In my smartphone journey I’ve used Blackberry hardware twice (first with the Storm 9530 and then with the Z10). While neither were standouts, they were (and are, in the case of the Z10) very solid devices that I enjoyed using. Recently I switched to a Nokia Lumia 1020, and while it does have some features I really enjoy using it still doesn’t feel ready for prime time. The camera was the main reason for moving away from Blackberry, the Z10’s is just terrible in all conditions, and the 1020 has the best camera (I think, and so do many reviewers) on the market so it was an easy choice. I’d like to say I’m totally happy with my new phone, but there are several issues that make using Windows Phone a tedious experience.
- The keyboard is terrible. Not just because I went from a platform known for their keyboards, but because it’s actually the worst on-screen keyboard I’ve ever used. Auto-correct fails 90% of the time and changes real words to word fragments, or words in other languages, and when it isn’t failing to recognize written words it fails to understand when words should be capitalized (it seems to think every Other word Needs To be Capitalized). That’s if it works at all. It seems like auto-correct turns itself off if I fix the auto-corrected corrections too many times. Maybe I’m just used to Blackberry’s version which learns how you type and actually fucking works 99% of the time.
- Apps don’t remember if they were opened and always re-launch whenever you click on the app icon. I don’t always think to go back to the multi-tasking view to go to apps I’ve already opened because on every other platform I’ve used tapping on the icon will launch you back to the already-launched instance. I don’t know how many times I’ve lost my place in the comments of the (unofficial) The Verge app because the OS thinks I wanted a new instance of the app when I tapped on the icon.
- Live tiles are useless 70% of the time. 30% of the time I want to know the temperature and how many texts I have. The homescreen is a cluttered list of unorganized notifications. I have no idea why people think this is a better system than a notification pane like on Android or iOS, but thankfully WP 8.1 fixes this. To be honest, I think the best implementation of a notification system is Blackberry’s Hub.
- Playing music on the Xbox Music app temporarily clears the lock screen image while the app is playing music, even if you have told not to do that.
- Bing. There is literally no reason why this or any of it’s “child products” should still exist. Please go away forever, Bing. Nobody likes you. There’s a dedicated search button on the 1020 but you can’t change who it uses to search (which is fine, it is a Microsoft phone after all). Installed the Google search app, add tile to homescreen, profit. Now Google is only one extra tap away!
The superfluous animations, lack of apps, and other technical shortcomings of the platform actually don’t bother me. Problem is, this is supposed to be Windows on a phone 3.0 (essentially, if we count Windows Mobile’s 6.5 versions as v1, WP7 as v2) and it still feels like I’m an alpha tester. Admittedly, I did know about some of these problems beforehand and they weren’t enough to keep me away but I was looking for something new. I wanted a different experience, most people who buy phones don’t and I think that’s why Windows Phone is going to fail (eventually, likely not any time soon). Microsoft is banking on the 3rd world markets and low-cost hardware instead of creating a truely unique and exciting platform. For example, (functionally) Windows Phone is identical to every OS (except BB10) with the added benefit of taking twice as long to do anything. Everyone is so hell bent on designing a launcher they’re ignoring the really interesting things they could be doing to enhance usability (though Samsung should just stop with the “air scroll” and other bloat, that shit isn’t helping anyone).
I bought my Z10 a few weeks after the BB10 platform launched and there was a pretty steep learning curve to get used to using an OS without any buttons (power and volume aside, of course) but I find I prefer it to every other OS now. It seemed like a more natural way to navigate once you got used to it. I have to think about what buttons do what on my Lumia, and that is pretty annoying but totally forgivable because that’s just how WP8 works. I think it’s great that we have several, clearly different and unique approaches to smartphone OS design on the market and I hope that doesn’t change. A world where only Android and iOS reign supreme sounds pretty dull to me.