1. Goodbye iPhone. Hello Windows.

    I jumped into the freezing cold North sea with Nokia, although it wasn’t me standing on the infamous burning platform. To stretch the metaphor somewhat, I was actually standing in the middle of a rather pleasant pub which had a roaring fire, St Peter’s ale on draught and was surrounded by close friends. I dumped my trusty iPhone 3G for the Nokia Lumia 800, but was it a good idea? 

    The iPhone 3G has lasted me over 3 years, its operating system a comfort through familiarity so changing operating systems is going to be difficult. Getting used to the interactions and the nuances of the OS will take time. Apps don’t transfer, you need to rebuy the ones you loved, but it’s liberating starting again. 

    I’ve had the Lumia for a week and the phone and Windows operating system has some excellent things going for it but there are some things that are immensely frustrating. I can only compare against an iPhone 3G (running iOS 3) so here what’s good and what isn’t.

    Brilliant things

    1. Product design - The product design is lovely, Nokia have done a good job on this, though the flap door for the micro USB cable seems like it might snap right off in the event of any turbulence. The glass front and the unibody gives the phone a nice weight and feel. Is the design better than the iPhone? Probably not.
    2. Tiles - The Mango interface with the tiles is blocky but amazingly feels anything but. The bouncy, bendy, stretchy and quick, slick transitions are beautifully weighted. The flatness of the tiles, with no bevels and drop shadows and simple one colour iconography is refreshing and give a consistent look. As a designer, this is great, but you do find yourself battling a bit. With the quick transitions you get a bit of icon blindness. Because they are all the same colour you lose a lot of the peripheral clues that you have on a iPhone icon design, so you have to slow down a bit and process what the icon is communicating. The eBay tile is done in full glorious colour and is easy to hit, unlike many of the Mango style app icons - maybe something worth considering for app developers? The live tiles are great, updated information is pushed through so a quick glance at the screen and there’s key information on how many emails you have, the weather forecast, Klout score (v. important!), etc. The interface is unique and not an iPhone clone (looking at you Android), it’s one page for your favourite tiles and a swipe to the right for the whole directory. Simple.
    3. Typography - The phone’s typeface is Segoe UI and it defines the look of the phone. It is set elegantly, large titles span across pages tempting you to swipe across. The font is used through menus and copy - it’s also available to applications meaning that almost everything you see on the phone looks like it’s native. Ebay looks like email, Facebook like Twitter at least in terms of font choice.
    4. People - At first, you hunt around in a panic looking for your contacts or address book. The People tile holds this stuff. You connect up Facebook, Twitter, Email accounts and import contacts onto the phone and it all gets organised here. You find a contact’s profile and from there you can call them, text them, write on their wall, tweet them, send email, see where they live, etc. Not only that, but you can see a feed of all their activity from the usual social networks and also see a history of conversations you had with them via email, text, phone calls etc. No longer do you have to remember which channel your friend sent you something in, it’s all chucked together. Sweet.

    The frustrations begin

    1. Battery - Oh dear. I need a phone that holds enough charge to last me the day. This phone hardly lasts me a train journey into work without looking like it needs a bit of a top up. After being plugged into my computer all afternoon, at 10.30 last night the phone suggested that I try battery saving, thanks. It seems the Micro USB doesn’t pull much charge from a computer, you really need to plug it into a socket. So you have a mobile phone that’s always thirsty and if you miss a plug in, you’re alone.
    2. No visual voicemail - Never before had I realised how great this feature is on the iPhone. After three years of finding a name with a play button next to it when someone left a message, I couldn’t believe that I had to call a number and listen to the Orange voicemail woman talk me through my options. YOU HAVE 1 NEW MESSAGE! To listen to your message, press 1. To slowly put your head on the desk and weep, press 2.
    3. Some things just don’t work - Copy/Paste for example. This is important when you are managing emails, notes and moving text between applications. Sometimes it just doesn’t function, double tap, tap and hold, nothing. When copy/paste is working, selecting the right piece of text, defining the start and end is simply frustrating. The iPhone’s magnifying tool to help find your selection just works, this just doesn’t. Another thing that doesn’t work, but I assume will be fixed pretty soon, is the share on Twitter function for photos. This embarrassingly presents a massively long link in a tweet, which when clicked doesn’t show the photo but puts your curious visitor onto a Microsoft Live login screen. Not good. Niggles continue with keyboard disappearing if you’re typing and take a pause for thought, getting it back is tricky, refresh? reload? erm?. Possibly teething problems here and after a search through microsoft forums I know I’m not alone. Syncing with mac using Windows Phone 7 Connector is intermittent at best. I’ve managed to get the phone and laptop to recognise each other only twice. 
    4. Maps - It’s a Nokia phone, it has Nokia maps. This is brilliant software and it’s looking great on the Nokia maps site. But when you stumble out of a tube station, running late and search to find a pub named The Phoenix and it gives you 3 places which are 5 miles away, this is frustrating. Close maps, open Internet Explorer, search for The Phoenix, find it, click on visit us, find the embedded google map. 
    5. Bing - It’s a Windows phone, it has Bing. There are three persistant buttons at the bottom of the screen. The third icon is search and launches Bing. On my phone this icon isn’t clicked very often because the quality of results just isn’t good. Google have an app, which helps but having Bing as the native search isn’t pretty.
    6. Could I give this to my mum? - My mum never used to write SMS texts and was pretty unsure about mobile phones (too fiddly). When I gave her an iPhone she got it straight away, was comfortable using apps and getting back to the safety of the home screen and was texting me a day later. Everything about the iPhone was considered and intuitive, it’s labelled (Windows menu names are by default hidden - just the icon) and everything is where it should be, menus look like menus and buttons like buttons. So could I give this to my mum? Yes, of course I could but I’m sure she wouldn’t like it as much as the iPhone due to the confusion within menu systems. The point is not whether my Mum would like it or not, the point is if the iPhone is that intuitive, then you’re going to be able use it when your half-asleep. I don’t think this operating system is there yet.

    Unlike Nokia and Stephen Elop now in the North Sea and swimming to shore, my returns policy states I have 7 working days of a possible air-sea rescue - now I just need to decide whether to keep the phone for next 24 months…