My Lumia 920, showing off it’s customized live tile home screen. Photo: Matt Morgan
It’s been about a month since I made a leap from Apple’s iOS to Windows Phone 8, joining a small 2% minority of smartphone users. Why did I switch? After five years of owning an iPhone, I was mentally ready for something fresh, but it wasn’t until the combination of the WP8 operating system and Nokia Lumia 920 hardware came along that I felt the time was right. The phone appealed to me on the strength of its core features which, when rolled together, make the Lumia 920 a contender as the best phone for geek-minded fathers.
The first feature that piqued my interest in the Lumia 920 was its camera. After reading about its optical image stabilization and seeing it beat the iPhone 5 and Android phones in a low-light shootout, I knew that this would be a useful upgrade. As a relatively new parent, I want to have the best possible camera in my pocket to capture my little girl’s first steps and other spontaneous Kodak moments.
After being sold on the camera, I looked more into the Lumia and its Windows Phone 8 operating system and liked what I saw. The features that grabbed me all had to do with saving time and money. Both of these are precious commodities for everyone, but a child-juggling parent can’t pass up any opportunity to squeeze a bit more of either one into their life.
Photo by Alex Washburn/Wired
So let’s start with money. As I was previously looking to upgrade my iPhone 4S to an iPhone 5, price had me a bit grumpy. With higher resolution screens and cameras, the storage required for apps and photos has ballooned. After going 16GB for so many years, 32GB was the only option, which means I’d be in for an extra $100. Also, I was dreading having to abandon my large collection of iPhone-to-USB cables and buy new Lightning port cables. I keep multiple iPhone chargers strategically placed, well, just about anywhere I could need to give my phone some extra juice; even my emergency backup battery has the iPhone connector on it.
With the Lumia 920, I was looking at a 32GB phone for $99, saving $200 right off the bat. I was also able to keep all of my old wall and car chargers and replace the Apple USB cable with the USB Micro cables that the Lumia 920 uses. These were purchased from Monoprice.com at the very un-Apple price of 72 cents per cable.
I was also able to save some time in the charging department as well. The Lumia 920 supports wireless charging, and AT&T is running a promotion through Jan 10th for a free wireless charging plate. I may not have sprung for this at an extra $50, but this freebie helped sweeten the deal, and now I can slap my phone down on the charger and keep moving.
The other major time savings come in two areas. First is the ease of syncing the Lumia 920. Nothing made me happier than the day I was able to uninstall iTunes. Now I can drag and drop whatever media I want to add to or remove from my phone using my computer’s standard file system. It is a blissfully simple process.
Productivity also has received a time-saving boost with the Lumia 920 and WP8. Built-in Microsoft Office is a godsend, and integration with Skydrive (Microsoft’s Dropbox competitor) makes it easy to get work done while on the go. Nokia’s Drive app serves as a better GPS than my Apple maps ever did, and the Windows Phone 8 interface is both beautiful and incredibly user-friendly when handling email and calendar tasks. Lastly, I am basically locked in to Google web services, and found the phone to have better Google account integration than my previous phone.
That last perk comes with a warning, though. This particular benefit may not apply for all users, as during the time since I had switched, Google has significantly upgraded their own GMail app for iOS while simultaneously removing all support for Windows Phone users that attempt to sync their accounts after Jan 30th, 2013. This threat stands unless Microsoft makes some significant changes to how it supports mail and calendar accounts in its mobile OS.
The Kid’s Corner home screen being revealed, mid-swipe. Image courtesy of Microsoft
The final benefit I found in switching to the Lumia 920 is a big one for parents: this phone sports the best parental controls you’ll find on any device. Windows Phone 8 comes with Kid’s Corner, which allows parents to set up a duplicate version of the phone’s home screen that only shows games, music, videos, and apps that have been explicitly selected for use in Kid’s Corner. Parsing this content out during setup is incredibly easy, and the OS gives you enough ways to filter out media that you can easily add just the right mix onto the Kid’s Corner page. You are essentially creating a phone-within-a-phone that you can safely hand off to your child, and it works beautifully.
What followed in my experience with the Lumia 920 is a laundry list of both pros and cons when compared with iPhone. They don’t all pertain to the life of a parent, but know that the phone and its operating system have many more perks to discover, from XBox Live integration to built-in free trials of paid apps. This all comes with that caveat that you will encounter the occasional hiccup where the Lumia 920 doesn’t work quite as well as your old phone, such as trying to find that perfect full-featured podcast playback app, or the lack of any method to completely silence the phone other than dialing its volume down 30 clicks (and manually back up again when you plug headphones in).
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