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Thread: Windows Phone 8 - Oh dear, what a bag of crap!

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    Laird Of The Glen jimborae's Avatar
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    Windows Phone 8 - Oh dear, what a bag of crap!

    So I've just picked up a Nokia Lumia 920 to try out for a few days with a view to possibly buying a WP8 phone as a personal upgrade in the next few weeks. I'm coming from a background of being an Android user for the last few years but have also tried/owned virtually every iPhone (and just dont like them).

    The phone itself is ok but it's format is not for me. Too heavy, thick and not an ergonomic shape, so feels really big and awkward in the hand. My current phone is a Nexus 4 which is pretty similar in size but feels much better in the in hand.

    My real issue though is the OS, what drew me to WP8 was the look of the tile based system and it's clean look but in practice it just doesn't work. Compared to Android it just takes to long to do anything or get the infomation you want. EG. So far I've not found a way to speed dial my favorite contacts or even access quickly my favorite contacts. When I unlock the phone I want to see the weather and news headlines but there's no one tile for this. In fact I've not found any tile that can display news headlines.

    Then there is the woeful state of of the OS itself. Podcasts, I listen to podcasts virtually all day long and one of the features WP8 was the supposedly inbuilt support of podcasts so I was really looking forward to trying out. Except I cant really because the ability to search for podcasts on devices is not functioning if you live outside of the U.S.!!!! Ok the work around for this is to import them via iTunes on your PC (the irony of this is ridiculous). Except that the MS software to do this is so bloody bug ridden that it crashes every time you try & sync with iTunes. And apparently its been like this since Nov last year!!! The 3rd party app I'm forced to use can only find a fraction of the podcasts i listen too and if I import them directly then the phone sees them as music not podcasts so they're difficult to find.

    I could keep going on about the annoyances of the phone and OS but I think you may get the idea. The only other down side I'd mention is the poor battery life when in standby.

    On the plus side the WP8 GUI is very clean compared to Android and social network integration is very, very good. E.G. When you go to Photo, Albums not only does it show albums on the phone but also all the ones from Facebook, Drive, Sky Drive et all which is neat touch. The facebook and twitter clients are the best i've used but these pluses are let down by the buggy OS and real lack of a decent selection of apps.

    I'll persevere with the phone for another couple of days but so far I dont think I'll be making the switch any time soon. And if I did I think I'd go for the Lumia 820 or Samsung Ativ S rather than the 920.

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    Drum & Bass Till I Die deejayburnout's Avatar
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    Nice honest review there

    Ï have never liked the Windows UI on mobile devices. I had a PDA a few years ago and it was terrible. Just as slow as a PC.

    My wife had a HTC with windows on it and it was a glorified paperweight that could make calls.

    Not a big fan of the new windows 8 UI either.

    Until windows can sort out there PC Operating system, will not even look at a mobile device.
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    Seething Cauldron of Hatred TheAnimus's Avatar
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    Re: Windows Phone 8 - Oh dear, what a bag of crap!

    For speed dialing, the idea is you pin a contact. For favourite contacts, use groups.

    My phone came with a little "how to" when I first turned it on, and also a paper booklet explaining this.

    The problem comes with trying to do a task, rather than a workflow.

    Ie, the workflow is contacting a specific contact (or group even), the task is that you wish to be a call.

    As such in WP, its always going to be 2 taps, one on the person, one on the call. I can't see that being a deal breaker.

    As for weather and news. I can't say it bugs me having two seperate live tiles, because ultimately, that is part of the idea, they are seperate concerns, so seperate tiles. But whatever, YMMV.

    For news I have BBC news and Bloomberg, I also have a couple of stocks pinned via bloomberg. Again, seperate concern, seperate tile.

    For the podcast I can't really advise as I tend to only do screencasts nowadays which for a code show just don't work on anything below 7"!

    I'm really suprised about poor battery, I find that is one of the reasons my 920 comes away with me, but the nexus 4 / sIII stay in the filing cabinet (only needed for testing stuff on em). Have you checked what you've allowed to run in background?

    The only reason anyone would go for a 920, over the much cheaper and in many ways better (such as expansion for memory) is the camera. If you don't want the camera, you don't want a 920.
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    Re: Windows Phone 8 - Oh dear, what a bag of crap!

    the camera on the 920 much better than the 820?

    am considering both, upgrading from the N8 (which had/has the best camera ever on a phone). Want Nokia, and 820 would be better for active lifestyle, but if the camera of the 920 is better.....?
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    Re: Windows Phone 8 - Oh dear, what a bag of crap!

    Oh yes, night and day better, but espesually for night.

    It's rather impressive actually for a phone camera. I was playing with it a while ago up against a 350d canon which has no stablisation and a 50mm prime. Been such an old SLR it gets very noisey quickly. We came to the conclusion that the Nokia would be a better choice for house party shooting and such. In fact it smokes the iPhone 5 and SIII camera.

    However, I still find skype in the background to be flakey. This is a huge negative for me. They still call it a "preview" version but have seen little improvement in months.

    The battery life I find to be excellent, beating iPhone and Galaxy by a fair few hours, however I find that when I have the screen sensativity turned up (so glove input works, which as I found arriving back in to England just yesterday, is a nesccity again) the battery life drops by about 20%.

    However, if you were thinking of buying one, you might find that its better to wait. The nokia 808 which has to be the undisupted best camera on a phone, allegidly the technology is coming to a lumia (running WP, the 808 was crippled by symbian). But I don't know about that, as MS have strick rules about Qualcomm S4s being used. The 808 had a very special bit of silicon because of the demands for processing such big images, ultimately turning a 40 megapixel image in to 8 or whatever, is very computationally expensive. Combined with the fact it was processing the RAW image data like a DSLR would, rather than just having a non-tuning DSP which is what all regular phone cameras do.

    It's funny, but I actually think we're going to see a lot more innovation in phone cameras, than we will in £2,000 DSLRs. The issue with the latter is that everyone wants the very slightest improvment, they want to be sold an expensive, chunky good to hold thing. I sometimes enjoy watching the fight when I say that Full Frame is a *bad* thing, because all of these people who've no idea about light, electronics or even basic phsysics want to burn me for hereacy. Sadly those people are blocking innovation. A good example is a lot of the comments about the Sigma offerings, which personally I just see as a "proof of concept" device. In some circumstances their little point and click devices deliver staggering quality, far ahead of what you can get with a £2k dslr with a £1k lens for landscapes.

    Anyway, the point I'm making is, yes the 920 has an amazing camera, that is hands down the best in useable smartphones right now (the 808 is better, but is a crap phone). HTC are working on some new techniques but haven't shipped anything. Nokia are actively shipping two great techniques, so I wouldn't be surprised if they manage to combine some of the oversampling of the 808 (great for making sharp, lower noise images) with the package stablisation they've done in the 920, which I read someplace was actually hybrid mechanical stablisation and sensor shift.

    But is it really worth the premium on a 620, which is a stonking phone and really a good bet for £160 from O2... I'd be half tempted to say just buy the 620, and with the £340 saved, look at a micro camera, such as the Pentax Q10 (which is the smallest) or maybe some full manual point and click?
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    Laird Of The Glen jimborae's Avatar
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    Re: Windows Phone 8 - Oh dear, what a bag of crap!

    Yes the camera is very good on the 920, but I don't use it enough to warrant the extra £s the 920 costs. For me the best blend is the 820 should I be willing to go down the WP8 route which is unlikel. The lak of apps is seriously becoming an issue for me now, apart from the whole podcast debacle.

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    Seething Cauldron of Hatred TheAnimus's Avatar
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    Re: Windows Phone 8 - Oh dear, what a bag of crap!

    Quote Originally Posted by jimborae View Post
    Yes the camera is very good on the 920, but I don't use it enough to warrant the extra £s the 920 costs. For me the best blend is the 820 should I be willing to go down the WP8 route which is unlikel. The lak of apps is seriously becoming an issue for me now, apart from the whole podcast debacle.
    Why not the 620? it is afterall half the price of the 820.

    What are the apps your missing?

    Did the pinning contacts thing work for your desire for quickdail?
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    Laird Of The Glen jimborae's Avatar
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    Re: Windows Phone 8 - Oh dear, what a bag of crap!

    Prefer the size & hardware of the 820 and cost is not so much of an issue as it'll be on a staff discount contract. The 620 is great budget phone though but I want the better specs of the 820. As for the quick dial yes pinning the contact works thanks and apps, well a decent free podcast app for one. Then news & weather app that displays headlines in the live tile, network & wi-fi analyser app, currency exchange (albeit I haven't looked for this yet)

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    Re: Windows Phone 8 - Oh dear, what a bag of crap!

    news and weather as I said above kinda goes against some of the ethos, so dunno! I could recommend seperate apps easy.

    Wi-Fi analyser as in sniffer? Not allowed, no chance of getting such an app. Wall gardens are safe and boring.

    Currency apps, plenty, Bloomberg is an over the top example.

    Sounds like the podcast thing is a deal breaker, I've no idea as I don't do that on mine. Try asking on wpcentral.com.
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    Comfortably Numb directhex's Avatar
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    Re: Windows Phone 8 - Oh dear, what a bag of crap!

    Worst thing for me is WP8's music app, Xbox Music, doesn't support "disc number" metadata. WP7's app, Zune, did. So for a 3 CD album, WP8 will play track 1, then track 1, then track 1, alphabetically. Then track 2, and track 2, and track 2.

    Maddening.

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    Re: Windows Phone 8 - Oh dear, what a bag of crap!

    Quote Originally Posted by directhex View Post
    Maddening.
    http://windowsphone.uservoice.com/fo...r-property-in-

    Vote!
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    Laird Of The Glen jimborae's Avatar
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    Re: Windows Phone 8 - Oh dear, what a bag of crap!

    Worst thing for me is WP8's music app, Xbox Music, doesn't support "disc number" metadata. WP7's app, Zune, did. So for a 3 CD album, WP8 will play track 1, then track 1, then track 1, alphabetically. Then track 2, and track 2, and track 2.

    Maddening.
    Yeah I discovered this "feature" over the weekend, took me a while to work out what was going on. The music player is pretty rudimentary all round.

    I suppose it's worth remembering that the OS is pretty new and will take a while to mature but MS have had WP7 for a while so should have had some indication of what users wanted and now they really need to step on the gas with updates to WP8 if they want this iteration to suceed.

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    Re: Windows Phone 8 - Oh dear, what a bag of crap!

    I really don't get Microsoft. Despite been an avid user of their ecosystem (because no one has a better one ) I just can't understand how they manage time and time again to snap defeat from the jaws of victory.

    Take Zune. Great peice of desktop software, now its gone. Its been subjigated for some peice of junk. I can't just sync a playlist across.

    Xbox music is junk by comparison. I would have no complaints if they said "in 1 year we want xbox music to replace zune" and actaully had a better xbox music app. But pulling the plug in the way they did is very frustraiting.

    Things like the fact you've got to make a playlist to work around the CD number issue are just not what you'd expect, considering the platform is 3 years old.

    But what really amazes me is they mess all this "easy" stuff up. Whilst having a phone environment that is always fast, always snappy even on low end hardware, I still use an Omnia 7 when travelling as my UK sim phone, whacking a data sim in my other one, and honestly I can put this 3 year phone down next to an S3, it makes the S3 appear slow (granted the omnia has a much worse display etc).
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    Senior Member watercooled's Avatar
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    Re: Windows Phone 8 - Oh dear, what a bag of crap!

    Sorry for thread revival, but wanted to add my current opinions of WP8.

    Before I tried it, I hadn't really heard much negative about it so was genuinely expecting it to be a great OS. That quickly changed after I actually used it; a family member got an 820 as a 'free' upgrade on her contract and offered it to me, completely free, as she was happy with her existing phone which she only really used for basic stuff. At the time I was using a Galaxy Ace, so I was essentially comparing it to an ARM11 Gingerbread device, and I still refused it.

    It did feel quicker, as you'd expect given the hardware difference but the whole UI felt incredibly unintuitive and cumbersome, and I ended up thinking 'jumped up feature phone with squares' after spending a while using it. It feels very restrictive and the apps are so limited in availability and functionality. And, just to be clear, I have no loyalty to Android - if a better OS comes along, I'd happily consider it next time, and I have no bias comparing the two - as I said I was expecting to like WP8 (I feel it's necessary to say this as speaking favourably about Android is often simply considered fanboyism for some misguided reason). Anyway, I ended up getting a Nexus 4, and I'm very glad I did.

    I'm not entirely sure what people mean when they say WP is so much faster, because it just isn't for me (comparing like for like i.e. 1.5GHz Krait to 1.5GHz Krait, not Krait to ARM11 or something), and I'm a fairly heavy user. I don't bother with social networking apps so maybe they do something faster? And lets not forget the WP8 UI is essentially a bunch of near-monochrome 2D squares, so it's hardly taxing on the hardware, unlike the (relatively) highly graphical UI of iOS/Android, but even so I fail to see this massive performance increase with WP8, even the all-important 'swipe test' doesn't feel any different?

    Quick Edit: I know WP8 tends to perform some sort of response immediately upon pressing an icon, but the actual action itself still takes time to load after that, whereas Android and IIRC iOS just start loading app or whatever, without animation 'tricks' like this. Some people apparently mistake this for a more responsive system overall. /end edit.

    Nokia music is also catastrophically bad, but it's probably not fair to blame that entirely on WP8. Purchased an album on it, about half the tracks failed to download. After figuring out what ones were missing, I went back on the store and was allowed to re-download a few, but others were requesting payment again. After spending a good while researching online, I tried the desktop app, and the album was listed in download history, but only 10 out of 21 (IIRC) tracks were there, and none of the missing ones. It took a few weeks to get something resembling a useful response from support, who did refund the purchase, but I'd be hesitant to use or recommend it again unless they announce fixing the complete mess it is. As other have mentioned, the music app is also poor.

    So yeah, my experience with it has been decidedly negative, and I'm now urging people to give it a try before locking themselves into a contract with it.

    It seems fairly 'cool' to attack people for having a negative opinion of anything from MS lately, so please accept this is my opinion, based on my own experience and preferences.
    Last edited by watercooled; 27-02-2013 at 02:37 PM.

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    Re: Windows Phone 8 - Oh dear, what a bag of crap!

    It's interesting to know what people find not working on WP8, because its so differen't to my own.

    I've only used Nokia as a radio, the idea of buying locked music does not appeal, I rent it knowing its money down the drain. Zune Pass does this rather well, and integrates nicely on the phone for the best in phone music rental experiance I've found, certainly better than Spotify on iOS.

    For me, by far the biggest bug bear is the lack of a notifications screen. It's not that much of an issue, but it's still anoying to view things entirely by apps live tiles, plenty of otherwise great apps, such as baconit, really don't make it obvious what you've got, instead it shows a number. However I am then network bound in finding out what that message is, sometimes, in central london, thats sloooow.

    The speed in use is for me something as mundain as where is resturant x, or how do I get there, and straight back to email please. WM even on an 800mhz does that faster I find than I can get through the option on a 4S or on an SIII.

    Part of that is due to iOS uses of skeuomorphism. This merely helps people who aren't familar with a new medium not feel scared, the problem is just look at the 80s example cars (as the wikipedia article I used to find the term shows ) they look down right retarded.

    The design language on WM makes everything clean and connected. The issue comes if your doing something which isn't part of that workflow.
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    Senior Member watercooled's Avatar
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    Re: Windows Phone 8 - Oh dear, what a bag of crap!

    Nokia music is actually DRM free if you can manage to get it working, which is why I tried it out, I could (and did) move it to another device if I decided against the Lumia.

    I suppose the speed is a more subjective thing than I assumed, and is based on individual usage scenarios. Personally I use the task switch shortcut (not sure if that's what it's actually called) on Android a fair bit, and have a few homescreens set up with appropriate shortcuts for various scenarios, which I find fast and intuitive.

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