Lumia 920 days 2-5 review

I’m getting settled in to using the Lumia 920 as my daily phone. In some ways this is a big change, but in other ways it isn’t, as I’d been using the Lumia 800 a fair amount over the last few months as an alternate device.

Let me start by talking about connectivity. I’m not talking about just network connectivity, although that so far has been excellent. Even on AT&T’s crappy Bay Area network, I have yet to have a call drop or data service outage, even in notorious bad spots like right across the street from Pizz’a Chicago. No, I’m talking about physical and sync connectivity, beginning with sync connectivity.

I miss wireless sync; at least with Mac OS X, WP8 devices have to physically be plugged in to sync. The Windows Phone connector software has flaked out on me a few times this week. First it refused to sync anything at all, with only a useless error saying that some items couldn’t be synced. This turned out to be because of the OS X sandboxing feature, which prevents the WP connector from accessing music in the iTunes library folder. It’s easy to fix with the “Allow Access to Folder” command, but finding this out required a tedious slog through Microsoft’s support forum. Then yesterday, after updating to Office 2011 14.2.5, the WP connector started crashing each time I plugged the phone in. Back to the forum I went, where I found this article… that turned out not to be the problem. I posted the issue to the forum but haven’t gotten a response yet.

(At this point, lest you think me a hater, I would point out that Apple has exactly the same terrible support process: find an issue, post a plaintive query in their support forums, and hope that someone can help you out– or, alternatively, trek to the store and see if they can help you.)

Now, about the physical connection– the Lumia 920 uses a micro-USB connector. This is perfectly OK with me, as I have other devices that use the same connector, and I have Bluetooth audio streaming in my car. However, the port on the 920 is a little finicky; you have to push the connector firmly into it to ensure that it actually charges, as I found when I awoke one morning and found the phone dead because it hadn’t charged overnight while plugged in.

And speaking of battery life: I’d have to label it adequate. I get about a day’s worth of use, meaning that I leave home in the morning with a full charge and usually need to give the phone a snack sometime between 5 and 8 pm to get a full day’s use. This is essentially what I was getting from the iPhone 4, although the 920 has a bigger screen and LTE. Seems like a fair trade.

Oh, and one more miscellaneous hardware issue: the 920 screen shows fingerprints and smudges much more than the iPhone or Lumia 800. This is a bit annoying, but easily remedied.

The apps I’ve been using have continued to work well. I love the way that the Photos live tile displays my airplane photos; the motion of the live tile looks slick. The Facebook app has a number of annoyances, like insisting on scrolling up to the top of my news feed after I comment on or like any item in the feed.

My limited experience with the newly-released Skype app has been positive: it works well and looks good, though I haven’t tried it for any video calls yet.

The only app-related complaint I have involves Bluetooth music playback in the car: the phone will sometimes freeze for up to a minute. During that time I see the lock screen background, with nothing drawn on it, and the phone’s not responsive to the hardware controls, nor do the stereo controls trigger any action. This has happened three times so far, all at times when I got in the car, started it, and wanted to listen to music. I’m not sure what’s going on with it, but it’s definitely annoying.

Now, on to this installment of “Really?”: things that aren’t present in the hardware or software but really should be. I noticed that WP8 doesn’t seem to have a screen rotation lock, which is a bit of a hassle. I still really miss the hardware mute switch of the iPhone line. In fact, I will continue to miss it for a long time because of the ridiculous way that WP8 implements volume, at least as far as I can tell. If I turn the volume to mute so that the phone vibrates for alerts, that also turns off all sounds for everything on the phone– including Bluetooth audio and even listening to a voicemail message on the internal speaker. Phone calls aren’t affected, though, but this seems like a ridiculous design. I haven’t checked to see if there’s a separate volume level for headphone use, but I bet there isn’t.

Luckily alarms are unaffected, which reminds me of another missing feature: the ability to wake to music by setting a song as an alarm.

Tomorrow I’m flying to Huntsville, without my iPhone, so we’ll see how the WP8 experience stacks up for travel use. I’ve got MyTrips (a TripIt client) and the American Airlines app all loaded, so I expect good things.