Being that I also own a Galaxy Nexus as my personal phone, and having the Lumia 920 replace an iPhone 4S as my business phone, I feel that I have a bit of perspective when it comes to the current big 3 mobile operating systems. The first thing that I notice with the 920 is that it’s a tank; I mean the phone is significantly heavier than any phone I have ever used. My Nexus, which feels heavy compared to the iPhone 5 and SGIII, feels much lighter. With the added weight of the 920 also comes terrible ergonomics. Holding the phone with one hand can be a pain because of both its larger size and slick plastic casing.

The OS itself, though, is amazing. It almost feels as a mix of both Android and iOS by the way of customizing your home screen with live tiles (compared to widgets with Android), but retaining the smoothness of iOS. To me, the OS has seemed to make great strides with competing against the heavy hitters, although Microsoft is not quite there yet. There a few things, app switching and app list to name a couple, which needs to be worked on; but the overall polished sense that the UI gives is outstanding.

Now to the elephant in the room- the app store. Microsoft may be touting 120,000 applications, but I don’t see many quality ones, especially designed for Windows 8, that I deem useful. The basics are there such as weather, Scoremobile, Facebook, Netflix, and ESPN, but besides that, there isn’t much else offered. Coming from Android and iOS (which both have remarkable app stores), the Windows Store feels desolate. Now I bought into this ecosystem with the mindset that this will improve within a couple months, and I really want to believe that. If it doesn’t happen though, it could be the beginning of the demise of WP8.

Overall, I would still cautiously recommend this phone. It does have the best camera in the market, amazing polish, and an overall intuitive UI. Just keep in mind that the ecosystem will need at least a couple months to build up, and that this phone is a mammoth in the world of increasingly lighter smartphones. With the HTC 8X having the same chipset and a really good camera all in a much lighter, more ergonomic frame, it needs to be taken into heavy consideration if you are intent on making WP8 your next operating system.