MUSIC: A FULL RETRACTION

I hate admitting I'm wrong. I'll do almost anything to avoid it. I'll go to extreme lengths to prove my point and I'll argue it to the death. I may even fake evidence if absolutely necessary. I was 3rd speaker on my debating team at school. I didn't even need to believe the argument, I was literally disagreeing for the sake of it.

However, when it comes to enjoying music on my Samsung Galaxy SIII, and this hurts me to write more than I can say, I was wrong. So wrong. Way wrong. Wrongiddy wrong wrong the wronging wrong.

And it's all because of Google Play Music.

Last time I wrote about music on smartphones, I was struggling to sync things onto my S3 from my iTunes playlists. I may have been a bit hasty. Since then, I've persisted, primarily because of the other features of the phone. I gave up trying to sync things with Kies, an application that tries to work either via USB or Wifi, but just took forever if it worked at all.

In fact, once I uninstalled Kies, everything functioned a lot better. I now keep the playlists I want up to date on my handset using Easy Phone Sync, a more stripped down program, but it works and it works quickly.

What's more important is now if I'm in Wifi range, it literally no longer matters if I have any music saved on my phone at all. Thanks to Google Play Music, I can access my entire music collection through my phone.

I'm not sure what Apple are trying to do with the iTunes Radio service they revealed last week, but they're probably trying to replicate what Google has been doing for a while, the difference being, you can access Google Play Music from a variety of devices.

Using the Google Play Music Manager on your PC, you can upload as many as 20,000 songs from your iTunes library - playlists, podcasts and all. They are then available from anywhere, all you have to do is log in.

I've found the streaming to be amazingly stable, probably due to the way the Play Music app caches songs in advance. You can even download songs and playlists to your phone on the go.

In short, finally, I have the ability to access my entire music collection in a way I've never been able to before, even when it was just a stack of CD's under the coffee table. The chances of me fossicking through over 1000 albums just because I felt like listening to one particular song would be about zero. Now I can search for it on my phone just as easily as I can using iTunes on my PC.

This is what I've been waiting for since I spent a stupid amount of time digitising my collection. Now, at last, I can finally LISTEN to it.

A SAMSUNG GADGET YOU SHOULDN'T LIVE WITHOUT

Oh dear, what a sellout I turned out to be. It seems like all I want to talk about lately is Samsung this and Samsung that. If it's not the innovative features of the Galaxy S4, it's the all round usefulness of the Note 8.0.

And now I've seen Samsung's dongle, there's no turning back...

Yes, today I bring you something from the You-Never-Knew-It-Existed-But-Now-You-Do-You-Must-Have-It-Immediately Department; the Samsung AllShare Cast Wireless Hub.

To be fair, it is a silly name for it. If I was naming it, I'd call it something a bit more straight forward, like PhoneOnTelly, because that's exactly what it does.

My relationship with my Galaxy SIII was not love at first sight. In fact, when I first tried to use it, I only lasted a week before I was scared off by how fiddly it was to set up. But eventually I went back to it, lured by Android's promise of a wider app selection.

It's actually a bit like my relationship with the Domestic Manager - we couldn't really stand each other when we first met, but over time we grew to love each other and 20 years on, we've really started to take each other for granted. Same deal with my trusty S3; after I spent a bit of time and effort getting to know it properly, we reached a mutual understanding and now I use it for things I never expected to.

Initially, I said mean things about playing music on it, for example. Now, after discovering Google's Play Music app, my listening habits are all Samsung based, but more on that next week. 

Not only am I now listening, I'm watching too. Unlike Windows and Apple phones, the Samsung's default browser doesn't even blink when asked to stream video. In fact, I even watched yesterday's Warriors game on my phone. Weirdly, this actually wasn't terrible.

The screen on the S3 is big, the S4's is bigger still but obviously, the game would have been even better on my TV, and what all Samsung phone or tablet users need to know, not only is this possible, it's easy.

I guess the AllShare Cast Wireless Hub is effectively Samsung's answer to Apple TV, except, instead of using it to stream stuff from your computer, you do it straight from your handset. (And by computer, I mean a Mac - I've heard "inconclusive reports" from people who've attempted to use Apple TV with their PC)

These days, Samsung makes a pretty impressive Smart TV, and this may be why I haven't seen any marketing for the AllShare Cast Wireless Hub, because it effectively turns ANY HD telly into a Smart TV, as long as you've got a spare HDMI socket to plug it into.

Amazingly, that's about all the setup required. You plug the tiny box in, push the AllShare button on your phone and you're good to go. Photos, music, video all played in crystal clarity on the big screen. Even if you're just browsing, you can now do it on your TV, just like one of those flash new ones you can't really justify buying.

It really is that simple - there's not even an on/off switch, just a reset button if you want to swap feeds between phones or tablets. Updates over the weekend have incorporated all this into the Samsung Link system, which gives you access to any multimedia content stored on any of your devices.

You can use the AllShare Cast Wireless Hub in conjunction with the Galaxy S3 and S4, the as well as the Galaxy Note II, 8.0 and 10.1.

What this all means is at last, after years of trying, is I can now use my phone to play anything on my computer through my TV. And that makes me a very happy boy.

THE GALAXY S4's NEW GADGETS: Part Three

A LITTLE LESS REMOTE...

Over the past few weeks, I've been taking a look at how Samsung has made the Galaxy S4 better than the SIII. Quite a few of the features they've been shouting about are software-based and a rumoured to be coming to an S3 near you in future updates.

Several of the new gizmos are built-in though. There are some pretty wizzy camera tricks I'll try and cover off next week, but I discovered one of the coolest things about this new phone almost by accident.

As well as being the smartest phone on the block, the Galaxy S4 is now your new Universal Remote Control.

I am old. I know this because I can clearly remember a time BEFORE remote controls. In fact, I recall the first VCR my parents ever owned. It was cutting edge because it came WITH an actual remote. Admittedly, it wasn't a wireless remote... it was connected to the video recorder by a very long lead. (No, I'm not making this up) You could play, stop, rewind, fast-forward and possibly even record. Obviously if you wanted to do anything as complicated as set the timer you'd have to do it on the actual machine, but what do you expect?

Of course, in order to do that timer recording thing, you'd have to stop the clock flashing, "00:00" - nobody's ever worked out how to do that, so no point in putting it on a remote, right?

Needless to say, things have progressed somewhat since then.

Now you can control EVERYTHING by remote - from the telly right through to the lights and the heater. Even just watching my favourite shows now involves up to 3 different clickers; home theatre for the sound, TV for the pics and SKY for dialing up the actual show. That's a lot of buttons on a lot of remotes all taking up a lot of coffee tabletop.

Enter, the universal remote. These come in all shapes and sizes - there are universal remotes that look like remotes, then there are models that operate more like a small tablet giving you complete control over your whole house, your beach house and possibly the U.S.S. Enterprise.

The price of these varies wildly too, but it's hard to find a half decent one for much under a hundred bucks. So is it worth handing over a hundie to free up your sofa arms? Possibly not. But if the universal remote was already built into your phone, it'd be silly not to use it.

The S4 comes with something called the IR Blaster, a piece of hardware you can now find in several of the new Samsung devices. On the S4, you run it with an app called WatchOn which will guide you through a reasonably straight-forward setup process to get your phone talking to your other gadgets.

The really cool thing is, you can set up different rooms. Hell, I even took it to work and started changing channels there. Primarily just to annoy people who couldn't figure out why their remote had stopped working properly. Good times.

If I have a criticism of what really is a very straight-forward device, it'd be some difficulties I had figuring out which option to use to recognise my MySky decoder. You select devices by manufacturer and it took some fairly intensive Googling to discover Sky's set-top boxes are in fact manufactured by Pace. Once I had discovered this, I could access most of the Sky remote's functions bu not all. I can't rule out operator-error here, of course, but given I would have thought this was a reasonably common machine for New Zealanders to want to control, the WatchOn people may want to have a look at making the kiwi MySky options a bit more accessible.

Other than that, how cool is it to have a universal remote that doesn't take up any table space at all, because it's in your phone? Or your Galaxy Note 8.0 tablet - but that's a whole other story. Or at least another blog.

THE GALAXY S4's NEW GADGETS: Part Two

TELLING ME WHERE TO GO...

Last time I investigated driving navigation on a Samsung Galaxy, I was comparing the Google-powered app on the Galaxy SIII with the very slick Nokia Drive on the Windows-based Lumias.

I gave the honours to the Nokia phones simply because their app worked offline, whereas the Google one didn't. Well... it SORT of worked offline, but not really, and certainly not as well as the Nokia version.

Enter the Galaxy S4 and its promise of a whole new navigation option. It's called Navigon and it just about does the job.

Somewhat confusingly, the original Google navigation app is still installed as well, so you need to choose which will be your default.

The Navigon app comes with the whole of New Zealand pre-installed, and I could also choose to download Australia for free. This is still not as comprehensive as Nokia Drive, which seems to offer a whole world of downloadable maps at no charge, but it's certainly a massive improvement on Google, which would only allow you to store 5 relatively small regions for offline use and even then, you'd have to go online to plan your route.

The S4's new navigation option works very quickly, asking you first for the city you're travelling to, then the street address. You then usually have a choice of routes along which you can decide to either drive or walk.

I used the app on a few of my regular routes, just to make sure it really knew what it was talking about. The only fault I could detect was at roundabouts, when the voice guidance would tell me to take the 1st exit when it meant the 2nd or 3rd. Very odd, given the map itself showed the correct route without fail. I'm sure this is a small glitch the designers will remedy in a future update and bearing it in mind, I set off on a real test of the might Navigon's abilities; Middlemore Hospital.

For any non-Aucklanders reading this blog, Middlemore is not what you'd call a central, easy-to-get to destination. Especially given I live at the opposite end of the country's only super-city and I'd never been there before.

My sister had decided to cut her wedding anniversary trip to Fiji short, by having an argument with a kayak in rough sea conditions. She lost the argument in spectacular fashion, smashing her knee up so badly it required urgent surgery back in New Zealand.

This is how she wound up stranded in Middlemore Hospital, still some distance from her usual network of friends, family and helpers in her home town of Palmerston North.

Being the doting younger brother I am, spending some time with her while she was waiting to be shipped back to the Manawatu seemed the decent thing to do, and the perfect excuse to put the Galaxy S4 to the test.

If you're online, you can simply speak your destination into the phone - this is true of any of the navigation apps I have used. It drives me nuts that you can't do this offline. When is offline speech recognition going to be a standard feature on our phones so we can do things like dictate text messages safely while driving? It's just stupid.

Anyway, even though I had to type it, I only got as far as "Middle..." before the S4 had suggested Middlemore Hospital as a probable destination and set me on my way.

I found the voice guidance less robotic than some others I've used, and less intrusive - only giving me directions when I needed them instead of hassling me with the same direction 15 times before I got to each intersection. The really cool thing this app does is when you have to do something tricky on the motorway. The display then changes from showing where you are on the road to a graphic of the motorway on or offramp in question. The lane or lanes you need to use are clearly highlighted taking any doubt out of your maneuver - even the signs on the screen match the real ones exactly.

The estimated time of arrival was as accurate as any other GPS I have used and the display was very clear and uncluttered.

In short, I got to the hospital with no problems whatsoever. The parking charges were exorbitant, but sadly, no phone is smart enough to get around that. Yet.

So the S4 has truly delivered an offline navigation solution, and a powerful, user-friendly one at that. Now if I could just figure out how to get off this roundabout...

THE GALAXY S4's NEW GADGETS: Part One

HERE'S LOOKING AT YOU...

It's been a fair old while since my last series of phone faffs, in which I pitted the Samsung Galaxy SIII against the latest Windows Phones from Nokia. The S3 won in the end, primarily due to the fact I could make it work like a Nokia Lumia, whereas I couldn't make a Lumia work like a Galaxy.

Since then I've been using the S3 pretty much exclusively, and it's consistently delivered in every area. Browsing, photos, the navigation works great (as long as you're online - more on that in a later blog though).

I found I could even pimp it up. I added a longer life battery and discovered I could charge the phone wirelessly - just like the Nokia Lumias.

I took it overseas, bunged a U.S. sim card in it, tethered iPads and other phones to it and it just kept delivering.

So when Samsung launched the S4 recently, I had to wonder just how much better it could possibly be.

Well, I've been playing with one for a few days and it definitely is a step up - in lots of little ways.

Essentially the S4 is the same phone. It's still an Android, albeit a very fast and powerful one. Although it's the same length and slightly more narrow than its predecessor, the screen is a bit bigger. It has a more solid feel to it - I don't know why, it just does. In fact, every time I use it, I seem to find something else it simply does better.

One of those things is called Smart Scroll.

According to Samsung, they've put a lot of time, effort and money into making the Galaxy S4 its most user friendly device yet. To achieve this, they've included a whole heap of extra sensors to read how you're interacting with the handset, from the way you're holding it to how you're looking at it - even what the temperature is!

This means browsing a website or reading a long document can now literally become a hands-free experience.

Who's watching who?

Smart Scroll works in one of two ways - Firstly; you can set it to detect which way you're tilting the handset. Tilt the bottom up and the the page automatically scrolls down. Tilt the phone the other way to scroll back to the top. It works in both portrait and landscape which is good because I've never understood why people try and view websites in portrait.

Alternatively; and this is kind of hard to believe till you've actually tried it, but you can set Smart Scroll to detect which way you're LOOKING at it. I'm not even kidding. Look towards the bottom of the page and it'll scroll down. Look up and back you'll go. Even Mike Hosking was impressed when I showed him this trick.

Whichever setting you choose, a small icon flashes up green in the middle of the screen to let you know when you're good to go, although you can turn this off if you find it intrusive. It isn't so I haven't.

I don't know whether it's because I wear glasses or I'm just not very good at it yet, but I found the second "looking" option a bit less reliable than the tilt option. I get the feeling it's the kind of thing you could train yourself to use more consistently if you really loved the feature. For now though, I'm perfectly happy with my Smart Scroll set to tilt. It makes me feel nicely lazy not to have to swipe up and down my emails.

Is it a must-have feature? Probably not, but it's some pretty nice icing on Samsung's latest cake and like I say, it's just one of a host of neat little tricks they've built in to the S4. The phone's now watching you all the time. If you're someone who views a lot of video content you'll appreciate the Smart Pause function, which stops your clip if you have to look away for any reason then automatically plays it again once your eyes are back on the screen.

Again, this is not something I was sitting there thinking, "Gee, I wish my SIII would stop playing my video automatically when I have to look around to answer someone's question." But since I've used it, I'd miss it if I didn't have it.

Now my phone is watching my every move, I can do more of what I like to do best; think less. After all, that's why I have a smart phone in the first place - so I can be dumber.

Next week we'll see if the the S4 can deliver on it's promise to provide comprehensive off-line navigation... as long as I don't get lost in the process.

ALL I EVER WANTED

Every now and then, and it doesn't happen nearly as often as it should, you stumble across a piece of technology so brilliant in its simplicity, you can't comprehend how you ever got along without it before.

These are those, "Why didn't I think of that?" things that are obvious, but only obvious once somebody else has done them.

Two notable examples of this in my life are MySky and LightSpeaker.

Imagine being able to access your TV guide and then digitally record what you want directly from it at the push of a button. On 2 channels at once. For the whole series. Even if they change the schedule time. Brilliant. Of course, MySky is now just one of a whole collection of similar services now available, but when I first used it I was totally blown away. Even the Domestic Manager thought that particular remote was pretty useful.

Then there's LightSpeaker. Wireless speakers built into LED lights that simply screw into your existing light sockets. An instant, wireless, multi-zone sound system you can't see. Also brilliant.

The really important thing with these two examples is they both work. All very well having the brilliantly obvious idea, but if it doesn't actually do what it promises, or it only SORT OF does it, that's no good. It should either just work, or forget it.

So what does all this have to do with phones?

If you've been reading some of the previous editions of this blog, you'll know I've been weighing up the various merits of the Samsung Galaxy SIII, the Nokia Lumia 820 and the Nokia Lumia 920.

Today I announce my winner; all of them.

To be honest, technically it's the Galaxy SIII, but only because I've turned it into a Windows Phone.

Let me explain by saying today's blog is more of an app review than a phone review. The app is called Launcher 8 by the Qihang Dev Team. Not only does Launcher 8 make my S3's home screen look like my Lumia, it actually works even better than the original.

Here's what I love about Windows Phone 8: the way it looks and the way you navigate around it. What I love about the S3 is the way it actually works - browsing, uploading, downloading etc.

As it turns out, the Samsung's Android OS let's you put a home screen over the top of existing one that really is a dead-ringer for WP8.

Launcher 8 displays your apps in the Windows Metro Style, but it doesn't stop there. It replicates the now iconic People/Contacts tile which randomly flips over little pictures of your contacts. It let's you display your favourite pics as a little slideshow on the photos tile, just like WP8. A simple swipe to the right reveals all the apps you haven't already pinned to the home screen, again, just like Windows. Here's the kicker though; unlike the home screen on your average Lumia, all the tiles are completely customisable. You can call them what you want, make them whatever colour you want, assign a Metro-style icon to them or just a picture of your own choosing.

It gets better...

Although you've now made your Samsung LOOK like a Nokia, you still want some of those Android widgets on the start screen, right? Not a problem - in fact, you can even resize them to fit exactly how and where you want. This is literally the best of both worlds.

I can't recommend this app highly enough. In fact, if you're a Lumia 800 user, considering upgrading to an 820 or 920, Launcher 8 could well be the reason you go with the Galaxy S3 instead.

Pity it's going to be obsolete in about a month's time when the S4 hits the shelves. Ah, well - that's phones for you.

THE BIG LAUNCH

On Friday NZ time, Samsung launched their new Galaxy S4 handset. They packed out New York's Radio City Music Hall and broadcast it all to thousands watching big screens outside in Times Square.

And I was there... in a function room at a bar on Quay Street in Auckland. I still saw the whole thing though.

This is not a review of Samsung's new phone. I'm not going to review something I haven't actually used yet, otherwise I may as well just cut and paste the press release, listing off all the new features they've packed into an even slimmer box. I'll get to that stuff once I've had a go on one.

This is a review of the launch itself.

This is a picture of someone taking a picture of the Samsung launch with their Samsung.
I took it with my Samsung. (Oh and yes, the telly IS a Samsung)

I'm no expert when it comes to product launches, but it seems to me, smart phone manufacturers put a big effort into theirs - a bigger effort than most. This time round, Samsung took the showbiz theme literally. Not only had they hired the Radio City Music Hall, but there was a cast of actors and dancers, a full orchestra and they'd paid Will Chase (who plays the cheating husband on Smash) to MC.

There was a kid with a really big box, which I thought was weird, given the phone is supposed to be a bit smaller than the last one. Then came Mr. Shin.

That's literally how Will Chase referred to him, Mr. Shin. He has a first name of course (if J.K. counts as a first name) and he's one of Samsung's 3 co-CEO's. I know, this is getting weird, right? Who has THREE CEO's? Anyway, Mr. Shin is specifically in charge of the mobile communications bit, he took the stage and just stood there smiling. For ages. I really hope it was because thousands of adoring fans were cheering and clapping madly, but on the satellite feed I was watching, we couldn't hear them, so Mr. Shin ended up looking a bit like an evil genius from a Bond movie. Once the crowd we couldn't hear died down a bit, Mr. Shin gave us a brief overview of what they were trying to achieve with the S4.

This is where I really started getting interested. Mr. Shin wasn't trying to tell ME what I wanted from a phone, he seemed to be saying they'd actually been listening to US. A host of new photographic functions, along with some neat biometric interaction, longer battery life, it was all sounding good.

We were then presented with a suite of sketches performed live on stage to demonstrate the various new abilities of the S4. We watched a pretend proud dad inserting himself into his own kid's dance recital picture. Pretend backpackers synced their photos directly into their parents' living rooms. A rather disturbing fake hens party created a surround-sound stereo by turning each of their phones into a separate speaker. The acting was corny, but the phone certainly looked cool.

While all this was going on, I was sitting in a wing-backed armchair eating mini-burgers, prawns on a stick and sipping a Peroni. Alright, maybe I sipped TWO Peronis - but it WAS lunchtime, and I HAD been up since 3AM.

If I was being schmoozed into loving this phone, it was working. Take note, prospective schmoozers; I really love mini-burgers.

Like I say, I can't honestly tell you if this phone deserves all the hype until I use it myself, but from what I've seen so far, Samsung is definitely continuing a trend in smart-phone innovation Apple started, but I now wonder if the iPhone was left behind a couple of generations ago. The Glaxay S4 is promising more than a few genuinely new tricks, and I don't just mean a bigger, clearer screen and a faster processor.

There's a big difference between TELLING the customer what they want and GIVING the customer what they want, and I've got a feeling Mr. Shin and his team know what that difference is. Some of the other phone-makers out there could take a leaf out of Samsung's book.

Then again, maybe it's just the Peronis talking.

A LITTLE LIGHT READING ANYONE?

The eBook has changed my life.

I like to read. After watching B-grade movies in the middle of the day while eating something I've melted cheese over, reading is just about my favourite thing to do.

I'm not overly fussy about WHAT I read. I prefer science fiction but I don't mind a tell-all biography either. Thrillers keep me turning pages, but I'm just as enthralled by a sexy vampire as the next guy. (That didn't sound weird at all, right?)

Unfortunately, I can get a bit OCD when it comes to a series of books. If I discover a new author I like, for some reason I'm suddenly compelled to read everything that person has ever penned. Immediately. This used to involve a lot of hanging about. Book stores would have me on back-order, I'd be on the waiting list at the library.

Thanks to the advent of the eBook, all that waiting is behind me now.

I was a fairly early adopter, eagerly taking the original Kobo eReader home with me and never looking back. Now with just a few clicks and not much money, I can download an entire author's back-catalogue for non-stop, volume-after-volume reading. Paradise. All totally portable too, of course. How convenient to be able to carry a virtual encyclopedia of pulp fiction around with me inside a device smaller than the hard copies of most of the books it contains.

Me being me though, I wasn't satisfied. As portable as the Kobo is, I don't always have it with me. Sometimes in life, there are opportunities to read another chapter of your book - waiting rooms, slow moving queues, at work. Of course, as with cameras, now we can carry our library around in our phones.

Is it really possible to read a book on your phone? Is the screen big enough? Is there an interface "booky" enough for it to seem natural? How difficult is it to physically GET the books INTO your phone?

Well I've done it and it's actually pretty good.

As usual, I tried eReading on both the Samsung Galaxy SIII and the Nokia Lumia 820/920. Unlike the iPhone/iPad, there's no native eReader for these devices so I had to try out a few different apps before I settled on the best one for each device. On the Galaxy I went with Moon+ Reader and after a brief flirtation with Raccoon Reader on the Lumias, I settled on Bookviser instead. Both Bookviser and Moon+ Reader are free and I'm not quite sure why I'd need to buy one because they both performed admirably.

Both apps allow you to access your books via SkyDrive (or in the case of Moon+ Reader you may prefer DropBox, since you're already on an Android phone and probably have a DropBox account) You can also access various online libraries to purchase new books which will load straight onto your phone. I get mine in epub format because that's what I use on my Kobo and these load into both apps with no difficulty.

The only real differences are minor but do affect the overall reading experience. Moon+ Reader simply has more features - more fonts, more backgrounds and most importantly, more controls. Both apps can simulate a turning page if that's your thing, but Moon+ Reader has a nifty scrolling function which you can adjust to match your reading speed. This means one page melts down over the previous one at the pace you select. Call me lazy, but the I found the ability to turn pages without having to touch anything pretty awesome.

The other thing Moon+ Reader offers that Bookviser doesn't is clearer information about where you're up to in your book - not just what page and what chapter, but how far through that chapter you are. This is very helpful if, like me, you might be reading the same book on several different devices and you need to find your place quickly. Both apps give you the option of searching a particular word or phrase but for some reason, Bookviser wasn't very helpful displaying the table of contents, showing only the chapter numbers and not their titles. This may have been something to do with the electronic formatting of the books, but probably not, given they displayed perfectly well on Moon+ Reader.

Is it just as easy to read a book on a phone-sized screen as it is on the Ink-Screen display of a purpose-built eReader like a Kobo? Of course not, but the screens on both the Galaxy and the Lumia 920 are big enough to suffice. Even the smaller Lumia 820 proved totally adequate, due in large part to it's impressive clarity.

So this time, it's not really a battle between phones, but between apps. Unfortunately for the Windows 8 Phones, as usual, they just don't have the selection of apps Android offers so were always going to struggle to match a product like Moon+ Reader or iBooks. Ultimately though, there's not much in it, and certainly not enough to warrant changing phones for.

JUST BROWSING, THANKS...

When it comes to perusing the net, I'm a Google Chrome man, through and through.

The reasons are many and they're my usual reasons for choosing anything computery... speed, customisability, synchronisation across devices and above all else, reliability. Google Chrome has offered me all this since day one and every time I've looked back at Internet Explorer it's always seemed so cumbersome and old-fashioned by comparison.

So you might think it'll be a pretty one-sided contest between the Samsung Galaxy SIII and the Nokia Lumia 820/920 this week, given I can use Chrome on the Galaxy but it's not yet available on the Lumias.

And you'd be right.

I just don't get this thing between Microsoft and Google, I don't get it at all. Why can I run Google Chrome on my Windows PC, but not on my Windows Phone? How is that logical in any way? Why would Microsoft put people off buying their phones, by not letting them use the browser they prefer? Or is just Google not letting Windows have Chrome for their handsets and wanting to keep it all for the Android army? No, that can't be it, because you can get Chrome on your iPhone too. Why? Why? WHY???

The Windows Phone 8 OS did make a few little concessions to consumer demand with their browser, most importantly by letting you choose Google as your default search engine instead of Bing, which also now works heaps better than it used to. The Windows 8 phones certainly load web pages nice and quickly, and their Gorilla glass screens make the sites look amazing... up to a point.

That point, of course, being video. I've heard Flash content is on the way out and it's going to be replaced by something called HTML5. Trouble is, I've been hearing that for over a year now and it hasn't happened yet. That means the vast majority of us have been missing out on watching video content on our phones, even though they're so damn smart and the screens are supposed to be so bloody amazing. What a waste. I can't even watch my OWN videos on the Newstalk ZB website with my Lumia 820.

The Galaxy S3 on the other hand is a whole other kettle of constantly evolving fish.

First up, the S3 has it's own default browser but I couldn't tell you what it's called because I've never even used it. Like I say, I'm a Chrome man so why would I choose anything else? I was already logged into the phone under my Google account, so when I fired Chrome up all my bookmarks and saved passwords synced straight over. I LOVE not having to think. It was Chrome, just like I was used to on my PC, but on my phone. Then I got to that same point, Flash video.

Disappointingly, Chrome on the S3 wouldn't play it either - or WOULD it? I did a little research (and I mean, literally the 3rd Google entry down) and discovered I could be using a browser called Skyfire instead. Somehow, this app plays Flash straight off the bat.

"This is stupid," I thought. "There must be a way to make it work on Chrome as well." A little more research (even littler than before) and I discovered another app cryptically named, Flash Player. Don't be confused, it isn't ADOBE Flash Player, it just installs it for you - and although it specifically said it WOULDN'T work on Chrome, it did. Yay! I'm now a happy man, dialing up old episodes of 11ish and glennzb tv so I can watch myself being hilarious to my heart's content.

It's not all good news for the Galaxy. These phones all have nice, big, clear screens, so god knows why I would want to be redirected to the mobile versions of sites like Facebook and Google when the fully functioning Desktop versions are perfectly readable. The Windows Phones have a setting to select the Desktop sites by default. As for Chrome on the S3? Dammit! You have to go into Settings and choose the desktop option every time you visit the site. More internet craziness that makes no sense to me whatsoever.

The ability to watch Flash videos still tips the scales mightily in the Samsung's favour though and there's one more mysterious difference that makes the Android interface just that little bit more user-friendly - for some reason, and again who knows why, I can push the little star button on my Facebook page to highlight this post. Not so on the Lumias. It's a small thing, a dumb thing even, but it's the small dumb things that all add up to a better browsing experience.

BLINK AND YOU'LL MISS IT

They've been sticking cameras in phones for a long time now.

I guess the theory was you don't always remember to take your camera, but you usually have your phone with you. Heaven forbid you should have to actually REMEMBER something for yourself - you know, with your actual BRAIN.

Those first cameras were pretty crappy of course. Combine a low-res image with a lens covered in fingerprints and pocket-fluff and the resulting photo effect was usually fairly blurry and indistinct. Now I think of it, pretty much like most of the images out there on Instagram.

Oh how things have changed. Now if your phone doesn't boast at least as many megapixels as your real camera, it's time to upgrade. Oh, and just one camera isn't enough of course - obviously you need a camera on both sides these days. (Don't ask me why, you just DO, okay?)

So this week, it's a camera-off between the Samsung Galaxy SIII and the Nokia Lumia 820. (The Lumia 920 has the same camera as the 820, and I only have 2 hands!) I decided to put them to the ultimate test; my daughter's 12th birthday...

What you need to understand here is, birthdays only happen once. Oh, sure you have one every year, but never the same one. That means, after weddings, they're about the most important event to save for posterity - photographically speaking.

If I'm being completely honest with you, I have literally no idea what most of the camera functions do on either of these phones. I just want to take a half decent pic. Luckily, phones are now so smart, they cater for total know-nothing bozos like me.

The solution seems to be something the Galaxy calls "Burst Shot" and the Nokia calls "Blink." This is the setting that takes about a dozen pictures at once so you can choose the best one. I found it a bit fiddly to work on the Galaxy, although it told me how to do it as soon as I started the camera. I was instructed to tap then hold down the camera button, which I got right about 75% of the time. I later discovered I could have put the camera into Burst Mode under the shooting mode menu, but the S3 just loves its fancy little shortcuts.

The thing I like about the Nokia's camera is you can start it up by holding down the dedicated camera button - even from a locked screen. Then you just touch the "Lenses" option, select "Blink" and you're away.

The results? The same. The colours are maybe a little more vibrant through the Nokia's Carl Zeiss lens, but there's really not much in it. I'm giving this round to Samsung though because once you've taken your burst of shots, the S3 picks what it thinks is the best one and puts a Facebook-like thumbs-up sign on it for good measure.

That's what I need from my phone, I want it to do my thinking for me.

DO YOU KNOW WHERE I'M GOING TO?

I am, without a doubt, the world's worst navigator.

I'm lucky if I make to the end of the driveway without directions... and it's a really short driveway... and it's downhill.

The complete and utter uselessness of my navigation skills doesn't just extend to the search for my destination either. Let's say, by some miracle, I actually manage to arrive at the place I'm supposed to be. (To be honest, the only way this could happen is if I follow someone who's going there as well, and even then I'd probably take the wrong exit at the first roundabout and still end up trying to find my way out of a shopping mall carpark) But let's say I get there, my navigational nightmare is only half over because I've still got to find my way home.

You'd think I'd be able to just retrace my route, remembering landmarks, signposts and major intersections. But no, I'm an idiot. Actually, I'm a terrible driver too, so I'm not even sure why anyone ever let me behind the wheel in the first place. (Admittedly, I sat my license in Cambridge, where they don't have any traffic lights. A few tricky slopes for hill starts though)

In saying all that, fortunately I now live in the age of the GPS. No longer must I rely on the terse and regular instructions from the Domestic Manager in the passenger seat, I can listen to a disembodied computer voice tell me where to go instead.

Trouble is, stand-alone GPS navigation devices aren't cheap and keeping them up to date can also cost you.

Luckily, God invented smart phones.

Now I don't know what's going on with the iPhone's navigation apps these days - last I heard the iPhone 5 was telling people to catch trains from somewhere out in the Waitemata Harbour.

Let us focus our attention then, on the Nokia Lumia 820/920 and the Samsung Galaxy SIII.

It's pretty safe to say Google's been leading the way when it comes to mapping stuff, which is why I found it so bizarre when Apple dumped Google Maps off the iPhone's default start screen. (I understand the person responsible for that decision has since been taken out the back and shot)

Of course, the Galaxy, being an Android device, has always been Google-ised up the wazoo, so the default navigation app is powered by Google Maps and is inspirationally named, Navigation. Okay, so boring name, but it's an amazing GPS. I first used it to drive across town. I was just meeting a friend for brunch, but I didn't quite know the quickest way to get there. Navigation did. Although I was only a 10 minute drive away, the Galaxy used all of Google's mighty resources to help me avoid traffic lights and busy roads. I was directed down alleys and right-of-ways I never knew existed. It was exciting, like a car chase although I couldn't help wondering if it was just all just a clever trick someone was playing on me. In the end, what I THOUGHT was going to be a 10 minute trip ended up being more like 5. Pretty impressive.

The Nokia Drive app I was used to on the Lumia 800 is now called Nokia Drive+ Beta on the Windows Phone 8 versions, but it seems to work exactly the same way. There's no indication it's trying to avoid heavy traffic, it just calculates the shortest route between two points and away you go. This once led to a slightly unnecessary scenic drive through the Hastings CBD on my way to Havelock North, but I've always made it to where I'm meant to be in approximately the time Mrs Lumia told me I would.

Nokia's put a lot of resources into their map apps and it shows. The display on Nokia Drive is either 2D or 3D and you can add landmarks in (notable buildings, hotels etc.) to reassure you you're on the right track. The display also changes automatically from day to night which is fun to watch when you go through a tunnel.

Meanwhile, Navigation on the S3 has a setting called Layers, which allows you to see the satellite view of your route instead of just a map. (Like Google Earth) The Layers setting can also show where the heavy traffic is on your route and lets you add the location of petrol stations, ATMs and restaurants to your map. 

Nokia Drive shows petrol stations and parking by default. You also get car repair businesses and public transport routes too, which is actually quite helpful. The other thing I liked about Nokia Drive is it always seems to know what the speed limit is and you can even set a warning to alert you if you're driving too fast. This is brilliant for me, because I never know how fast I'm supposed to be going and I'm quite happy for a machine to tell me.

Both apps come with a selection of polite voices to choose from - no-one with a New Zealand accent sadly. In spite of that, I try and avoid anything Australian, just on principle.

So it's all much of a muchness between Navigation and Nokia Drive UNTIL... you go offline. I don't know how typical I am as a smart phone user, because I'm on Pre-Pay. So when it comes to data usage, I have to be pretty frugal. It's not an issue when I'm at home or at work - that's what WiFi's for. Get in the car and it's a different story.

Once offline, the Galaxy's usefulness ebbs away dramatically. Satellite images are not available offline. Live traffic information is not available offline. You can still navigate your way around, but only if you've downloaded a map of your area in advance.

This is where Nokia Drive completely kills. In order to find my way from Auckland to Hawkes Bay recently, I had to download 5 different maps for the Galaxy and what's more, there's a limit to how many you can download at any one time. Nokia Drive let's you download a whole country at once. I've got all of Australia on my Lumia too, which was extremely handy when I was trying to master the Melbourne tram system late last year.

It seems to me, if you're driving somewhere, sooner or later you'll need to go offline and because I don't want to get lost when that happens, Nokia Lumia wins this round hands down.

LET THE MUSIC PLAY... PLEASE

I love music. I've got to have some on whenever and wherever possible. But I'm not an iPhone guy. I've already told you this. They're too bossy, too set in their ways.

So that's left me the choice between Android (Sumsung Galaxy SIII) or Windows Phone 8. (Nokia Lumia 820/920)

Trouble is, there's one thing Apple does best and it's because they invented it. When it comes to mobile music, iPods set the standard and everyone else has been playing catch-up ever since.

Oh, even with iPods I tried to resist. But nothing comes close to iTunes as method of managing your music library. The way iTunes keeps track of what you've played, how often and when so you can create "smart playlists" giving you fresh music every time you sync your device is sheer genius.

I've always considered the iPhone to be an iPod first and a phone second. So it's only logical to assume when it comes to music, the Lumia and the Galaxy have a way to go, right? Well maybe not quite as far as you might think.

Since microSD cards have been available with significant storage capacity, I've been filling them up with music to play out of my handset. Even before I had a smart phone, I was using my old Nokia Classic 2730 as a mobile music machine, although getting the songs in and out of it was never an entirely straight-forward process. It still isn't, but it's getting there.

Let's start with the finished product and work backwards. Obviously, both the Galaxy S3 and the Lumias have music players installed as standard, and you can choose any number of alternatives on their respective app stores. Both allow you to play your collection pretty much the way you're used to, you can create and select play-lists, shuffle, repeat all of that. The Lumias allow you to pin individual Artists, Playlists, Albums and Songs to your start screen so you can play them with one touch. I couldn't figure out how to do that with the Galaxy's default music player, although there is a widget you can drag onto your home screen that shows you what's playing and has basic play/stop/next track controls.

The cool thing about the Lumias is a very similar widget appears whenever you push one of the volume control buttons - even if you're only on the lock screen, so turning your music on, off or skipping a track is only a couple of button pushes away.

What's the sound like? That's a hard one. Although my job involves listening to stuff all day, I'm not actually massively fussy when it comes to things like speaker quality. In saying that, I would never choose to listen to music through my phone's little speakers, not when you can just plug it into the nearest stereo or set of headphones. But if I did, the Samsung has a slightly livelier sound, while the Nokia squeezes a little more bass out somehow. I'd call that even - although, like I say, why would you ever listen that way? Both phones have preset and customisable EQ controls available, although they're a bit harder to find on the Lumia - you have to go out of the music player and into Settings to find them, but once you get there you can choose Dolby noise reduction and something called Audio Levelling as well.

This last feature's quite groovy, because there's always been a disparity in volume between my old songs and my new ones - Audio Levelling seems to even that out.

So in terms of just playing the music, the Nokia Lumias sound a bit better, are easier to control, but the EQ settings are more accessible on the Galaxy.

How about the radio? I'm not talking about streaming radio over the net, any WiFi device can do that. There's a great FM radio on the Galaxy - again, there's a widget you can drag onto your home screen to access it instantly, just plug in your headphones and away you go. Bad news for Lumia fans, though... NO RADIO AT ALL! Given I work at a radio station, this seems like the dumbest thing ever, especially since the old Lumia 800 had a perfectly good radio on it. Where's it gone? Apparently, nowhere. The radio hardware is rumoured to be installed in the Lumia 820s and 920s, Microsoft simply hasn't turned the software on yet. Just bizarre. I can only hope they sort this out in a future update, but who knows?

Now let's back-track to actually getting the music onto the phone... how hard could it be? On the bright side, both Android and Microsoft seem too have conceded most people would prefer to sync their iTunes playlists onto their phones, rather than mucking around with yet another media manager program. Previous Windows Phone users had to use Zune to sync their phones - not a terrible application by any means, but still not iTunes and trying to keep  playlists synced between iTunes and Zune required a lot of cumbersome double handling.

With Windows Phone 8, Microsoft have streamlined the whole process dramatically - there's a very stripped-down utility that automatically loads either your iTunes or Windows Media Player libraries, and from there you can choose which playlists (including Smart Playlists) you want to transfer to your phone. Just one trap for young players: If you're planning on storing your music to SD card in the Lumia 820, I'd advise you to start with a clean slate. Format the card and install it BEFORE you do any syncing. Everything got a bit confused for me when I decided to change where I was storing my songs after a few days, and I ended up having to reset the whole phone to sort it all out. Not an issue for the Lumia 920 of course - it doesn't need an SD card due to it's ample 32gb internal storage.

On the other hand, when it comes to syncing, I've found the Glaxaxy SIII to be a complete nightmare. For starters, there are 2 different utilities available; Easy Phone Sync and Kies. Easy Phone Sync looks a bit like the Windows Phone program, but instead of syncing from iTunes itself, it seems to use information from whatever backup was created the last time you synced your iPod, which isn't that useful.

Kies is much more comprehensive, but I couldn't connect to it via my USB cable and had to sync wirelessly instead. While that SOUNDS like a cool idea, if you're trying to transfer any decent amount of music at all it takes HOURS, and inevitably something will interfere with your connection when you're 82% complete and you'll have to start all over again. Maybe other Samsung users have had better success with different computers running different operating systems, all I know is I've wasted many hours of my summer trying to keep my Galaxy synced with very limited results.

To be honest, there's really not much difference between these phones when it comes to getting music out of them, but because I found it so damn hard to get my music INTO the Samsung Galaxy, Nokia Lumia would easily have to be my first choice. Now if we could just get that radio working...

NOKIA LUMIA 820: THE LAST OF 3 FIRST IMPRESSIONS

The first phase of my phone fiddling is finished. Thank goodness. It's like anything you love, you think you could never have too much of a good thing, but perhaps attempting to set up 3 different phones over 6 weeks was a little ambitious.

I'm not paid to do this. I'm not the editor of a smart phone magazine. It's quite possible I have no idea what I'm talking about. I'm just a guy who gets up in the middle of the night to play stuff on the radio. Maybe I should be reviewing radio shows instead. What I've been trying to do is demystify the world of iPhone alternatives because a lot of the stuff written about Androids and Windows Phones is of a somewhat nerdy, techno-jargon bent.

I'm no professional techno-nerd... I just wannabe.

So I didn't start a smart phone magazine, I started this blog instead.

Here's my third and final offering for now, the very tidy Nokia Lumia 820...

Now I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "I'm sure I've seen this phone somewhere before." Well, you have and you haven't. Yes, I reviewed the Lumia 920 just 3 weeks ago, and yes the two phones are similar. So although, initially I wasn't going to directly compare phones in these first 3 blogs, I've reconsidered. I've decided to make this more a battle-to-the death between Lumias and Galaxy SIII's than a polite scuffle between all three.

In saying that, there are quite a few differences between the Lumias 820 and 920, so I'll spend the rest of this ultimate first impression outlining exactly what those are.

The most obvious difference is the size, of course. The 820 passes my crucial pocket-fit test without any effort whatsoever. In fact, after the Lumia 920 and the Galxy S3, it was such a relief to have a phone that was still more or less the size of a phone, I couldn't stop slipping it in and out of my pocket. In. Out. In. Out. In. Out. Hours of fun just doing that.

In fact, "slipping" is quite an appropriate verb because I've found the 820 to be perhaps the slipperiest Lumia yet. The Lumia family have this amazing polycarbonate shell with beautiful rounded edges. It's very tough, very hard to scratch and, as it turns out, more slippery than a fresh-caught fish.

Because I'm a) a bloke, b) clumsy and c) an idiot, I usually sort myself a cover to keep my handset as protected as possible. I was really keen to get stuck into the Lumia 820 though, so I started using it without a cover on and obviously dropped it on the hard linoleum floor immediately. Twice.

Nokias are Nokias though, so I was relieved to see the 820 had taken its beatings without complaint and had kept on ticking. The reason I dropped it the second time was due to my attempts to insert the sim and SD cards. (The first time was just blokey, clumsy idiocy) Other Lumias I've used have just had a little pop-out compartment at the top of the handset for the sim, with no option to expand the storage via SD. (You know what I mean; those memory cards you bung in your camera only smaller. I wonder what the SD stands for... "Stupid Doofer"?)

The Lumia 820 has the SD option. In some ways this is great because you can insert as much storage as you need. In other ways it's annoying because it means there's not much storage to begin with. Anyway, the upshot is, for the first time Nokia let's you take the back off their phone... if you CAN. Unlike the Samsung Galaxy SIII, which has a back so easy to remove you've done it before you meant to, the Lumia 820 requires an intricate combination of pushing, bending and jamming your thumbnail in at just the right time to gain access to its privates.

You can see how a guy could work up a sweat and lose his grip on the thing. Oh, the battery flew out and skidded across the floor as well. That too seemed to suffer no ill effects. No harm done.

Previously I've mentioned an app on the Windows 8 Lumias called Transfer My Data. This is what I tried to use to get my contacts and settings from last year's Lumia 800 to the all new Lumia 920. Without success, because they wouldn't talk to each other via bluetooth. I figured the problem might be something to do with a Windows 7.5 phone trying to get it on with a Windows 8 one.

This time I was trying it with the 920 and the 820, both running the same operating system and sure enough, big Lumia made contact with little Lumia and identified some stuff to transfer. Actually, that's an overstatement. It transferred half my contacts and nothing else at all. Am I using this app in some wacky way? Not sure, although an update came through for it last night, so maybe now it's a bit more useful.

So yet again I was setting up a phone almost from scratch. How hard would it be to develop a program that transfers your apps, settings and accounts from your old phone to the new one? Too hard apparently. Luckily I am now an old hand at personalising a Windows handset and I reckon I probably broke several speed records this time round. As far as how it operates, in terms of apps, browsing and on-screen appearance, there is literally no difference between the 820 and the 920 other than the 920 having a bigger screen.

The camera is the same, (yes, there's a forward-facing camera on this one too) and the speed appears to be the same, although you may experience a minuscule delay accessing things stored on your SD card, depending on how whizzy it is. (That means, did you buy the cheapest card available or did you pay through the nose for something super-fast?) Because I've now used 2 phones using Windows 8 and only one on Android, I'm starting to discover some quite interesting little tricks and hazards which can greatly enhance or hinder your Lumia experience, but we'll get into those down the track.

Let me just conclude these 3 first impressions by admitting so far the Lumia 820 is easily my favourite. If I'm being totally honest, I thought it would be right from the start, that's why I left it till last. The 920 is equally nifty, but just way to big for me, and while I liked the Galaxy S3 about a million billion percent more than I thought I was going to, it's still too weird for me to feel totally comfortable with.

Yes, Round 1 goes to the Nokia Lumia 820, but it's early days and I think you might be surprised what else these phones can and can't do. Dum dum dah...

SAMSUNG GALAXY SIII: THE SECOND OF 3 FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Some people go away for the holidays. They might go camping. Maybe they'll stay with relatives. If they're really lucky, they could head off overseas somewhere, perhaps Hawaii, like John Key. If they're really UNlucky, they might end up in Antarctica, like John Key. Me? This year I took a slightly different approach. This year I just spent some quality time... with a bunch of smart phones.

Last week I showed you the Nokia Lumia 920, a very slick, if slightly massive new Windows phone. I loved it, but then I was probably always going to, given I'm not a huge iPhone fan and I'd already spent most of last year loving its predecessor, the Lumia 800.

Turns out, there's another bunch of handsets out there that aren't iPhones either. They're a bunch of phones I've never paid much attention to, but this summer, all that changed.

Here's my first foray into the world of the Android; the Samsung Galaxy SIII. In white...

It's time I came clean. Just like Lance Armstrong, I've been living a lie, deceiving the public for years and if Oprah knew who I was, I'm sure she'd want to interview me about it over 2 gripping episodes. My secret is deep, it's dark and I only hope we can confront it, deal with it openly and move on. Here goes... I was an Android bigot.

By that I don't mean I used to be a racist robot. That really WOULD be news. No, what I'm confessing to here is writing off the world's most popular smart-phone operating system without even really trying it. Very naughty of me really, given that at first glance, Android seems to give me the ability to do the very thing I've always wanted to do; build my phone from scratch.

In my defence, there are a couple of reasons why I have deliberately ignored phones like the Galaxy SIII until now.
1) I knew how to work Apple and Windows products already and couldn't be fagged learning something new and 2) The S3 just looked so huge I wasn't sure I'd be able to lift it.

Let's deal with that last one first. I've seen people using the S3 in public. Hard to miss, given it appears to be the size and shape of your average dinner plate. Obviously I get that bigger screen size makes for a more accessible browsing experience but as I've asked before, if I can't slip it in and out of my pocket, just how mobile IS my phone?

Just goes to show how deceiving appearances can be. The Galaxy would prove to be a veritable bundle of surprises, the first being how easily it passed the pocket-fitting test. Yes, the front is wide, but the whole thing is very rounded and tapered, giving the impression of being quite slim indeed.

I was impressed by how light the Galaxy is too. Unlike the Nokia's heft, which gives them a definite feel of durability, the Galaxy almost strays into the flimsy end of the spectrum - especially when you peel the back off to insert your sim or SD cards. That's literally how you do it, almost like peeling the backing sheet off a bumper sticker. This particular bumper sticker's worth about $850, so ripping it to bits to make it go is a tad nerve-racking.

It all still seemed to work once I'd clipped it back together though. Then it was time to set this puppy up. Turns out, the setup on this particular puppy is a bitch.

I always thought what I wanted was a phone with countless possibilities... any number of ways to set it up... change the lock screen... change the home screen... unique ringtones and text alerts... live updates of weather and social media... Sounds amazing, right?

Nightmare. 

Too MANY possibilities. Too MANY options. This wasn't a Matrix-style, "Choose the RED pill or the BLUE pill" situation, this was a "Here are pills in every colour of the rainbow, plus some colours you've never SEEN before" situation.

I found myself trying out 10 different apps for everything I wanted to do. Then I realised most of things I was trying to do, were things that were already set up FOR you on a Windows phone. Maybe I wasn't quite the freestyling smart-phone user I thought I was. Maybe I really didn't mind having someone tell me what I wanted, as long as they knew what I actually what I wanted. One thing the Galaxy was teaching me fast; I was the LAST person who knew what I wanted.

Over time, a GREAT DEAL of time, I started to whittle down the seemingly endless possibilities. I started to learn the difference between what Google and Android call Apps and Widgets, and I'll attempt to share this wisdom with you in some kind of useful way in a future blog.

Let's just say I made it work. Eventually I could check my emails, browse the web, text and tweet almost the way I was used to. I could sense the potential for greatness here, if I could just cut my way through some of the less-great chaff being thrust at me from every direction. I also rediscovered some of the things I used to like about Apple, are readily available for Android too. Meanwhile, in many cases the Windows phone is still waiting for its version to be invented.

Again, more details for more blogs. As part two of 3 first impressions, I'll conclude by saying the Galaxy looks and feels a gazillion times better than I expected. But... at least SOME of my Android bigotry was well-founded - not due to any restrictions I came up against, rather the LACK of them was just so overwhelming.

I can still hear the Domestic Manager complaining, (totally justifiably) "You're not STILL fiddling with that phone, are you?" The reason I can still hear her say that is, I still am.

I'll try and put it down long enough to give the Nokia Lumia 820 a go for next week's post, but I tell you what; something about this S3 is bloody addictive.

NOKIA LUMIA 920: THE FIRST OF 3 FIRST IMPRESSIONS

I've been fiddling with a few phones over the holidays. Actually, fiddling is understating things somewhat. Obsessively dedicating every waking hour to them might be more accurate. So thought I'd justify all the hours I've spent ignoring my family by sharing some of what I love and hate about them with you. (The phones that is, not the family)

Hopefully this won't be like the majority of other phone reviews you'll find online. I'm not going to list off all the specs you can just Google on the manufacturers' websites. I don't know about you, but I don't actually care how many cores the processors have as long as the phone does what it's supposed to.

Also, they lie. Claims around things like battery life and charging time are usually... shall we say... ambitious?

Instead, I'm just going to tell you about what I tried to get these phones to do, and how well they actually did it.

Let's kick things off by introducing you to the Nokia Lumia 920... Or as I've come to think of it, the Beast.

The thing you should know about me as a smart-phone user is I'm a bit of a weirdo. I'm kind of anti iPhone, but I think that's more to do with my personality than the phones themselves. I've always resisted authority. I don't respond well to being told what to do, so me and Mr Jobs never really saw eye-to-eye. Sure he was an amazing uber-genius and perhaps one of the greatest innovators of our time but the arrogance of his design philosophy often left be bewildered and frustrated.

I like to tinker and customise, upgrade and modify. The Apple devices I've encountered over the years seem specifically developed to thwart these urges at every turn. Tightly sealed boxes with few buttons, Apple tells us how to use their phones, how they should look, how they should interact with other devices and we, the customers get very little say.

That's why the new breed of Windows Phones from Nokia really captured my imagination. I've always been a Nokia man. (In the age before smart phones anyway - I guess were they "dumb" phones?) There seems to be a feeling of solidity to a Nokia you don't always have with other brands. I'm not claiming they'll survive being run over or dropped in the loo, but I've heard and seen some pretty incredible comeback stories.

That's just the way last year's Nokia Lumia 800 felt too. Fitting easily in one hand, it seemed more like a phone more than a small tablet. After going from turning it on to changing everything to my favourite colour within the first 3 minutes, I was pretty much in love.

The Lumia 800 runs on Windows Phone 7.5, which made syncing with my Office email, documents and Skydrive cloud folders an effortless operation - in fact, the phone set a lot of things up for me without me even realising it.

I'm a big fan of effortless operations, so I was a little worried about upgrading to the all-new Nokia Lumia 920. Turns out, my worry was ever so slightly justified. The Lumia 800 had this magical app installed on it called Contacts Transfer. This enabled you to connect to any old "dumb" phone with a bluetooth connection and suck up all the contacts. How it worked I have no idea, but it did.

So it was with some disappointment I discovered there was no such app on the 920 - I couldn't even install it from Windows Marketplace (the Windows version of the iTunes App Store) However... I did discover something called Transfer My Data. "This sounds promising," I thought, "Maybe this'll literally just clone all my existing settings, contacts, photos and music directly over to my new phone!"

Sadly, the 920 wouldn't even connect to my trusty old 800. Don't know why, but it wasn't for lack of trying. (Not to mention endless Googling)

Luckily, saving my contacts to my Windows Live account (ie: Hotmail) was a reasonably straightforward task. Those contacts then all synced back onto the 920 once I signed in. A bit of a pain having to do it that way though, and even more frustrating having to re-download all my apps and settings.

On the plus side, the 920 is bloody fast. Apps open quickly and the browsing is noticeably quicker than on the 800. This is partly due to some slightly whizzier hardware, and partly due the the Windows Phone 8 operating system. Designed to look and feel like the Windows 8 OS installed on all the new Microsoft PC's, at first glance it's not massively different for an experienced WP 7.5 user like me.

The smooth scrolling and customisable start tiles are still there, but the cool thing is, they're more customisable than before. There are more colours to choose from and more sizes too. So unlike the iPhone's uniform little boxes, you can have larger tiles for apps you use more often, a bit like the "widgets" you can access on an Android-based phone like the Samsung Galaxy S3. Personally, I think the tiles on the Lumia look a bit nicer, because they generally default to your preferred colour scheme, so you're not left with a hotchpotch of different hues, shapes and fonts like you can end up with on an Android home screen.

Most of my frustrations with the Lumia 920 are nothing to do with the phone itself. Microsoft has still got a long way to go to catch up with Apple and Google when it comes to the range of apps available. For example, I much prefer the Google Chrome browser over Internet Explorer but Chrome simply isn't an option on a Windows phone. At least I can now select Google as my preferred search engine, as opposed to Bing, which I loathe, mostly because of its stupid name.

But all those are niggly details for another blog. This is part one of 3 first impressions, so I won't get bogged down in the nitty gritty. I was impressed by the look. I was impressed by the speed. I was impressed by the screen size but with that comes one down side. This thing is huge. I've always been suspicious of the Galaxy S3 as a practical handset because of  its size, but the Lumia 920 is easily as wide. It's not quite as long but it is thicker and heavier. That all means it doesn't really fit in my pocket... which is a major bummer because I kind of love it. 

I'll tell you some more reasons why I love it in blogs to come, but in the meantime, I'll give you my first impressions of the Samsung Galaxy SIII next week.