Nokia Lumia 920 First Impressions

So, after eagerly awaiting the Nokia event in New York for the last couple of weeks it's finally all over.

I currently use a Nokia Lumia 800, I love the Windows Phone 7.5 OS (although I'm painfully aware of some of it's limitations), and was hoping to see a raft of features on offer that would have me taking a hammer to the piggy bank.

The hammer, I'm sad to say, is staying in the garage for a while.

The Lumia 920 is indeed an excellent looking phone, and from as much as we've been told ticks most, if not all, of the boxes for me. Except one.

Whilst Windows Phone 8 (re)introduces support for SD cards, and there is an MicroSD card slot on the mid-range Lumia 820, this is sadly lacking on the 920.

Why?

Don't get me wrong, the 32Gb of on-board memory is quite good, but I fear on a phone that I hope to keep using for at least two years this will get filled up pretty quickly.

I've had the Lumia 800 since early this year and I'm already at the stage where purchased applications take up the lions share of internal memory, leaving me limited space for music and movies. I regularly see a "not enough space" message when updating the libraries for the following day. This is a situation I can only see getting worse with the new applications that will begin to appear.

Sure, the Lumia 920 features double the memory of my Lumia 800, but it's still not enough, especially considering that the new screen is begging to be used to view movies.

So 32Gb of memory will lead to compromises, whilst 32Gb with a MicroSD slot and a card of 64Gb (or possibly higher in the future?) giving 96Gb of space would lead to... well, fewer compromises (yes I really do have that much music, and it's not always possible/practical to stream music).

So the Lumia 920 is still in the running, especially if the Nokia software bundle is as strong as it has been on the current models, but this one seemingly simple omission has got me considering alternatives. It's not the no-brainer I was hoping it would be.

I wonder how that Samsung Ativ S will turn out...

WPF Phone

I can already hear the iPhone owners: "Windows Phone 7 UI is a copy of the iPhone UI". I will understand this, but it's only looking at the UI from the perspective of an iPhone user.

I've not used an iPhone, primarily because I know that however good the OS looks (and it does look good), it doesn't offer the features I want (neither does Windows Phone 7, as mentioned many times before). However I was just browsing through a few screenshots of apps on the iTunes web pages and one thing repeatedly kept hitting me: "These apps look like they were written in WPF!"

WPF has been around since (AFAICR) the release of Vista, and at that time, as far as I was aware, Microsoft weren't trying to ape the iPhone UI to the desktop (although I dare say some inspiration was drawn from there, as is the nature with these things, although reading some of the documentation and tutorials on WPF I would say they were after a version of HTML for creating Windows clients originally).

WPF is the brother to Silverlight (with the alleged intention apparently to end up with a single technology at some point)

And  of course Windows Phone 7 is based on Silverlight and XNA.

I can see where this is going...

On an aside, several years ago there were hot rumours of Microsoft going into competition with the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS. I can't think of any device they are scheduled to launch in the fall that may be doing this...

It's been argued before, but finally I can see mobile killing the likes of the PSP and DS. Perhaps it's a shame NGage never caught on after all.

ECommerce Done Bad.

I was recently sent an email from Nokia telling me they’d created an account for me at their Nokia Music site and credited it with £4, which works out at about 5 free tracks at the 79 pence each they charge. So I promptly flagged it for looking at later and forgot all about it.

It’s now a couple of weeks later and I decided to log into this account I never asked for to see what gems I could find, my ultimate goal being to find an old classic album and download the lot for my free £4.

After installing their odd software (which I wouldn’t normally do, but since I will be re-installing the operating system on this machine shortly I’m not too bothered), I managed to browse around their store, but to my disappointment no albums could be found for less than £7.99, and no individual tracks for less than 79 pence.

So basically, CDs which I could got into HMV and buy for £3 will cost me over twice as much, without the physical expense of a tangible product which I could (arguably) format shift onto MP3 anyway.

So I’ve decided to spend my £4, then never return unless they ever decide to give me more free credit, at which point I may repeat the process if I can be bothered. The design of the site itself is not intuitive and it took me just under 5 minutes to work out how to download the tracks I’d selected. If I’m confused, what’s Mr. Average Joe going to do.

Sorry Nokia, but your store deserves to fail on both price and design.

And that brings me onto the second part of my rant – the greed of the music companies.

I used to have some sympathy for the record labels, after all they often spend large amounts of money promoting new groups, and don’t always get it back. But their business model for electronic delivery is just crazy.

When CDs came out we were told how they would be cheaper than Vinyl or cassette as the breakage rate would fall and they would become super cheap to manufacture. This did eventually happen, but only after the percentage ‘reserved’ by the publishers for these breakages was doubled from the previous formats, and only in recent times since imports via the web, and the demand for music has dropped has price followed suit.

Why has demand dropped? I’d guess that there’s just too much choice for other ways to spend our cash now, be that DVDs, video games, or any number of fancy gadgets that simply didn’t exist ten years ago.

I’m wrong of course, it’s actually down to all the pirates out there illegally downloading music for free from drug dealing gangs to make more money. Silly me.

I’d imagine any gang dealing in drugs that makes more money through distributing torrents for free is probably not that big a risk for the DEA. Of course, I understand there needs to be methods for money laundering used by these imaginary gangs, but I always assumed the point of these was using a legitimate business as a front, not another ‘criminal’ activity, after all, what would be gained? How silly I am…

So instead I’ll pay £7.99 for an electronic copy of an album I could get cheaper on CD anywhere else, or pay 79 pence for a single of one track, when I could have four or more tracks on a CD single for £2.

Except I won’t, I’m not that silly after all.