The official tablet (and other useless electronics) thread!

[Ken]

So the digitizer on my HTC Evo 3D started to flake out (after less than a year and a half...lame)
and coincidentally Ive been jonesin to experiment with some different phones anyway since android is starting to feel very stale.
my contract is (long since) up, and I ported my primary number to google voice so that gives me some flexibility to try a bunch of different stuff under prepaid plans without making a long term commitment.

So I picked up a Nokia Lumia 900 a couple weeks ago and have been playing around with it.


Its windows phone 7.5, not the newest winphone 8 that just came out unfortunately but it should give me a good idea what winphone in general is like.

the hardware is nice and the amoled screen REALLY pops, especially with the high contrast design of win phone. if youre into 'style' of your phone, its got a great industrial design. the polycarbonate case feels solid and bulletproof too.

I wont go into too much detail about win phone, but to sum it up, its a very good, intuitive and very fast OS. (even despite the older single core processor) with some drawbacks.

the good:
as stated above its very fast, fluid and intuitive. live tiles are a step beyond even widgets and its great to get everything you need in a quick glance at the phone.
i havent been left wanting for any apps, especially if im willing to pay $1 for something. And there are some apps that are better than other OSes.
Nokia music is like free pandora, but you can download a station into offline mode and listen to it without a connection. very cool
Nokia drive is a navigation app, but you can download maps for offline use. maps of the whole country, making it a real offline nav unit that works even when you hit that data dead spot.
IE is very fast, even faster than chrome mobile despite the slower processor. drawback is changing tabs takes an extra tap which is annoying

the bad
Nokia maps is a passable google maps alternative, but the maps dont have quite the resolution and its a little sluggish.
the win phone email app is terrible. far and away the worst part of the phone experience (and really the only bad part) It uses fonts that are way too big only 5 emails are visible on screen at a time and threaded viewing is clunky and takes too many taps. i need to play with winphone 8 to see if they have fixed this, but its a shame because everything else is very good, but email is a major use of a phone so it really kills the experience.


it was a fun experiment but I dont think ill keep this phone as my "daily driver" for much longer. as stale and boring as android is, its comfortable and does what i need it to do relatively quickly, so ill probably go back.

next experiment: google voice+voip on an android phone with a cheap data only plan

I have the 920, i guess i see your point about the e-mail only showing 5 at a time but the font size can be changed if that's an issue. I actually like the threaded viewing, removes cluster of the same e-mail being shown over and over again.

Overall though i love it, everything works perfectly and with the Snapdragon processor everything moves quickly. Camera is outstanding, tested the stabilization feature they touted by shaking my hand as a i took pictures and the results were pretty impressive.

Haven't gotten a chance to mess with the Xbox SmartGlass yet, looks cool though. I love the live-tiles as well, great to not have to click into the app.

Battery life has been great, i watch netflix during my lunch on it for almost an hour and i still get about 16hr life out of it. Love how it seamlessly syncs up with my music, honestly a big portion of why i switched from android. hated not having my playlists copy over without some dumb app. Even cooler that when playing it has artist pictures and such in the background. The Dolby Equalizer actually makes a difference too, so that's appreciated.

All in all, an awesome phone, especially for the relatively low price paid.