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 However for Soho where bars come and go in weeks, its often out of date for POIs.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.