Part of me wishes that I would've gone Windows Phone sooner but the realistic part of me realizes that Windows Phone 7 was still nowhere near the quality of iOS.
Windows Phone 8 is a completely different matter though. It's superior to my old iPhones in almost every way. Live tiles, SkyDrive integration (much better than iCloud especially if you get the 25 GB free from Microsoft), much better maps application, tight OneNote integration, native Office support, excellent Remote Desktop support. The other thing that's important to note is that the web browsing is just as good and email is just as good. I actually do those two things more than any other function on my phone.
However the lack of webkit will remain :(
Only in badly-designed, non-conformant user agents. :)
The WebGL security issues have, for at least a year, been FUD. The spec is essentially fixed, drivers have become a whole lot better, and browsers have become a whole lot stricter in their validation code. WebGL is not OpenGL nor OpenGL ES.
Examples: while the OpenGL ES spec is silent on buffer overflows, WebGL mandates user agents to signal errors; while OpenGL ES doesn't specify the state of freshly allocated textures, WebGL requires them to be blanked out; WebGL textures can never be from non-origin-clean canvases.
For me to be comfortable with WebGL, we'll have to really train graphics card manufacturers to take security issues as seriously as web developers do. That isn't going to happen any time soon.
On OS X, on the other hand...
But it's all down to the user- I have no requirement for Remote Desktop support, so that doesn't matter to me. I don't use OneNote or Office, and use Dropbox for file syncing.
I used to think that Google Maps was great, but after using Nokia's HERE maps I have to say, HERE is better. Not sure if it's the hardware, but first of all it's A LOT faster than Google Maps ever was. Secondly, HERE maps work offline (altough I just heard Google is finally enabling this with their maps).
Without wanting to sound like fanboy, the 920 is a great phone: it just works. The UX is better than in android, mainly because different apps all follow same guidelines on how to implement UI navigation/actions.
On the android phones I had, most of the time it was "free for all" with the UX as different manufacturers and devs implemented their own ideas on how nav/actions should work.
Other things I can say about 920: battery time is great, wifi (and wifi sharing) work flawlessly, sound quality is great both ways and the _camera_ is best I ever used in a mobile phone. It just puts all other mobile phones to shame.
I'm looking forwards to 1020 and hope to get one when they are available.
Only bad thing I can say is the Windows store and apps. I miss quite a few apps I used on my android phones. It's a shame so many devs only focus on apple/android.
However, I am still surprised how we got here, we went from having offline maps on all GPS devices in the beginning of last decade to online only maps by the end of it! Now we have to tout the ability of having offline maps as a feature?
Point is, everyone has different needs from a Maps app. I don't drive, so don't need navigation. I just need to enter an address quickly and find out where it is, so offline downloads don't really do anything for me.
Exactly. For instance Nokia Maps don't cover Japan, so they're a complete non-starter for me.
In short, I'd have to agree that google maps is unparalleled (important to note that the iPhone people didn't even bother using their maps).
I used to deliver pizza. If you had to stop and look up addresses you lost money to the drivers who didn't. It was to your advantage to learn your way around the delivery area.
Windows phone would be much better if they offered a google map app for it.
Lets just to with an example...I wanted to find the nearest post office, typed it in, I got a result about 9 hours flight away from where I lived. Google maps was able to return something down the street.
Download the offline maps you need and you are good to go!
There's a manual here if you need one:
http://www.nokia.com/us-en/support/product/nokia-drive-plus/
I was use ping here maps, or HERE whatever, there are a lot of them and I'm not sure what each does. It didn't help me find something as simple as the post office when I needed to mail off tax forms last month, which google maps and apple maps had no problem with. Very disappointing.
Unless you count battery life, GPU, probably CPU, form factor, build quality, the wildly superior app, media and accessory ecosystems. But other than that what have the Cupertianians done for us lately?
It looks like the iPhone and 920 battery life are both pretty abysmal http://blogs.which.co.uk/technology/phones-3/best-phone-batt...
CPU and GPU for the end user isn't important. What is important is the perf of the UI, which WP7/8 have always been buttery smooth when compared to iOS and Android devices with better hardware.
I'd also say Nokia is very closely behind Apple in build quality if not on par. And their form factors have been great as well.
iPhone/iOS definitely has a better ecosystem, but the apps on WP8 are getting better.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6914/samsung-galaxy-s-4-review...
No Lumia on there but I think that matches up with the general btty life rating for iphones. Some nokias in this listing:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Smartphone11/349
"CPU and GPU for the end user isn't important."
It certainly can be for certain apps.
"WP7/8 have always been buttery smooth when compared to iOS and Android devices with better hardware."
I'm not sure why you've lumped iOS with famously jittery Android (at least historically, 4.2 seems to have solved lag) since iOS is usually cited as the standard for smooth interface as in this initial WP 7 review from Josh Topolsky: "probably the most accurate and nuanced touch response this side of iOS4."
That's where iPhone seems to excel. On a fresh install of Android, using just one built in app, it seems fine. But eventually the phone fills up with stuff that seems to drain it. Not sure how Windows Phone fares on that front.
However, Android gives you tools to see which apps are using the most battery, and you can uninstall them if they're a problem.
Recently I noticed much worse battery life on my nexus 4, opened up the battery stats, and saw 30% of my battery usage was the consequence of a messaging app I don't use, deleted it, and got back to normal.
CPU and GPU don't seem to be so different subjectively. Both are smooth.
The apps are vastly better on iOS, even the ones that are on both platforms e.g. one cannot insert rows in Excel for WP 7 or add annotations in Kindle. Support seems better for Apple, as Lumia 800 and 900 customers did not get WP8, while the older iPhone 4 will get iOS 7!
It is just a little bit bigger sensor in the end with one smart idea that is not contributing much.
The HERE Drive+ from Nokia Maps though is fantastic. One nice feature (of many)... it shows you the current speed limit on every road that you're on. It also shows you your current speed and it is dead-on accurate. It can even be set to give an alert if you exceed the speed limit by x MPH.
Hands down, the built-in Lumia 928 maps application is better than any maps application I ever used on any of my three iPhones.
I'm amazed by that. In London the mapping is top notch, it has pedestrian paths and such which gmaps is missing. However for Soho where bars come and go in weeks, its often out of date for POIs. But as normally if I'm in a place that changes often, I'll have data, that isn't an issue (one can always fall back to gmaps data).
But outside of London Nokia maps are hands down the best I've found. This holds true in the countryside of England, France, Spain, Italy, Morocco, Vietnam... I mean in the middle of nowhere Vietnam, I've good offline all the directions I need to my cycling. Amazing, gmaps didn't even have a road there, and bing, well lets not talk about bing maps. The only one that comes close is the Open Street Map project. But they lack POIs pretty much completely. On my motorbike in Thailand, I had not just Fuel places shown, but also coffee places. With no mobile phone signal...
Whilst I use windows phone as my primary device, I have some uses (SkyDemon) that require me to have an Android too, but I will say that the Nokia mapping is so bloody good, I bought a 720 (as in the UK they were £120 off contract!) for a friend as a travel phone, only for the mapping.
However, I don't use it when driving in the UK, because it doesn't have 'accident black spot warnings' or speed trap locations.
Also, who the hell decided to give a bunch of apps the same prefix in an alphabetically ordered list?
I'd say they could even beat Samsung in sales eventually (again). But right now I can't even extrapolate how much time it would take them to ever do that, if even possible.
For a normal user, how much does the OS matter in 2013?
The OS playing ground is much more level today than it was in 2008.
I'll be upgrading my iPhone 4 soon, and frankly, I'll be considering everything OS out there. I'll actually be choosing based on hardware more than OS, because all the web services that I use are supported by every operating system.
I guess if you're really into apps, the ecosystem might matter, but I suspect a normal, non-geek really doesn't need access to hundreds of thousands of apps if their core needs are satisfied.
Most notably absent from WP is Instagram, which will be resolved when Hipstamatic launches for the OS.
There is a feature equivalent WP app that uploads to Instagram that is an unofficial Instagram app, can't remember the name now though, but for users that want Instagram the reviews have been good. It's pretty much everything Instragram is sans name.
third-party devs really are the lifeblood of the wp ecosystem and continue to amaze me with the quality of the apps many of them put-out. coupled with an increasing capable mobile web, its made the app gap virtually non-existent for me.
[1] http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/instance/ef18d20...
iPhones sold in china don't have this problem, so they are a safer buy.
They can, but they don't. And Nokia is indisputably the king of Windows Phone world, even though HTC have created some perfectly great devices. It's unlikely that Nokia could ever topple Samsung from the Android top spot.
Apple could have probably made more money over the years by selling Macs with Windows and retiring their own OS.
Competition is good, for example see the flat look and concentration on typography that both Android and iOS borrowed from Windows Phone.
That's why I don't get all the deriding of Firefox OS and Ubuntu Phone. Android has plenty hardware OEMs behind it.
I tell everyone competition benefits us all. I find people railing at iOS or Android or anything else ridiculous.
Yet people persist in that. Oh well.
Overall, I like both the device and the OS. So far any nits I have are minor -- Only one volume setting for all the apps, touch screen is overly sensitive, polymer case is too slippery.
So far, the WP app store has had the applications I care most about. And since you can write apps in C#, it's more approachable to write for.
This is the first device that makes me wonder about Nokia's WP-exclusive decision. They didn't go with Android to avoid becoming "yet another" Android manufacturer, and I agree with that sentiment (look at how few are turning a profit). However, there are no Android devices that really excel at stuff like photography- I think that Nokia could have carved out an interesting niche in solidly built, feature-focused devices.
But oh well.