Jan Leow's Press Blog


My Nokia Lumia 925 Windows Phone

Finally, I have decided to upgrade to Nokia Lumia 925 Windows Phone 8 having used my Lumia 800 for about a year and a half. The Lumia 800 was running on WP 7.8 and it wasn’t supporting the new apps and I really want to use those apps (plus a few other features)!

The jump over came when Nokia made a promotional offer at RM1,099 which was quite a huge drop from RM1,599! I was actually mulling about whether to go for the Lumia 1320 but felt it was too large with a 6” screen (there was an offer from it too but the price drop wasn’t as much). The 925 has a 4.5” screen was more handier friendly plus it has some good camera features too.

My Nokia Lumia 925 Windows Phone 8

The only issue with that offer was the phone has to be white. The black and grey was not available. Still white was quite nice though it will get dirty pretty soon! The offer was kinda special direct from Nokia and no other shop I tried could match that price plus the Nokia retail shop could also accept payment by credit card where most could only accept cash payment.

Setting up my Nokia Lumia 925

Setting my Nokia Lumia 925 was quite a breeze and this time round there was no language issue for this region. My previous Lumia 800 I had to set the country to USA or Singapore in order to get English language to show which was kinda stupid. There were many complaints in Europe too where the owner wasn’t a native speaker like if they didn’t speak French but they couldn’t change the settings to English! This time round there wasn’t this issue but just to be safe I set it to Singapore for now.

As for contacts data, since I keep most of my contact data in the cloud it was just a matter of syncing it. It should have been a breeze but unfortunately it didn’t work. Either Google didn’t play nice and disabled the ability to sync with Windows Phone or Microsoft didn’t get their APIs right. All I got was Error code: 8007000E, “Your phone doesn’t have enough memory to sync information at the moment”. There was no workaround for this and the only way to get my contacts was to transfer it all to my Outlook People account, which meant I have to maintain 2 sets of contacts data if I want my Android phone and Windows phone to have the same contacts data. I didn’t have any issue on contact syncing on my old Lumia 800. And when I tried it with Google Apps contacts, it worked. So something else may be at fault here. Checking online, some people mentioned that it could be the contact photos that was causing this error. However I’m not about to go through my 1,000 plus contacts just to see if it will resolve this issue. Then again it might not work, so I just end up having to maintain 2 sets of contacts data for now.

Being catching up on age, my eyesight were what it used to be. So the ability to use larger fonts for messaging and email was a plus point. My old Nokia Lumia 800 didn’t have this ability. After using my Lumia 925 for sometime, I tried my older phone and realised that font was really tiny! How on earth did I managed it then?

Email in Lumia

One thing about the email program, it works well with any email account. I have no issues with Gmail, Google Apps, Yahoo! Mail, and of course Microsoft very own Outlook/Live/Hotmail email account. And one of the features I liked is the ability to separate out the unread mail for better work efficiency. The Android Gmail app didn’t have this feature and I haven’t found a good Android email program that can do this so far.

Oh, a mobile phone must be able to do what it was designed for in the first place, making calls! It works well and no problem with its integration with the contacts. Though in the messaging section, sometimes it wasn’t able to group the same contact message in one conversation thread. Could be a bug somewhere in it is ability to recognize the number to sort into the correct message thread.

With LTE/4G data connection I could surf the internet pretty quick. However I do wonder why I get better internet data connection using LTE than WIFI. For some strange reason it struggles with my home WIFI signal. My house walls are causing a bit of a havoc for WiFi coverage but I don’t have this WiFi connection problem with my Samsung Note 2 in my house.

Apps, Marketplace comparison between Android, Apple and Windows

Amongst the three smartphone brands that I’m playing around with namely, Android, Windows Phone and Apple iPhone, the downloading and updating of apps store for Windows Phone is pretty quick. Of these 3, Apple iPhone apps store has the slowest download connection. So I’m pretty satisfied with the apps server connection.

Granted that Windows Phone still has a lot of catching up when it comes to apps especially against Google Android and Apple’s iPhone, as well as developers not paying too much attention to updating and fixing their apps in Windows Phone, I still could find some fairly good apps. Since not all phones platforms are the same, some apps work better based on the developer’s knack for designing their app software.

At least now I could get my hands on WAZE and Instagram! Especially Waze GPS navigation with its real time traffic information, helps me a lot to get to my destination and avoiding traffic congestion where possible. The Nokia Here Maps traffic reporting is not available in my country making it function like a normal GPS navigational device like Gamin or Papago. With Waze, I could circumnavigate around the traffic snarl. Yeah!

Mobile Camera and Photo taking

And finally, the camera, 8.7MP may not sound like much, but it is not the megapixels that count nowadays for a good camera. If you really want super high megapixels you should go for Lumia 1020 whopping 41 megapixel camera! As a casual photographer, I don’t want such a big MP as that would take up a lot of storage space. The 8.7MP camera makes a 3552 x 2000 pixel photo with an average size of 2.5 MB size per photo taken. The clarity is really great with the Carl Zeiss lens. Windows Phone takes photo by tapping it on the phone display where you want the camera to focus on. This may make it a little slower when it comes to capturing photos compared with Samsung which pre-focus first but you get to choose where you want it to focus. In my Note 2, I can tap elsewhere on the screen to focus on an object, but it would soon centre its focus back to the middle again.

One nifty thing about Nokia mobile camera, you can download special lenses for taking more interesting photos. One of my favourite is the Microsoft Photosynth for capturing a 360 degrees picture and the Panorama lens. With the Panorama lens, I don’t have to rely on the Google Picasa auto-awesome for creating Panoramas, which don’t create Panoramas when I want it. Rather than based on my luck for it to happen, the Lumia 925 just creates it. Of course I could download an app from Google play store for my Android phone, since I have it in my Lumia 925, why not use it instead?

By and by, I am quite pleased with using this Nokia 925 phone despite having less apps than Android or Apple, it could still find a mark in the smartphone market if Microsoft gets it right.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Blue Captcha Image
Refresh

*

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.