Ryan Brodie

The iPhone was more important than the iPad ever will be.

When the iPad was unveiled back in January 2010, the media were underwhelmed, but consumers still queued in line. It’s success has been unprecedented, but for me it’ll always be an evolution next to the iPhone. As I sit here in a station waiting for a train, everyone around me is using their phone. Not T9 dumb phones, but touchscreen smart phones. People are playing Angry Birds, reading Tweets, and checking the news.

5 years ago browsing the internet on your phone was so intolerable that even the most savvy of users didn’t go near it. In 2012, Americans spend more time browsing Facebook from their phone than from their desktop PC. Despite what the media say, the successor for the PC won’t be the tablet.

It’s already been superseded by the smartphone.

Follow Ryan Brodie on Twitter, @rysle, to keep up with his latest posts and projects.

The place where the grass seemed greener. (Nokia Lumia 800 Review)

A few weeks back, as I sat in front of my iMac, admiring it along with my Macbook Air, iPad, iPod and iPhone, something dawned on me: I’m too tied into Apple’s ecosystem. I needed a change from the Cupertino lifestyle, and thought the grass looked greener elsewhere. At the same time Nokia coincidently offered me a Lumia 800, to have, for free. I of course gladly accepted.

First things first, despite sounding very much like a point and shoot camera, the Lumia 800 is in actual fact Nokia’s latest flagship device, the first offering from the Finnish company to run Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 (WP7) operating system. The phone features a 3.7” OLED capacitive display, an 8 megapixel camera, 8 Gb of onboard storage, a 3.5mm headphone jack, HSDPA support, and a 1.4 GHz single core processor, all of which is crammed into a 142g unibody, polycarbonate casing.

Despite myself just listing these, a phones hardware specifications are almost irrelevant these days, what really matters is the software that’s nestled inside it’s black bezel. Windows Phone 7 is a compelling re-imagining of current smart phone operating systems. The biggest change from the norm is it’s truly revolutionary user interface, what Microsoft like to call ‘Metro’. There’s no artistic drop shadows, artistic trickery creating illusions of bygone physical objects, or elements that try to add dimension to the pixels onscreen, just a fresh, simple layout, with a big focus on large type headings and monochromatic, inverted text-on-background colour schemes. It’s nice to finally see originality in this industry, especially from Microsoft.

I’ve been an iPhone user for over 5 years now, so during this process I wanted to be as open minded as possible. I completely moved all of my content to the new phone and made it my primary device. The short of it: I didn’t enjoy this switch. My challenge now is to try and explain exactly where the phone fell down, leading me to this conclusion. There was no startlingly broken or bad features that lead to this, more that there was a lengthy series of fairly small failures that accumulated to this resounding No.

In terms of the basic navigation of the OS, it’s tile home screen paradigm just doesn’t work on a functional level - you feel yourself constantly wanting to go backwards another level to a real home screen every time you return to it. Instead of icons, WP7‘s home screen is a grid of tiles, all of which containing unique and personal information relating to your activity from within each application. This on paper sounds effective at relaying new, important information, but in reality becomes an overly noisy mess with key information being hidden amongst the unimportant.

The badge approach - when a number is displayed on the applications icon to show new activity - is a much more effective method of highlighting this to the user. On OS’s that use this paradigm, users are able to quickly scan the home screen, on WP7 you find yourself devoting far more time than necessary to achieve the same effect. The lack of a notification area, one that delivers a quick overview of all recent messages, email, and calendar appointments, much like those found on iOS and Android, is also sorely missing on WP7.

The phone has 3 capacitive buttons running along the bottom of the handsets front panel; Back, Start, and Search. Start takes you to the discussed tile launch screen, Search to the Bing mobile app, and Back to the previous level or state of the current application. Holding down this Back button takes you to the phones multitasking interface. This presents running applications in a card like manor, very similar to what is seen in WebOS, letting the user quickly jump between ‘running’ applications. Multitasking on phones is an odd being as in reality the applications that are supposedly ‘running’ are most definitely not, they’re actually put into a dormant state. 

This process requires memory allocation by the operating system, but allows applications to be launched far quicker the next time they’re opened. Theres a limit of how many applications can be put into this fast switching state due to the scarcity of RAM available; WP7’s limit is 7. You’d assume therefore that a key function of the multitasking interface would be to kill some of these dormant applications, freeing up memory and saving battery life in the process, but surprisingly no, this infuriatingly isn’t possible from the multitasking switcher. The way the user actually goes about this task is by switching back into the application and then going back to the home screen. This makes as little sense as having Germany share the same currency as Greece in 2011.

My next gripe is Hubs. This is more of a personal preference rather than an actual complaint about the operating system, but is one that became increasingly more annoying when I spent more time with the phone. WP7 combines and amalgamates all of your contacts from your phone book, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, into one ‘People Hub’. This Hub also contains an extremely basic integrated timeline, showing recent user activity, such as photos, wall posts and statuses. I don’t like this integration. Searching through 1500 contacts to call just one number isn’t fun, especially when you quickly find duplicates. 

It doesn’t make any sense to me to include an activity timeline when all 3 of these social networks offer far more powerful downloadable applications from the Marketplace. Other hubs include ‘Photos’ and ‘Me’. The first of which again combines your photos and friends photos from the networking sites into one central location, the second is a combined Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn application that again offers less functionality that the stand alone downloadable applications. The very worst offender of this stupid integration is the ‘Messages’ hub - you’ll go to text someone but instead will Facebook Message them without realising, brilliant.

WP7’s applications rely heavily on an interaction called ‘pivoting’ - swiping from left to right - on doing this, another section of the application is revealed. When theres only 2 sections within an application, pivoting works effectively as you the user is aware of the other section as it’s labelled next to the current one at the top of the screen. It starts to go wrong when applications exceed this number of sections as the oversized label style then means that sections become hidden, often making you not realise that there’s more functionality inside an application than what is visible.

The included Maps application couldn’t correctly locate me (always deciding that I was in a location a mile away from my actual one). The speakers really disappoint, they’re loud yet are distinctly average, producing extremely tinny and flat results. The included browser - Internet Explorer - renders some sites extremely peculiarly, and doesn’t match the speed of the competitions offerings. Bing search, has always been, and always will be, is rubbish. This wouldn’t be an issue if you could change the search button to link to Google, but you can’t. Text selection is overly long winded. Moving the text-cursor is second to selecting entire words - something that is the opposite on iOS and Android for the very good reason that it’s a task done more than the other.

A core part of any touchscreen phone is it’s keyboard. WP7 isn’t necessarily bad, on a basic level it works fine, but it could be greatly improved. On iOS and Android, touchspots for certain keys become bigger when the probability of the user using them next increases. This lets the user type furiously fast yet still achieve perfectly coherent and grammatically correct sentences.

To be truly impartial I need to also mention what’s actually good about this phone, and a lot thankfully is. The overall speed and snappiness of the OS is outstandingly good, especially considering that it’s running on a now last-generation single core processor. It’s a much better experience than on Android phones, where interactions can at times feel laggy, and is definitely on par with iOS. The camera is good, and the bundled application lets the user quickly add fun filters to their photos, Instagram esc. Where the heavy social integration actually works is in such a use case scenario - taking and then sharing a photograph to Facebook takes 2 taps, far better than the equivalent process available on iOS or Android. 

The phones casing, however aesthetically pleasing, is made of polycarbonate, which lends to the device not feeling nearly as precious or valuable as a phone such as the iPhone 4S, which offers far superior materials and build quality. The screen is polarised and in combination with the OLED technology means colour reproduction is particularly good, the resolution however is now subpar when put next to a phone like Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus. I wouldn’t go as far as saying impressive, but the battery life still allowed a full days use without needing a charge, which matches that of the competition. The Zune Marketplace, which offers all-you-can-eat downloads of songs for a very reasonable £8.99 a month, worked well and contains a great selection of music. The phones Marketplace (App Store equivalent) now features over 50000 applications, despite this most are lacking in quality, but the odd gem can still be found.

Despite a recent major update to WP7, dubbed Mango, the OS still feels lacking and half baked. The Lumia 800 is on par with the iPhone and the top end Android phones, in terms of contract prices and handset costs, but just doesn’t seem to offer a comparable user experience. It may be that in a years time Nokia will be offering more competitive and compelling hardware, and that Microsoft will have delivered on making the phones’ OS more feature rich, but until then I can’t recommend this phone, nor WP7 as a platform.

Follow Ryan Brodie on Twitter, @rysle, to keep up with his latest posts and projects.