Battery & operating system

Battery life

I have now used the phone for a week and have been monitoring the battery life. Compared to the S II, the Lumia 800 has a smaller battery, but also a smaller display and a less power consumpting hardware. So how does the battery perform?

The S II has a battery of 1650 mAh, where the Lumia has 1450 mAh. I have to say, that the battery life I get for my "regular" usage on the S II is noticeably longer. The Lumia 800 performed for only about 9 hours on a rather heavy usage.

The S II has pushed it as far as 3.5 hours of display on time and almost 15 hours on battery until 1 % left. The Lumia gets 13 hours easily if you don't hassle with it too much, but for a power user like me, 9 hours is not enough. At least I would have to carry the charger with me always. Talking of the charger, you get quite a long USB cable that plugs to the adapter which goes to your power outlet.


The USB cord is long and the adapter very small

I don't like this implementation, as I like to keep the charger plugged in always and have the extension cord hidden under my bed. That way I would need another USB cable for data transfer or another charger.

Depending on the use of the phone will determine the battery life for each individual user. There are too many variables that affect to the battery life, so don't take my results as if they were engraved to the bedrock.

Operating system

Now the real fun starts. Windows Phone operating system, what a candy to your eyes.

Windows Phone is a great OS. It runs smoothly and is snappy even on a less powerful hardware. Nowadays the phones centralize too much to the specs on paper rather than to the real performance. Optimizating will do a great job in providing a solid user experience, but it feels that the manufacturers have lost interest in optimizing and are just rushing more and more phones on the market.

I've been using the dual core "Android phone market-leader" for almost a year now, and I have to say that Windows Phone runs better on the hardware of the Lumia than Android on dual core. Just on a sidenote, the firmware on the phone has been Gingerbread, which doesn't have proper support for dual cores. That means the phone hasn't been able to perform as well as it could have.

Apps

I have noticed that the apps on the Lumia 800 open slower than on the S II. Even when an app is already running, opening it again from the tile on the home screen takes as long as opening it the first time. If I return to it from the multitasking menu, it opens instantly.

Some apps for Windows Phone feel a little unfinished and some of them are really a pain in the butt. They do what they're made to do, but the user experience suffers a great deal when the application misbehaves. The Nokia Music application is a nice music player, but in some parts it's very inconsistent. I have explored three different views for the album song list and two different now-playing views, which will make your head spin around wondering where you are now.


The Nokia Music -player is too inconsistent

Social media integration

As you might already know, Windows Phone users enjoy a very deep integration of social media services. You get Facebook, Twitter and Windows Live feed in the People hub, which also serves as your contacts app. The UI really works, but in the official Twitter app you get slight loading delays that prevent swiping from a screen to another. This, though, will go away as soon as the Tweets have been loaded.

You can select each source to be viewed individually if you have added an acocunt, or view them all in the same feed.


Some Facebook feed

Real performance

Sometimes while inputting text you can see that it's obviously doing someting on the background, or just jamming for no reason. If you're typing, you'll see the letters after a fraction of a second. This is by no means anything big, but as the text input is most of the time solid and the keyboard responds to keyhits immediately, it can be a little confusing at times.

Memory handling is absolutely awesome. The phone has just 512 MB of RAM, which seems to be enough. I have had multiple tabs open in the browser and something else going on in the front, and there's absolutely no impact whatsoever to the performance. Despite that, I have experienced redrawing a couple of times when scrolling down the tiles on the start screen.

Angry Birds, the game that has been known to work butterly smoothly on any device, lags on Windows Phone. Why this is, I don't really care, but seems like that Rovio didn't have much time to optimize the game for Windows Phone.

Settings

There are not much settings and everything is quite straight forward. However, what I am missing greatly are Wifi and cellular network shortcuts. If you wish to save battery, it's wise to turn off Wifi search when you're not around your Wifi access point. Doing this from the settings is a bit annoying, as there is a better way to implement this. Also the Wifi signal icon doesn't show the signal strength in real time, so it'll lie to your face.

Features

Like iOS, you can't send files through bluetooth, so you'll have to use your computer or cloud services to get the files on the phone. Also setting any sound file as ringtone is not possible. Nokia has had these features supported before, so I don't think that the users will adjust to this very well, at least I'm not too pleased. Also the USB OTG (On The Go) feature is missing, as Windows Phone doesn't support mass memory mode and doesn't have a file manager either.

Notifications will be displayed on the bottom of the lockscreen as small icons representing the application which has received a notification. Facebook message and SMS notifications will be viewed on the top of the display as they arrive, where you can tap to view, swipe right to dismiss or simply ignore it as it will disappear itself after a while. The notification will push through the lockscreen, so the display will turn on and you can unlock the phone to view, but in order to view an arrived SMS, first you need to tap on the notification, and then slide the lockscreen up. After that the SMS app will open up.

Notifications on the start screen will add a number of new notifications next to the app's icon in the tile.

There's no profile switcher, but you can switch silent mode on by first pressing the volume button and then tapping on the circle on the top right corner from the window that slides down.
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NIKO April 4 2012
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