5 ms·

Regardless of anyone's opinion on Windows Phone, the Lumia 920 should be a pretty competitive phone. Furthermore I always had the impression that owners of Lumi

Regardless of anyone's opinion on Windows Phone, the Lumia 920 should be a pretty competitive phone. Furthermore I always had the impression that owners of Lumia 800 & 900 devices were very happy with. It remains to be seen how successful the 920 will be but saying Nokia hasn't anything in the pipeline seems far from accurate.

empire29 14y ago
In this day and age it seems like the phone's ecosystem is even a stronger driving force than the quality of the phone itself. While the Lumia 8xx and 9xx are very nice devices (and I even think Win Phone 7/8 is a very nice OS), I wouldn't purchase a Lumia solely on what I perceived to be a young and unproven ecosystem around the OS. All I hear is Win Phone 7/8 (3rd party) apps are limited in variety and and quality. Its a very hard sell when iOS and Android have such an expansive catalog of (quality) apps. Phones these days are about the software -- good HW is table stakes.
- MBCook 14y ago
  That's where I think I'd be. Even if you ignore my investment in iOS apps over the last few years, I'd much rather go with Android because I know the platform is alive. One of the other developers I work with bought a Windows 7.5 phone (used). He actually really likes the interface and says it works quite well. But he's looking to buy a used iPhone to replace it because there are so few apps available. That was the same thing that drove both my siblings off their Palm Pres - the app store was empty, with the exception of a few "demo" apps like Connect-4. Windows Phone 7.5 is doing much better than that, but it's a dead phone anyway with Windows Phone 8 coming out in the next month or so.
Kliment 14y ago
My father bought a Lumia phone. He's been anything but happy with it. The fonts are too small to read numbers off the screen from the phonebook, and cannot be zoomed. The menu structure is confusing. We had to get some images and videos from the phone to a computer and it was an incredible pain. It would not work as a mass storage device, the only options were to upload stuff to microsoft's cloud offering, email them or sync them to the computer. We had to download hundreds of megs of Zune crapware to talk to it from A computer. It didn't work at all on a mac or on his windows 7 computer - it wouldn't talk to the phone at all. In the end we could get it to show up in an XP virtual machine running under Linux. The email and upload options did not work because the videos were above some unspecified size limit. The sync option did eventually work, but took 6 hours to transfer several gigs of video, and showed no progress bar. Nightmare experience. The video and audio quality of the recordings was wonderful, but everything else about the device sucked.
- joenathan 14y ago
  That is the first time I've heard someone call the Zune software crapware, it's a godsend compared to the mess that is iTunes.
  - tsotha 14y ago
    I've never used Zune, but iTunes has always bothered me. I get that people took to it because you could buy new music and get it to your phone from the same application. But I've always considered the interface to be a cross between the worst web page on the web and the worst native app. What the hell were they thinking?
    - joenathan 14y ago
      It's especially a nightmare on Windows with all the extra services it installs that start with up with the OS. Does anyone actually use Bonjour? The automatic updates that decide to install Safari & Quicktime, it runs like molasses even on the latest and greatest hardware, you also seem to have to resign-in to your apple account every time the software even thinks about doing anything. One of the worst offenses is it won't monitor folders for new music, if you decide to acquire music outside of iTunes you have to manually tell it to rescan for music each time. iTunes is an offense against humankind and will probably be what starts WWIII.
      - starik36 14y ago
        I believe Bonjour is used for Airport Express speakers and for sharing music over the network.
      - gurkendoktor 14y ago
        > The automatic updates that decide to install Safari & Quicktime that used to (they've stopped pushing Safari very* fast)
    - MBCook 14y ago
      You have to understand a few things. First, iTunes has grown a ton over the years. It has some serious warts. For some reason the integrated stores are slow as hell despite displaying simple webpages. Navigation has gotten worse and feature after feature has been added to the left hand pane. But by and large it works. It plays music, you can purchase music easily, it does a good job syncing my iPhone or my old iPod. That puts it head-and-shoulders above some manufacturer software for controlling hardware devices. I'm also going to guess you're a Windows person. I promise you that iTunes ran much faster on my old G4 PowerBook than on my much more powerful P3 desktop I had at the same time. iTunes runs on Windows... and that's about all you can say. Apple wants it to look like the OS X version and it does, but they clearly don't care much about making it perform well. As for Bonjour, it's actually very nice. When I open iTunes my iPhone shows up if it's on the network and they can sync. The button to play sound or video on my Apple TV shows up and with one click I've got playback on my home theater. It's been doing that since I got an Airport Express when they were released in 2004. It's amazingly simple and easy to use. If it doesn't work, you're sort of up a creek as there is no way to know why the devices don't see each other, but that's quite rare. And Apple announced a total rewrite of iTunes during the iPhone 5 event, which is long over due. While iTunes works pretty well on OS X, it could certainly be better in many respects. I'm quite hopeful. As for the reason the iTunes store is a web page, I'm sure that's so they can totally restyle it without having to push software updates. It's too bad because it's easily the slowest part of the application, and not having tabs means you can't open a few store pages to compare applications.
mtgx 14y ago
But you can't sell the Lumia 920 without WP8, so you can't separate like that in your theory. Either WP8 is a benefit or a hindrance. There's no other way but those 2. I think this was Nokia's biggest mistake, that they tied themselves to Microsoft, and they really didn't have to do it, as they had the bargaining chips when Microsoft came to them. But I guess with a former Microsoft CEO, it must've been pretty hard to consider any other options but Microsoft.
- ryanmolden 14y ago
  He was a business division president not the CEO. Ballmer is the CEO. Actually, iirc, he was the business division president for Office, so he didn't even have a history with the phone division. I suspect his move was due less to some undying loyalty to Microsoft and more to him deciding it was his best option (one may disagree, but we also aren't aware of the other options/limitations/incentives in place when the decision was made, so we are just arm-chair quarterbacking).

empire29 14y ago

In this day and age it seems like the phone's ecosystem is even a stronger driving force than the quality of the phone itself. While the Lumia 8xx and 9xx are very nice devices (and I even think Win Phone 7/8 is a very nice OS), I wouldn't purchase a Lumia solely on what I perceived to be a young and unproven ecosystem around the OS. All I hear is Win Phone 7/8 (3rd party) apps are limited in variety and and quality. Its a very hard sell when iOS and Android have such an expansive catalog of (quality) apps. Phones these days are about the software -- good HW is table stakes.

MBCook 14y ago
That's where I think I'd be. Even if you ignore my investment in iOS apps over the last few years, I'd much rather go with Android because I know the platform is alive. One of the other developers I work with bought a Windows 7.5 phone (used). He actually really likes the interface and says it works quite well. But he's looking to buy a used iPhone to replace it because there are so few apps available. That was the same thing that drove both my siblings off their Palm Pres - the app store was empty, with the exception of a few "demo" apps like Connect-4. Windows Phone 7.5 is doing much better than that, but it's a dead phone anyway with Windows Phone 8 coming out in the next month or so.

Kliment 14y ago

My father bought a Lumia phone. He's been anything but happy with it. The fonts are too small to read numbers off the screen from the phonebook, and cannot be zoomed. The menu structure is confusing. We had to get some images and videos from the phone to a computer and it was an incredible pain. It would not work as a mass storage device, the only options were to upload stuff to microsoft's cloud offering, email them or sync them to the computer. We had to download hundreds of megs of Zune crapware to talk to it from A computer. It didn't work at all on a mac or on his windows 7 computer - it wouldn't talk to the phone at all. In the end we could get it to show up in an XP virtual machine running under Linux. The email and upload options did not work because the videos were above some unspecified size limit. The sync option did eventually work, but took 6 hours to transfer several gigs of video, and showed no progress bar. Nightmare experience. The video and audio quality of the recordings was wonderful, but everything else about the device sucked.

joenathan 14y ago
That is the first time I've heard someone call the Zune software crapware, it's a godsend compared to the mess that is iTunes.
- tsotha 14y ago
  I've never used Zune, but iTunes has always bothered me. I get that people took to it because you could buy new music and get it to your phone from the same application. But I've always considered the interface to be a cross between the worst web page on the web and the worst native app. What the hell were they thinking?
  - joenathan 14y ago
    It's especially a nightmare on Windows with all the extra services it installs that start with up with the OS. Does anyone actually use Bonjour? The automatic updates that decide to install Safari & Quicktime, it runs like molasses even on the latest and greatest hardware, you also seem to have to resign-in to your apple account every time the software even thinks about doing anything. One of the worst offenses is it won't monitor folders for new music, if you decide to acquire music outside of iTunes you have to manually tell it to rescan for music each time. iTunes is an offense against humankind and will probably be what starts WWIII.
    - starik36 14y ago
      I believe Bonjour is used for Airport Express speakers and for sharing music over the network.
    - gurkendoktor 14y ago
      > The automatic updates that decide to install Safari & Quicktime that used to (they've stopped pushing Safari very* fast)
  - MBCook 14y ago
    You have to understand a few things. First, iTunes has grown a ton over the years. It has some serious warts. For some reason the integrated stores are slow as hell despite displaying simple webpages. Navigation has gotten worse and feature after feature has been added to the left hand pane. But by and large it works. It plays music, you can purchase music easily, it does a good job syncing my iPhone or my old iPod. That puts it head-and-shoulders above some manufacturer software for controlling hardware devices. I'm also going to guess you're a Windows person. I promise you that iTunes ran much faster on my old G4 PowerBook than on my much more powerful P3 desktop I had at the same time. iTunes runs on Windows... and that's about all you can say. Apple wants it to look like the OS X version and it does, but they clearly don't care much about making it perform well. As for Bonjour, it's actually very nice. When I open iTunes my iPhone shows up if it's on the network and they can sync. The button to play sound or video on my Apple TV shows up and with one click I've got playback on my home theater. It's been doing that since I got an Airport Express when they were released in 2004. It's amazingly simple and easy to use. If it doesn't work, you're sort of up a creek as there is no way to know why the devices don't see each other, but that's quite rare. And Apple announced a total rewrite of iTunes during the iPhone 5 event, which is long over due. While iTunes works pretty well on OS X, it could certainly be better in many respects. I'm quite hopeful. As for the reason the iTunes store is a web page, I'm sure that's so they can totally restyle it without having to push software updates. It's too bad because it's easily the slowest part of the application, and not having tabs means you can't open a few store pages to compare applications.

mtgx 14y ago

But you can't sell the Lumia 920 without WP8, so you can't separate like that in your theory. Either WP8 is a benefit or a hindrance. There's no other way but those 2. I think this was Nokia's biggest mistake, that they tied themselves to Microsoft, and they really didn't have to do it, as they had the bargaining chips when Microsoft came to them. But I guess with a former Microsoft CEO, it must've been pretty hard to consider any other options but Microsoft.

ryanmolden 14y ago
He was a business division president not the CEO. Ballmer is the CEO. Actually, iirc, he was the business division president for Office, so he didn't even have a history with the phone division. I suspect his move was due less to some undying loyalty to Microsoft and more to him deciding it was his best option (one may disagree, but we also aren't aware of the other options/limitations/incentives in place when the decision was made, so we are just arm-chair quarterbacking).