Microsoft (Nokia) Lumia 925 & Windows Phone 8 Independent Review

As you can see from the post title, I’m reviewing here both the Microsoft Lumia 925 along with its operating system, Windows Phone 8; the reason being that, for me, it’s often impossible to tell where one ends and the other starts, where the borders lie between the hardware, the firmware and the software; most of all taking into account that all of them are created by the same holding. So, which of Microsoft’s companies gets the credit or the blame for a certain feature or lack thereof? And, actually, does it really matter here?
Also I must say that I’m new to Windows Phone, an OS that I would’ve never gone for if it weren’t because Nokia are the only phones (that I know of) shipping what I most covet above all other features: free offline maps. Lastly, it’s to be noted that, as a reference, I’m comparing the Lumia 925 with my other two recent phones: a Nokia C7 (Symbian Belle OS) and a LG-Optimus black (Google’s Android OS).
Look and feel
You’ve seen and read lots of professional reviews with great pictures and descriptions of this handset, so I won’t digress much here. Physically, the Lumia 925 is one of the sexiest handsets I’ve ever hold and beheld; it’s a pleasure to have in your hand, feels light as a feather while not fragile, has a nice form factor (though a bit too wide for single-handed use) and is slim as can be. The more I watch it, the more I like it. Its design is simple and elegant, an aluminum frame holding together the screen and the plastic back cover (pity it’s not also aluminum, but I don’t mind to pay that price for the sake of lightness). The three discrete physical buttons are placed on the right side, despite the volume rocker being more practical when placed on the left (at least for my tastes). On the lower part of the screen there are the three haptic buttons that Microsoft imposes on any manufacturer that wants Windows Phone running on a cellular. On the back sits the mandatory camera lens (protruding with a little bump) and the flash leds, plus a speaker.
Usability. The OS.
So far, so great. Problems arise when you actually start using the phone. There are several things to note, and I list them here without any particular order, just as I think of them.
Firstly, you can’t go straight from standby mode to “use” mode the same way you do with any Symbian or Android; and that’s supposing you don’t set any PIN or key for using your SIM card or unlocking your phone. With WP8, you have to “withdraw” two “curtains”: first you need to get past the standby screen (they call it glance) either by pushing the power button or by double-tapping the display, and then slide up the lock screen (which shows some basic, configurable information like date, pending messages and calls, strength and type of signal, battery, etc.). Only once you’ve removed both screens you’re presented with the home tyled screen, characteristic of both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. It’s pretty where Bill Gates wants to lead us, isn’t it?
Then, unlike Android or Symbian OSes, WP8 gives us only one start screen, scrollable up and down, where we pin our favorite apps’ tiles (each providing three different sizes for three different kinds of “live” information). We can always access this screen by pressing the central haptic button (the one with the Windows 8 logo on it). Then, sliding the start screen to the left, we come to the app list: a very unpractical single-colum list with all the apps we have in the phone, followed by their name or description in huge letters, not adjustable, that any short sighted granny can well read. This design means a huge waste of space and, along with the lack of a virtual slider (which WP8 seems to have wholly disregarded), makes the search for applications noticeably bothersome compared with Android or Symbian: in the same screenshot the two latter hold twenty apps, the former barely shows eight or ten.
The right haptic button is, perhaps, one of the most annoying features in WP8: it not only tends to stand always in the middle of every movement of the fingers we make, thus being often hit by accident, but also serves to no other purpose than marketing Microsoft’s Bing search engine, as it just opens a Bing browser; quite a useless and redundant feature if we consider that, for that matter, we can all the same pin a browser tile to the start screen. Actually, I find this “feature” somewhat offensive or even fraudulent; a total waste of a precious haptic button, serving Microsoft’s interests instead of the user’s. Quite a deal for Bill Gates, isn’t it? He desn’t need to pay for publicity: we pay him for it. Sure, this “dedicated” Bing browser is useful for reading QR codes and finding the title of playing music, but again we can easily achieve that with apps pinned to the start screen. And… if only the search button were placed in the left!, at least we wouldn’t hit it so often accidentally; but that’s exacly why it’s there: Microsoft wants us to hit it as often as possible.
Finally, the left haptic button, return, being the most used one, it’s also the hardest to tap single-handed. Unles you’re long fingered, you’ll have to use your left hand or really stretch your right thumb… for accidentally hitting the search button instead. The return button works very much like in a browser: it takes us to wherever we were before, and very often it’s the only way to collapse the popup keyboard.
By the way: you cannot set the haptic buttons to not vibrate, which means a forceful waste of energy: bad news for a device so short of battery life.
So far, so bad. I can’t really see what kind of customers is Microsoft targetting with WP8 phones. Upgrading for losing features seems to me utterly absurd. Perhaps it’s a matter of fashion, or exploiting the inexhaustible vein of human idiocy… unless all WP8 users aim the exactly same goal as me: HERE maps.
Another negative side about WP8 phones is the strong restrictions Microsoft puts onto the applications, most of all when it comes to filesystem access. They’re paranoid about this, and there is practically no access to its filesystem. Microsoft’s staff have done a good job to protect and encrypt it, hackers being at a loss here. Conclusion: there is no way of file exploring except for three or four accessible folders, and this has two main negative consequences: first, if  you download a file for which you happen to have no associated app (let’s say you download a .pdf before you installed a .pdf reader), you’ll never again find that file, and you won’t be able to delete it either. Second, you can’t perform filesystem cleaning tasks, so that the amount of garbage we usually collect through normal daily use is always increasing, quickly eating up the scarce storage room available (more on this later). In my unit, after one month of usage, a “dump” category called other by the storage check app is close to 1 Gb, and no way deleting it except for some shoddy, indirect and bothersome means.
Or let’s go for the settings. Instead of a tree with ten or fifteen main categories holding subcategories, like the well thought and practical Android, or even the less friendly Symbian (whose learning curve is steep but, once you get used to it, turns out to be quite usable), Windows Phone has a setting menu with 54 (!!) categories, divided in two groups not logically related: system and applications, whose elements are, in turn, sorted out in vertical lists without any logical or alphabetical criteria whatsoever, through which you have to slowly scroll for making sure you don’t miss the one you’re looking for. This is extremely bothersome and non-functional. For instance, a category named “store” is, counterintuitively, listed under applications instead of under system, same as “wallet”, “phone” or “background tasks” categories. Who on earth would expect to find “background tasks” within the applications group and not within the system group? Inversely, categories like  ”email accounts”, “internet sharing”, “kids corner” or “company apps”–to name just a few–which should go within applications are, however, listed under system. WTF???
Yet another mis-design is the bizarre lack of a call tile taking us directly to a dial pad. While in every other phone on the planet you can acces the dial pad with just one single press of this or that key, on WP8 phones you need two or three presses: first the haptic home button, then the phone tile, and then the keypad icon. And, to make things worse, WP8′s default keypad can’t be used to dial a contact’s name by tapping on the letters that come alongside the numbers: you can read the letters there, but they’re good for nothing. Fortunately there’s an app (Phone dialer) that substitutes this features.
As you can see, there’s no shortage of missing features in Windows Phones. It’s an almost endless list, and I can’t go through all of it here. So, I’ll mention just four or five among the most annoying.
For instance, the lack of a notification area, like most other smartphone OSes have; or the WP8 limitation preventing any tile from directly changing the settings: instead, a tile can only give you a shortcut to the setting to be changed, so that you need two key presses where every other phone needs only one; or the other limitation for background tasks when in “battery saving” mode: you don’t get background notifications except for SMS and calls; so, if someone sends you a Whatsapp or Skype message, or an email, you won’t notice until you unlock the screen and open the corresponding app. This way, if you don’t want to miss your contacts’ knocks on you, you’ll have to give up battery saving. Again, Microsoft, WTF??
To finish this section, I’ll talk about one of the biggest issues I find in WP8: the keyboard. It’s the worst that I’ve ever dealt with. Designed after this maximal-minimalistic kind of style with which Microsft seems to have re-invented the hot water, the OS’s keyboard is both unpractical for typing and bothersome for watching the application behind it: despite the Lumia 925′s generous screen space, the keyboard lacks some direct basic signs (question and exclamation marks for instance) and, worst of all, its lower row is totally misplaced to the right, so that you find the B almost underneath the J. If you’re used to blind typing you’ll find the experience on a WP8 very odd, as keys supposed to be pressed with the left thumb are noticeably closer to the right one. And, to top the bill, there is an unnecessary stripe, unnecessarily wide, above the upper row for presenting us the writing suggestions, whose undesired side effect is to hide from our sight an important part of the application running behind.
Enough of this. Only a last word to notice that I haven’t even started talking about the apps themselves, most of them lacking features they have for Symbian, Android and iOS. Perhaps the most notable of these is WP8′s Skype app, with which you can’t send SMSs. Funny enough, by the way, Skype also belongs to Microsoft.
Usability. The device.
Lumia 925′s call quality is–in my experience–quite good, compared to both the Nokia C7 or the LG Optimus Black. Voice through the earpiece sounds clean, undistorted and crisp, without background white noise. But that’s as good as it gets, because there are two big, BIG flaws that I find unacceptable and unforgivable about this phone: 2G data transmission and storage memory.
Whatever its origin–hardware or software–the poor creature can’t establish a 2G connection even in strong signal conditions. In the same spot where a C7 or an Optimus Black take five seconds to synchronize mail or messengers, the Microsoft Lumia 925 is a helpless failure, taking sometimes up to ten minutes to connect!, only to finally give up. This phone scores here an absolute zero. No problem with 3G, however. But 2G uses less power and it’s better for normal voice calls; not to talk about where 3G isn’t available. No, no, no, Microsoft. Your Nokia division boys have done a very poor job there, mostly when taking into account that this is supposed to be a flagship phone: it shouldn’t have any problems working with data over 2G. At least, not where an outdated Android Froyo or a relegated Symbian Belle do the same job flawlessly. So, trying to chat, to download a text message, to connect to the Market or to search Bing over 2G is a very frustrating experience.
About Lumia 925′s storage, the device ships a chip with just 16,000,000 bytes (which is only 15.2 GB ) for holding the operating system itself (which eats up to 2,6 GB!!!), plus the apps, plus whatever maps and pictures we’ll store (and remember that the default photo we take with the built-in camera will be 8.7 Mpixels big), plus any music or video we’d eventually play on our phone… Definitely there’s a severe shortage of storage room, considering the average use of a smartphone nowadays. So, as I don’t see any reason for not shipping 32 GB or at least a microSD expansion slot, I strongly believe that this phone’s memory has been deliberately undersized to force us to use SkyDrive. Actually, it’s no little coincidence that, along with the small storage, comes an aggressive marketing campaign for promoting Skydrive. Bill Gates doesn’t want us to store things on the phone, but on his servers, wherefrom he can collect and sell the information to the best bidder. So, have this in mind when you buy a WP8 in general, and the Lumia 925 in particular: you’ll be contributing to the success of the data business and, perhaps, population control.
Another very negative side of this Lumia: its battery life is deplorable. Utterly disappointing when it comes to practical use. Sure, if you put the handset in either offline (flight) or sleep modes and battery saving activated, then it lasts around two weeks. Great job, Microsoft! But… did any of  you buy a Lumia 925 for storing it two weeks within a drawer in flight mode? Nope, you didn’t. Similarly, if you just use it as a phone, i.e., only for 2G call time, battery life is also acceptable: you can get four or five days without recharging. Quite good, but then again… would any of you buy this phone for just using it as a phone? Probably not. When you spend 350 € in a piece of hardware like this you want to get the most of it: chat, browse the web, use VOIP, videoconference, listen to music, play videos, check email, use HERE maps and other positioning apps, etc. And now is when I have bad news for you: only two hours of Whatsapp chatting over 2G will totally drain a full battery. I don’t know if this is a Whatsapp issue or a Lumia one, but whomever fault is, I can’t accept it. Other web applications don’t drain the battery so quickly but, in general, with any kind of internet use this device won’t render more than five hours in the best of scenarios. Doing exactly the same things with the Nokia C7 I get three day’s use, and two days with the LG Optimus Black.
And that’s it for now. Here you have your Microsoft Lumia 925, folks. True, some things are really cool. Glance is cool. The stability of WP8 is cool, but only at the cost of forbidding the apps to do many things they can do in other environments.
You’ve realized that I’ve left behind, in this review, some typical sections as multimedia capabilities, camera quality or extended information about call quality. This was intentional: there are out there dozens of professional reviews that will give you extense and reliable information about those topics, much better than what I can offer. My main point was to talk about those things most other reviews never mention. Please feel free to comment anything constructive. On my side, I can only say one last concluding and significant word: my Microsoft Lumia 925 is for sale.