At the end of 2013 I decided that my Samsung Galaxy S3’s battery life just wasn’t acceptable. On standby it would manage 16 hours, but any actual usage would flatten the battery within hours. On a typical “light use” day I would get 12 hours from it, and it certainly wasn’t a phone that I could leave the house with in the evening without a lengthy charge.
Due to these reasons I wanted to try out a Windows Phone from Nokia. I bought a second hand Nokia Lumia 610, running WP7.8.
I trialled this phone over the Christmas holidays, and I liked it but opening apps often took way too long (about a minute in some cases).
Reluctantly, I put my SIM back into the Galaxy S3 after my initial trial period, but I still wasn’t happy with it.
A few weeks later I decided to buy a second hand Nokia Lumia 620, as it had more RAM and ran WP8, which should iron out some of the problems that I’d experienced with the Lumia 610.
The Nokia Lumia 620 was a breath of fresh air – The battery would last several days if the phone wasn’t used much, and I could definitely get a full day from it through normal use. The interface was (and is) fast and nippy, with little lag. My Galaxy S3 used to lag a lot, and this was Samsung’s flagship back then.
I used my Lumia 620 for six months. Some apps just don’t work very well, and some websites just don’t load correctly, but I stuck with it until I got itchy fingers for a new phone.
Nokia/Microsoft were enjoying a surprise increase in sales throughout 2014 due to the popularity of the Nokia Lumia 520, but at the time this was the lowest priced handset and it was a downgrade from the Lumia 620, so I thought that I’d follow the herd and get myself a Motorola Moto G.
The Moto G was a fantastic phone. The screen was great, the camera wasn’t, but the battery life was fantastic compared to both the Lumia 620 and the Galaxy S3.
I happily used the Moto G until February this year until it upgraded to Android Lollipop.
There are fans of Lollipop, but I found that my user interface had suddenly needed additional swipes and double taps to perform simple functions. I hated it/
I was tied in heavily to the Google ecosystem, and found migrating back from Windows Phone last year to be incredibly difficult, but I hated Lollipop so much I thought that I would never go back to Android.
So I moved all of my contacts (unsuccessfully) from Google to Outlook. I lost quite a lot of contact information through this process: Outlook doesn’t recognise many of Google’s contact fields, so things like middle names are ignored, or lengthy contact names are presumed to be middle names which mean that business names end up being merged with each other – This is not acceptable. Whilst I think that I have sorted out most of my contacts now, there is some information that it lost and remains in my Google contacts, never to be synced.
Once again, I found myself back with Windows Phone (8.1). I even bought a Microsoft Lumia 535 so that I could use a much bigger screen than the 620.
Five months on and I’m considering trying to get to grips with Android again. I’m not being indecisive, it’s just that I keep finding usability problems with WP, which make me think that the operating system still isn’t good enough for day-to-day use.
Yesterday I discovered the biggest problem yet.
Microsoft keep pushing Windows Phone’s business credentials, but I’ve discovered a massive issue: Using the MS Outlook email client (so it should work!) I wanted to attach a MS Word document to an email that I was replying to: You can’t.
You can attach photos, but not files! What use is this?
A quick web search didn’t find too many people complaining about this. I’m assuming that there are still so few people using WP that this major problem has not really hit too many business users. However the fact remains that Microsoft’s solution is to locate the file using the MS Office app or a file manager, tap and hold the file and select “share”. You can then select email. This then attaches the file to a blank email.
Adding a file to a reply is not possible. Multiple attachments are also not possible.
This was so annoying, I even thought about buying a cheap Blackberry!
I composed myself and went through the laborious and inefficient process of attaching the file and writing a new email.
Last night I thought that I’d try out my Moto G again. I went through the apps and only the bare minimum are installed, yet I still struggle to have enough free memory for app updates, meaning that I spend far too much time “maintaining” my phone.
Fiddling with the Moto G made me realise that there are some things that I have been missing: I miss Google Maps (HERE Maps are ok, but nowhere near as good). The Facebook app is years ahead of Windows Phone’s basic offering. The eBay app actually works. I can access Google Play Music and store all of my music for free. I can edit my website (Mobile-networks-uk.weebly.com), as well as sync my favourite websites.
But, the Moto G is now so slow after the Lollipop update. All of the many notifications and settings now take several taps and swipes to access or clear. The camera is pathetic and once again I am faced by the prospect of Android fragmentation. A quick look at current prices for similar handsets and the really awful Samsung Galaxy Young 2, Ace 2 and Pocket Neo are all about £60, with the next price bracket around £100 for the Motorola handsets.
Microsoft have pulled a blinder by selling Lumia handsets at such a low price. You know that a cheap Lumia will perform really, really well and will actually work.
Faced with this choice, I am currently sticking with my Lumia 535. It works.
It has some drawbacks, but both Android and WP have drawbacks, meaning that I still need a PC to do some of my work. For me, WP is the simpler, cleaner and more efficient of the two operating systems. Top end Android devices still have their problems, so paying several hundred pounds for one doesn’t make the world a better place.
What all this has helped me to realise is that smartphones are supposedly taking over from computers, but how many websites still only really work properly on a PC browser? Smartphones have come a long way from the first Symbian smartphones that I was using nearly ten years ago, but they still don’t work as well as we believe they do.
We have become too reliant on our smartphones. We think that they do everything, but in fact they have apps and features which make us work more and actually lead to a loss in productivity.
Basic functionality should be at the top of any smartphone OS, and it’s clear that not one single OS covers all of the basics, so we are left to choose something that we feel familiar and comfortable with, rather than something which does exactly what we want.
For anyone feeling unfulfilled by their current OS, I’d recommend trying something new – It won’t be perfect, but you might like the change.
