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.
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