My WP8 Journey : Incomplete , Frustrating And Disappointed Experience

Posted by Sanjaychandra on February 14, 2013 01:11 pm 44

I have been using the Lumia 820 from nearly 3 weeks and here are my findings :

I spent 2-3 days with Lumia 710 last year once (That's my first experience with WP platform) and now Lumia 820.

820's screen is very responsive and amoled display fades into the bezel of the phone which gives an ultimate look to it when using black theme.

WP offers simpler approach to many things like these :

1.Hardware camera button for directly launching camera from lockscreen (Press and hold it)

2.Press and hold the search key at right bottom to activate 'bing search' from anywhere on phone (but screen must be unlocked to use it)

3.Share things to facebook , linkedin , mail , etc. with a very simple approach

4.People Hub connects ur contacts to facebook/hotmail etc. and also gives whole new way to experience contacts

5.You can pin a tile for a particular person , say , like your spouse , best friend or a family member and that tile shows and updates everything related to him/her.

6.Kid's corner (aka guest corner) is also nice but not widely used in my daily usage.

7.Groups option is nice.

8.You can post message to multiple sites at once.

Free Nokia Drive/Maps and Nokia offers their own set of Apps for Lumia exclusively.

Battery life is above average.

Camera is decent but images are not sharp and also not quite good in focusing things , sometimes its messy (if u use shutter key) but if u take pic by tapping screen , its gives better results.

Expandable storage is nice option and also removable battery.

Decent audio quality , Good Quality and Nice Loud Speaker located at bottom.

Now , Drawbacks :

1.Music Player is sluggish

If i fill 100 songs pr above , (whether its internal or external) , music player is slow/late response

For example , changing song gives quick 'audio change' but album art takes 2-3 seconds delay to change but if access music from lock screen , its all good.

I reset phone and tried to use windows phone app to sync music and tried manual copy-paste but facing same result and Also I didn't like the idea of putting next/previous.play buttons at top instead of bottom.

Album art is also missing.I would be glad if MS chose album art instead of artist's art on music player live tile.

And also I am now getting duplicates when i add songs.I format my SD and phone once , duplicates are gone but now they are back again.I tried using internal storage first and then tried only external storage for music but result is same.Solution is factory reset for now. (I went through WPcentral forums regarding duplicates but solution is temporary)

2.I didn't like the idea of merging media volume and ringer volume , its quite annoying sometimes.

3.No notification center

4.Selection of apps and games is poor.MS promised many apps but none of them came (Ski safari anyone ? temple run ? or recent smash game , subway surfers ? and apps like pulse , flipboard , etc.Gameloft announced many games via trailer but none of them arrived till now.

Replacement apps are there , i agree but some apps can't be replaced easily.For example , None of youtube apps show vevo videos and also most youtube apps don't produce full search results.

5.Videos with long duration have scrubbing delays/troubles especially movies or recorded videos or long duration high quality videos, I have to press next button constantly to get right part.

6.I didn't like very limited background tasks allotted to apps.

7.Wifi turns off when phone is locked

8.NFC is proprietary to WP only and I have to spend some time to remove back case but once if u learn to do it , then its very easy.

9.Volume buttons on right instead of left and camera button is not as easy to press as pressing 'lock' key

10.Only 3 options for brightness (low , medium and high) and lack of screen orientation lock.

11.Apps greater than 50 MB need Wifi for sure , can't do it via 3G

12.Nokia Music has poor quality music (Nokia Music+ claims to have 8 times better audio quality than normal nokia music)

13.VGA front cam instead of 1.2 MP/HD

14.Status bar often disappears and we have to slide down to view signal,battery as it is invisible most of the time

15.In Phone storage , there is something called "Other" category in addition to "music+videos" "apps" categories.

This one is mystery , out of 7.4 GB on phone , "other" category storage is now nearly 2.9 GB and only factory reset is the solution as far as i have read on forums and nobody knows whats the mystery behind that "other" category , i deleted all photos and videos i shot with camera and also removed SD-card but that "other" storage is increasing every week and at this rate , I will run out of internal storage by end of this month.Then i can't install anymore new apps and I have to factory reset my device

16.Camera pics are not quite sharp , they are blurry (I heard that portico update resolves sharpness issues)

I don't know whether some of these issues are limited to my device or every device.If anyone has solution to any of the problems , plz help.

I am disappointed but having hope in Apollo+ update , If not , I will sell this and get an iOS/Android device.