New Phone

Friday, October 3, 2014

I'm a fan of Android phones.  I've used an HTC and a Samsung Galaxy S3, and enjoyed both of them.  At upgrade time this year, I thought my choice was probably between the HTC M8 or the Samsung S5.

I was surprised to find that I went for a Windows phone.  The Nokia Lumia 930, in fact.

The phone itself is an improvement on the S3.  It feels heavier, which is oddly reassuring.  The design and construction shows almost Apple levels of attention to detail, to the point where although I have the phone in a protective case I'm finding reasons to remove the casing so I can enjoy the build quality.

Windows 8.1 works well.  It's noticably faster than the last edition of Android I used, but that's because the technology in the phone is beefier too.  The interface is nice - the live tiles finally make sense! - and it's simple to navigate.  So far, so good.

My biggest concern is the number of Apps that I thought I couldn't live without and which don't have an equivalent in the Windows store.  As it turns out, there are just two Apps I'm missing: a good Gmail client -  because I've got used to the way Gmail filters incoming mails into Personal, Social and Promotions - and an App I used to store e-tickets for the local bus company.

The mail client that comes with the phone is fine.  It's done a good job of repogramming me out of the notion that any old spam is perfectly acceptable because Google hides it away in the Promotions tab, which I can ignore.  I'm now evaluating which companies I really want to hear from.

Of course there are Gmail clients available, but I'm actually pretty happy with the native client on the phone now.  It's a nice, clean interface that I've rapidly adapted to.

My favourite feature is Cortana.  The Windows digital assistant might officially be in Beta, but it's already an important part of the phone for me.  Cortana has already worked out where I live and where I work, so I can ask her to set alerts and reminders for those locations.  The search results are from Bing, but Cortana seems to be pretty good at sorting those by relevance and location, which makes any results I get more immediately useful.  I can also allow Cortana to handle calls and texts for me when I set the phone to Quiet Time.  If I can work out how to set Quiet Time for any time I'm at work, I'll be delighted but it's not exactly burdensome to switch it on manually.

I've never used Siri, so I can't compare them directly, but I was speaking with a couple of iPhone users this week and they told me that Siri has a distinctly passive aggressive streak, which Cortana seems not to display.  Cortana's notebook is also accessible to me so I can find out and ammend what the assistant has learned about me.  So far, I'm using Cortana a lot more than my Apple based colleagues use Siri and this is earning me some envious looks.

Something else I'm really pleased with is the power management feature.  I've managed to keep the battery life on the phone to around 50% for a day - double what I was getting from the S3 which needed charging by late evening.  I suspect I could get two days out of a charge if I really needed to.  I've installed things like WhatsApp, which normally kills a battery, but told the phone that WhatsApp can check for new messages when I turn it on rather than when it wants to and this seems to have curbed it's energy appetite.

The switch from the Samsung to the Nokia was less problematic than my original switch from an HTC to the Samsung, and a lot of the two years I had with the S3 I spent trying to make it behave like the HTC had.  With the Lumia 930, I feel like I've got my first properly grown up smartphone.  A large part of that is that I'm actually using the digital assistant for stuff other than cracking jokes and finding easter eggs, and haven't bothered installing any games.  If that persists, I can see myself sticking with Windows phones for the next few upgrades.  Obviously, a lot of that depends on what happens to HTC and how Windows fares, but I'm already hearing good things about Windows 10.

But, look, back in the day I read scifi stories about people talking to technology and having it do useful stuff.  I'm living that now.  No, it's not solving any world problems and yes, there are some real issues to deal with.  Countless issues, in fact.  But just for right now, I'm living in a science fiction story and that's got to be worth celebrating even if it's just for a minute.

Right?

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