First two weeks with the Lumia 920

A few quick notes jotted down from my two-week exploration with the Lumia 920 as my primary phone:

• LTE is awesome, and the WP8 tethering app works flawlessly, with none of the flakiness of the corresponding iOS app.
• There’s no TaxiMagic app for WP8, so I grabbed my iPhone 4 this morning to book a taxi. It felt tiny compared to the 920.. but it also felt terribly slow. Granted, the iPhone 4 is two hardware generations (at least) behind the 920, but I’d always previously been satisfied with its speed.
• The Bluetooth crackling I complained about seems to be a bug in the Nokia Music app; it doesn’t happen when using Xbox Music or the built-in music app.
• The Mac sync tool is buggy. Really, really buggy. This is my biggest current frustration with the phone, although since it automatically uploads pictures to SkyDrive at least I can grab photos without too much hassle. It occurred to me that I might want to use the Windows sync tool in BootCamp instead of relying on the Mac client, but then I’d have to give up iPhoto and iTunes integration.
• Only today did I discover the very cool Groups feature, which allows you to see all status updates for a subset of your contacts from a single tile.
• The WP Evernote app seems to have a bug where, when you edit a note, you get a blank white screen with no note contents. I’m not sure what causes this or whether it’s known, as I haven’t really had time to dig into it yet.
• Nokia’s Panorama app is superb: it is super easy to take panoramic pictures with great alignment, through the expedient of showing a hollow circle that you align with a solid concentric circle. This works really well– here’s an example of a panorama I shot at the I-20 rest area in Vicksburg.

Although I briefly considered swapping the 920 for an HTC 8X, I decided not to for three primary reasons. First, the 920’s screen looks better to me– blacks and colors both look better on the 920. Second, Nokia’s bundled (and supported) apps are better– Panorama, SmartShot, Nokia Music, and Nokia Drive are great examples of how they’re adding value for their users. Third, the 920’s wireless charging feature would greatly simplify my phone usage– or at least it has that potential, once Nokia ships the plates.

Oh, and as long as I’m fantasizing about future developments: it would be great to get a full-fledged Starbucks app one day… sigh.