label -
This is a feature suggestion. I have this on Android (all my messages are saved to a label in my Gmail thorugh a third party app) but not in iOS. Microsoft backs up my messages in Skydrive and restores them whenever I need to. That's fine and dandy. But things can be improved much further. As I'm already using a live ID for my email and cloud storage, should it be that difficult for Microsoft to take my SMS data and write them to my outlook.com email account as a separate label? If that can be done, it's going to be the first time as neither Android nor iOS do it natively.
Making Hyper-Local way too local -
This is something that needs to be sorted immediately. Microsoft is making things too local. It's as if no one ever goes out of their own country for ANYTHING. I opened an outlook.com account based in Bangladesh (my original one in based in the US) to be able to use my local credit card for buying apps and services. A significant number of apps aren't available in the Bangladesh store but are so in the US store. That's bullcrap. It's like saying, "Tough luck, dude. You are living in the wrong country. Move to the US to experience how awesome your phone can be."
It's even worse for maps. I know that HERE Maps has developed quite a robust database for Bangladesh. Nokia Bangladesh is promoting that like crazy. I've personally seen that in Nokia stores here in Dhaka. But as my phone was bought from Thailand, I can't see that. I can't even download the offline maps. Bangladesh isn't even on the list of countries in Asia whose maps can be downloaded for offline usage.
I can't really change my locale back to Bangladesh to avail of this functionality as some apps that I use regularly aren't available in the Bangladesh app store. I might like local, but not THIS local.
FM Radio -
I personally don't have a problem with this but it's an issue for other people. I had personally convinced two people to buy Lumia 620s as they were looking for something cheap that would cater to regular needs. None of these people are overly concerned with hardware and apps. For these people, the Lumia 620 should be the perfect device, right? Wrong. When they heard that the phone didn't have a FM Radio, they said, "Sorry, not happening." I know that the phones have FM Radio receiver chips but for some bizarre, alien reason, they have been left inactivated.
Nokia seems to be pushing these handsets in a grand way in Asian countries. General users in Asian countries can't afford to listen to radio using TuneIn or similar apps. Even a standard def radio station broadcasts at 64 kbps. That amounts to roughly 30MB of data per hour. So, even if I listen to radio only for an hour on my phone through my data connection (say when I'm going home from the office), that would burn through my 1 GB monthly data allowance like a hot knofe through butter. I can't possibly imagine why someone would have FM radio receivers on a phone and leave them deactivated.
Making alert tones editable -
Personally, this makes me wonder what the developers were smoking. In my Lumia 920, I can change my phone ringtone and alarm tones as I like. I can create custom tones and use them as I please. But I can't assign custom tones for messages, emails, reminders.
That's. Just. Stupid.
That was all I had. I haven't lost hope yet. Some upcoming updates are promising to rectify some major issues. But quite frankly, we've seen too many promises and too little delivery from Microsoft regarding WP in recent times. I haven't gotten rid of the Lumia and I plan to sticking to it at least till next year. These days I switch between the two phones quite regularly as my primary phone. It'd be great to see the day when I wouldn't have to go back to any other platform.
That's the day I can actually 'Switch to Lumia'.
Nashid
I've been an Android user from early 2011. My first device was HTC Desire and I used that for around 1.5 years. Sometime during that, I got an HTC Titan which ran WP 7.5 Mango. I switched to the HTC One X last May which has been my go-to device over the past year. I also own an iPad 3 as my primary tablet.
The day I saw the Nokia press conference announcing the Nokia Lumia 920, I decided that I need to get my hands on one, The features seemed great and the device itself looked brilliant. I fell in love with the grey one and managed to get my hands on it after managing the bring one over from Thailand 3 months ago.
I was looking forward to WP8 and the awesome camera that came along with the 920. Some of the features that I've had from this is superb. The email experience is the best out there bar none. The camera is also the absolute best out there. The 'People' hub makes my life much easier compared to what I have to go through with my Android phone.
Sadly, I've had to go back to my HTC on a lot of occasions for features that were lacking.As a power user, I can live alone on my One X but I can't do that on my Lumia 920.
I'm listing the issues that I've had with the overall experience over the past few months. These will cover issues with the phone, apps from the marketplace and WP8 itself.
Here goes -
Apps -
Facebook -
This is probably THE MOST IMPORTANT app for any mobile platform that's out there. It's a sad fact that the app for WP is WOEFUL. The UI is clunky and significantly slower compared to Android or iOS. Posting to groups and pages is also significantly more painful. It's almost a breeze for the other platforms. The Facebook Beta app has improved the overall experience considerably but issues still remain. The Facebook integration baked into the system makes up for the shortcomings somewhat. Notifications for groups, pages, user accounts work seamlessly through the 'Me' tile.
The key issue is messages and that's prevalent in the beta app as well. There is nigh non-existent support for message notifications if you're not online. The integration with the system messaging app also wonky. I only appear online on chat for a few people in Facebook. If they send me a message, I sometimes get a regular message in the messaging hub. But for other people who send me a message, I don't get any notification whatsoever, not in the live tile or the messaging app. The web app can show me messages but as there are no notifications for the web app, it kinda defeats the purpose.
Twitter -
I've tried a lot of Twitter clients on WP and most of them work quite well. I've tried Twitter (official), Mehdoh, Rowi, Peregrine, Gleek, Cowlick etc. Rowi is crap. It didn't even let me see my Twitter lists. Waste of $1.5. All the other ones are quite nice.
Curiously enough, all of them have the same shortcoming that a power user is almost sure to face. I use 4 accounts on my phone. Two personal and two for work. Whenever I get a mention or a retweet to any of these accounts, I get a toast notification saying, "XX has retweeted you" or "XX has mentioned you". The live tiles also get updated with the same message. None of the apps say which 'you' are they referring to. And whenever I click the live tile, it takes me to the home screen of whichever account was last active. In other platforms, the app switches the account to whichever one received the notification and shows me the relevant tweet. The notification (on other platforms) also show me straight away which account it's referring to. But none of the WP apps do that. Bummer for power users such as myself.
Skype -
This is a weird one. Skype is owned by Microsoft itself but the service isn't up to the mark. For example, whenever I get a message on Skype, the WP app is the last one to show me that. The live tile on my phone (or my Win 8 PC, for that matter) is the last one to be updated. I can see the updates on my iPad as well as my One X. I've personally seen missed call notifications on my iPad that skipped my Lumia altogether. I find this very weird, indeed.
Kindle -
I prefer the Kindle app for reading books on all my devices because of a simple reason - sync. Whenever I'm reading a book on that, I don't have to remember page numbers or start converting one page reference to another. I usually read books on my iPad. Whenever I'm commuting or something, I can readily switch to my One X and continue where I left off on my iPad. It's brilliant.
Sadly, the WP8 app doesn't even support personal documents. That's a shame as most of my stuff are personal documents.So, in my Lumia 920, I have to use other book readers and convert one page number to another causing a major inconvenience. Personal documents are supported by Kindle (obviously), iOS and Android devices. I talked to Amazon and the customer care said their developers will work on this but could give me no time frame.
IE -
It's quite a nice browser and quite fast as well. The UI is a bit outdated as bookmarks can't be launched easily. There's an extra tap that I need to go through. UC Broswer is quite nice as it has a speed dial option and bookmarked pages can be launched very easily.
The main lacking for me would be the absence of cloud sync. With such a robust could storage utility such as Skydrive, it's baffling why Microsoft wouldn't support this. Chrome has been doing it successfully for the past year and even Safari does it now between OSX and iOS. Not being able to see the tabs I had open on my phone in my PC isn't good enough anymore. I don't need to see the tabs in another browser, being able to see them in IE on my PC would be good enough.
News Readers -
I've tried quite a few ones and none of them are as good as Pulse. This is focusing too much on a single app but Pulse is just that good. The absence of Pulse in WP8 is quite baffling as they used to have an app for WP7.
I've tried most of them i.e. Fuse, Weave, Collector. Fuse doesn't let me choose custom feeds. It throws me whatever it has listed under each category. Weave let's me configure custom categories (which feeds I want to have under Tech, Fun etc.) but it doesn't provide me any nested navigation. For example, whenever I open the 'Tech' tab on my Weave app, it shows all the stories from all the feeds. I can't see the 'Engadget' stories separately but I can do that in Pulse. Collector is the same, no nested navigation.
The Pulse web app is barely adequate as pressing the back button once while inside a story causes me to go to the Pulse homepage and almost making the nested navigation invalid.
Kik Messenger -
This was by far my favourite messenger app on my One X. But sadly, I was forced to move to Whatsapp as Kik notifications are very bad for WP8. The live tile for Kik doesn't update frequently and there is no lockscreen notification. Not having lockscreen notifications (as there isn't any centralized notification panel) makes the 'instant' in 'instant messenger' a moot point.
System Issues -
Games -
It's a complaint against WP is general. But the fact that I can only play one Temple Run on my Lumia 920 (April 2013) whereas I can play four ones on my One X or my iPhone is a fact that can't be overlooked. Microsoft needs to pay and/or push developers to start working on games. I have bought a Lumia 920 despite very few popular games being available, millions wouldn't.
Nokia Lenses -
These are very nifty features that make the already brilliant camera on my 920 even better. The problem is that sharing/viewing these outputs is a bit difficult. I captured a image by Photosynth but showing that to someone else requires me to open in in Photosynth. I can't do that from the pictures hub. It's the same for Cinemagraph. Cinemagraph is even worse. I can make animated images but I can't export them as gif files. It's cool indeed but not being able to show it to someone who's on some other device kinda defeats the purpose.
SMS Scheduler -
A feature that I use regularly on my One X. It's very good for sending birthday texts, farewell texts and such. The ones for Android work seamlessly. There are a couple of ones available for WP8 but they basically give me a reminder to send the text, the apps don't actually send the text.
Traffic counter -
This is baffling. Why wouldn't my phone be able to show me how much data traffic I've used over a specified period of time? Why do I have to dial a number that my mobile operator has set up to see my monthly data traffic? Why can't I have any idea how much data I've used through wi-fi over the past week? It's 2013, for ****'s sake.
No MKV palyback -
MKV has become a standard video format these days. No OS supports it natively, true. But not having a third party app for seamless MKV playback is definitely a shortcoming. People sometimes argue that MP4 is a better format compared to MKV. These people are just trying to change the subject.
SMS as email label -
This is a feature suggestion. I have this on Android (all my messages are saved to a label in my Gmail thorugh a third party app) but not in iOS. Microsoft backs up my messages in Skydrive and restores them whenever I need to. That's fine and dandy. But things can be improved much further. As I'm already using a live ID for my email and cloud storage, should it be that difficult for Microsoft to take my SMS data and write them to my outlook.com email account as a separate label? If that can be done, it's going to be the first time as neither Android nor iOS do it natively.
Making Hyper-Local way too local -
This is something that needs to be sorted immediately. Microsoft is making things too local. It's as if no one ever goes out of their own country for ANYTHING. I opened an outlook.com account based in Bangladesh (my original one in based in the US) to be able to use my local credit card for buying apps and services. A significant number of apps aren't available in the Bangladesh store but are so in the US store. That's bullcrap. It's like saying, "Tough luck, dude. You are living in the wrong country. Move to the US to experience how awesome your phone can be."
It's even worse for maps. I know that HERE Maps has developed quite a robust database for Bangladesh. Nokia Bangladesh is promoting that like crazy. I've personally seen that in Nokia stores here in Dhaka. But as my phone was bought from Thailand, I can't see that. I can't even download the offline maps. Bangladesh isn't even on the list of countries in Asia whose maps can be downloaded for offline usage.
I can't really change my locale back to Bangladesh to avail of this functionality as some apps that I use regularly aren't available in the Bangladesh app store. I might like local, but not THIS local.
FM Radio -
I personally don't have a problem with this but it's an issue for other people. I had personally convinced two people to buy Lumia 620s as they were looking for something cheap that would cater to regular needs. None of these people are overly concerned with hardware and apps. For these people, the Lumia 620 should be the perfect device, right? Wrong. When they heard that the phone didn't have a FM Radio, they said, "Sorry, not happening." I know that the phones have FM Radio receiver chips but for some bizarre, alien reason, they have been left inactivated.
Nokia seems to be pushing these handsets in a grand way in Asian countries. General users in Asian countries can't afford to listen to radio using TuneIn or similar apps. Even a standard def radio station broadcasts at 64 kbps. That amounts to roughly 30MB of data per hour. So, even if I listen to radio only for an hour on my phone through my data connection (say when I'm going home from the office), that would burn through my 1 GB monthly data allowance like a hot knofe through butter. I can't possibly imagine why someone would have FM radio receivers on a phone and leave them deactivated.
Making alert tones editable -
Personally, this makes me wonder what the developers were smoking. In my Lumia 920, I can change my phone ringtone and alarm tones as I like. I can create custom tones and use them as I please. But I can't assign custom tones for messages, emails, reminders.
That's. Just. Stupid.
That was all I had. I haven't lost hope yet. Some upcoming updates are promising to rectify some major issues. But quite frankly, we've seen too many promises and too little delivery from Microsoft regarding WP in recent times. I haven't gotten rid of the Lumia and I plan to sticking to it at least till next year. These days I switch between the two phones quite regularly as my primary phone. It'd be great to see the day when I wouldn't have to go back to any other platform.
That's the day I can actually 'Switch to Lumia'.
Nashid
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram