randomosity

In an effort to keep my mind open to chan­ging tech­no­lo­gies and avoid drink­ing the Mac Fan­boy kool-aid, I have spent the last month using a Nokia Lumia 800 as my primary smart­phone. It has been an eye-opening exper­i­ence and I will say at the out­set I am not yet ready to switch back to my iPhone 4S.

(20 June 2012) I was dis­heartened to learn that Nokia decided to orphan my phone a couple days after writ­ing this. I feel quite short­changed to be hon­est and this stems from com­pli­city between Microsoft and Nokia. As the fol­low­ing dis­cus­sion shows I was very impressed by Mango 7.5 but found that there are some short­com­ings. When I pur­chased this phone I delib­er­ately acquired what was the best WP7.5 phone avail­able. Little did I know its days were already numbered and with the announce­ment of WP8, exist­ing Lumia’s will not have an upgrade path. I have never par­ti­cip­ated in such an inten­tion­ally orphaned plat­form before and feel short­changed for hav­ing made a com­mit­ment to give WP a chance. Appar­ently Nokia was aware on ship­ping that future ver­sion soy the OS would not be sup­port­able on its ship­ping hard­ware. They are selling hard­ware today that will not run the cur­rent soft­ware in a few short months. As a con­sumer — shame on Nokia. I gave them a chance but hon­estly feel that they have not done the same for me. Nokia got my €450, but it is the last they will get from me.

User exper­i­ence is a com­bin­a­tion of the hard­ware, the soft­ware and inter­ac­tion between these and the user him or her­self. I will attempt to address my thoughts to this in sequence. Suf­fice it to say at the out­set, I am very impressed and find that there is a fine bal­ance between pos­it­ives and negatives.

The hard­ware is superb and I have been sur­prised by the aspects of the oper­at­ing sys­tem that have really appealed to me. I will admit at the out­set to being a long term Apple user, but one that attempts to explore other man­u­fac­tur­ers as well as hope­fully some­what circumspect.To that end I want to gig Win­dows Phone 7.5 as fair a judge­ment as pos­sible and dis­miss as many pre-existing notions arising from past exper­i­ence. I was a happy Win­dows XP user on IBM Think­pads while OSX was rudi­ment­ary and really out in the wil­der­ness. How­ever, it is often the com­bin­a­tion of the hard­ware and soft­ware deliv­er­ing a total pack­age that has appealed and to that end I am basing this judge­ment on the spe­cific com­bin­a­tion of Microsoft Win­dows Phone 7.5 as delivered on a Nokia Lumia 800. This is also not meant to be an exhaust­ive review and com­par­ison of fea­tures between plat­forms. It is merely a quick com­pil­a­tion of things I like and things I don’t like about the phone and platform.

Hard­ware — The Nokia Lumia 800

Firstly, a quick note on the hard­ware. To my mind, it is nearly per­fect for me. I have but two quibbles: the rocker but­ton on the volume and the cam­era but­ton are jig­gly and mar an oth­er­wise solid feel to the device and the cam­era lens is very eas­ily smudged and accu­mu­lates mois­ture. The but­tons, well, that is fit and fin­ish, but in terms of the cam­era I sus­pect it is the lens pos­i­tion on the unit. I rarely found myself rub­bing or grip­ping the iPhone lens and I sus­pect this is because it is well posi­tioned in the corner of the phone. The Lumia pos­i­tion is right in the centre and a ser­i­ous ‘grip zone’ and is rather exposed as a res­ult. How­ever, the glass screen on the device is superbly robust and feels that way. The inter­face appears to float ever so slightly and enhance the feel of the mobile exper­i­ence. The smooth curves and the com­pos­ite mater­ial really lend them selves to fur­ther enhan­cing grip­pab­il­ity and they feel great. Apple lost this with the move to the sharp iPhone 4 shape. I don’t like it and sus­pect never will. I really liked my iPhone 3 shape — it was easy and sure to hold and to move from case to hand. The bat­tery life, as with any smart­phone, is just mar­ginal. It gets you through the day (usu­ally) but only just. Someday you won’t have to worry about nightly charges, but we aren’t there yet. From a hard­ware per­spect­ive I really like the Nokia Lumia and give full marks to Nokia for this one. Fur­ther­more, when I see the improve­ments on the Lumia 900 which elim­in­ated the fiddly cover on the inter­face port and adds a front-facing cam­era, I know they are improv­ing it all the more.

So how do you meas­ure the over­all user exper­i­ence? It is of course the inter­ac­tion of the hard­ware, soft­ware and user and this device has great hard­ware. The soft­ware is Win­dows Phone 7.5 (mango) and I imme­di­ately found it aes­thet­ic­ally seduct­ive. This spurred my ini­tial interest in giv­ing it an explore as well as indul­ging my own instincts to be eval­u­at­ing options and avoid­ing becom­ing blindly wed­ded to an exist­ing plat­form. As a side note, I will admit that Android did not do it for me. In fact I may have mis­stepped slightly in that exper­i­ment and this does greatly inform this Win­dows Phone exper­i­ment. I chose a lower end Acer Liquid Metal, which has ser­i­ous memory issues (would it have been dif­fer­ent with a Galaxy SIII — prob­ably but I am not con­vinced appre­ciably). I put a 32Gb Sd card into it to aug­ment the 8 or 16Gb onboard, but even in the first few days it was con­stantly telling me it was out of memory. Android sug­ges­ted I see what was con­sum­ing memory and turn off unne­ces­sary pro­grammes, etc. I shif­ted pro­grammes and data files to the card manu­ally, but it was clear that the way that Android is con­struc­ted it likes the internal memory and cer­tain things have to reside there. But you know, I don’t want to have to worry about these things. My iPhone never ran into this and that’s also some­thing that I have come to appre­ci­ate in OSX as a desktop OS. I don’t want to have to worry about stuff below the hood all the time. Although I have been known to tweak things (OK I do like to some­times) they are mainly aes­thetic or in terms of a real world tasks. I don’t want to bother with all the nuts and bolts. I want to use a cal­en­dar to man­age events and a con­tact man­ager to man­age con­tacts. I don’t want to have to move sub­pro­cesses and ter­min­ate threads. It’s not what I do for a liv­ing. This is why I am gen­er­ally very sat­is­fied with iOS and also with OSX. It’s why I switched back to OSX around 10.3 and shif­ted off of Win­dows. Microsoft Win­dows always seemed to be rather trans­par­ent with what was going on under the hood — often too trans­par­ent and demand­ing that you be able to fix the engine to drive the car. This was not what I wanted. I just want to drive and I want some­thing that drives well.

Ima­gine my sur­prise to dis­cover that Win­dows Phone 7.5 seemed to fit the bill. I have used Win­dows Mobile plat­forms off and on over the past dec­ade and was always of the sure give it a try men­tal­ity. I do like new toys. Inev­it­ably, though the vari­ous OS’s have come up lack­ing. I expec­ted the same from Mango but so far I have to admit, I am very pleas­antly sur­prised on the user exper­i­ence front.

I real­ise that it is the com­bin­a­tion of the three factors I men­tioned above that define the over­all exper­i­ence. What works for me may not be the way at all for someone else, so the user com­pon­ent remains a big ques­tion mark. How­ever, this is not dis­miss the level of atten­tion from Microsoft and Nokia on the try­ing to give me vari­ous aven­ues to accom­plish the same thing and not get­ting in the way of allow­ing me to define my own way to work. They seem to have adop­ted this prin­ciple and so ques­tions of my abil­ity and strange likes and dis­likes aside they have addressed many aspects of the suer side very well. The hard­ware and soft­ware are very closely linked and so I make it a point to identify this dis­cus­sion as per­tain­ing to the par­tic­u­lar hard­ware and soft­ware that I am using.

What Win­dows Phone 7.5 on the Nokia Lumia 800 does well

Metro UI Aesthetics

The aes­thet­ics really work for me. I really like the Metro UI. Microsoft is imple­ment­ing it across all their plat­forms and it does work well. It remains to be seen how well it will work on the desktop (I sus­pect it really is ges­ture driven so Win­dows 8 on non tact­ile dis­plays may be a real dog) but I will wait and see. The design sys­tem is well thought out, very user cetred and frankly my impres­sion of it is fun and fresh. What I think it does espe­cially well is to give a far more uni­fied user exper­i­ence across applic­a­tions and tasks. In fact, the exper­i­ence is one of uni­fied work task-based pro­cess. I don’t always sense trans­itions between apps and this is exactly as an OS should be. Although indi­vidual developers can go their own way and either take short­cuts or fig­ure they have the far super­ior inter­face and break the design these seem few as of yet. When they don’t, the sys­tem really works and I applaud it. The irony in my own mind remains palp­able as this is what I would expect from Apple, but Microsoft is return­ing a bet­ter exper­i­ence here in most cases.

Inter­face Elements

The inter­face makes it easy to see imme­di­ate options and identify the most import­ant info. The open envir­on­ment­ment of iOS has begun to allow inde­pend­ent inter­face design­ers huge lee­way in UI and although there are standout examples of great UI, the dis­tinc­tions between apps mit­ig­ate uni­fied exper­i­ence. The large top cat­egory text as tabs is superb. I am espe­cially fond of it and find that it lets me see what is also avail­able to me to the right and left without hav­ing to take any action. It works. I also find it enhances vis­ib­il­ity find I can actu­ally see it in the worst light­ing con­di­tions and when con­sist­ently imple­men­ted I find it very intuitive.

Intu­it­ive­ness

The intu­it­ive­ness is a tougher factor to actu­ally doc­u­ment, but (yes, in a Microsoft OS) yes, I have been sur­prised by this and found the thought pro­cesses behind Metro UI have really suc­ceeded. The pleas­ant sur­prises such as the alpha­betic index­ing I am about to men­tion have really caught me off guard. Kudos to

Haptics

The haptic feed­back is par­tic­u­larly well done. It works for me. I feel the response to my input and it cements the feel­ing if pos­it­ive inter­ac­tion with the device. This is well integ­rated without being jar­ring and is simply reas­sur­ing. It gives the user a pos­it­ive feel and cements the user-device bond. You can cus­tom­ize this to suit your wants and it is part of a total exper­i­ence. On the iOS haptics are so not­able in an app like Flight Con­trol because they are largely absent from the bulk of the inter­face. They are well integ­rated into the Mango on the Lumia.

Ser­i­ously Ges­ture Driven

This is a gesture-driven inter­face and it really shows and shows well. The momentum is well cal­ib­rated and and makes it easy to get to an app or a place in a scrolling list. It feels very nat­ural and I really like it. Seem­ingly ‘auto­ma­gic­ally’ little index­ing alpha­betic let­ters showed up in lists and apps (after I went bey­ond 45 in a list appar­ently) and Intu­it­ively I tapped on a let­ter and sure enough imme­di­ate fil­ter­ing or jump­ing to a spot. Very slick and well imple­men­ted. It’s the little touches that are subtly but when you exam­ine what you are feel­ing that stand out. That the text com­presses ver­tic­ally when you scroll it towards the bot­tom the screen makes it feel elastic. Again this makes you feel like you are inter­act­ing dir­ectly with the data and the screen dis­ap­pears from the equa­tion. I am sure there are far more less per­cept­ible ones that I don’t even note that are rein­for­cing this further.

Integ­ra­tion between Applications

Ulti­mately one of the most import­ant from a task based stand­point if the integ­ra­tion of all apps and actions. When you do things in WP7, the back but­ton flits from action to action regard­less of app. It is seam­less, there are no screen flips or aes­thetic calis­then­ics. You just move back and forth between your actions, not between per­cept­ible apps. In IOS, you are often even asked whether you want to go to another app and frankly, in many cases, should a user care. This aspect of Mango is very un iOS, but it is how a user actu­ally works and I am a fan.

Uni­fied Messaging

Hav­ing all my con­tact touch points in one place is pure sens­ib­il­ity and this was so seam­less it was scary. All my mes­saging was com­bined in the mes­sage App after I entered account info. Apple talks of it and Face­Time was added to SMS, but Apple in this instance has con­trolled the inter­face and the inter­ac­tion to the deter­ment of the user. Apple design­ers decide who gets per­mis­sion to play so no Skype, Face­book, Google or IM chats integ­rated in mes­saging. Not so Mango and it is very sweet and makes per­fect user sense.

Nokia Apps

The Nokia Apps that are included under Win­dows Phone are intriguing. Maps, Drive and Trans­port all show great prom­ised and I am intrigued by their poten­tial. Trans­port will be come richer over time and I can see the dir­ec­tion its going — it is still rather lim­ited in most loc­al­it­ies I sense, but it is evolving.

Where I have prob­lems with Win­dows Phone 7.5 on the Nokia Lumia 800

Explorer

Explorer web brows­ing — mobile or oth­er­wise — feels like explorer and to me that is less than smooth. The little square address box feels like it is win­dows mobile — it just feels clunky and slow. The page only seems to dis­play when fully rendered and I think this really harms the user exper­i­ence. The links seem fid­dlier and I serious;y feel like there has been little thought over how this browser func­tions within a mobile envir­on­ment. It feels like desktop crammed onto a small screen and pre­dic­ated on hav­ing a nonex­ist­ent mouse to drive it. I wish that Microsoft could simply start from blank slate and con­sider what a browser could be with no pre­con­ceived notions or pre-existing code to repurpose.

Media Sup­port

Sup­port for win­dows media. Ser­i­ously, come on. No flash on iOS has been an issue, but not only does Man­ago seem to lack flash…it won’t even play stream­ing win­dows files…if it won’t who will???? This is not quite a deal breaker but with the pre­val­ence of vivid media, it needs to offer this at an OS level. With Sil­ver­light so much a part of an app like Net­flix, when I attempt to use stream­ing WMV, I am flip­ping’ shocked to dis­cover that I rarely can play it successfully.

Small Mar­ket­place

The paucity of applic­a­tions. Well, the App Store does rule and there are a few miss­ing pop­u­lar ones. It’s real­ity. I am of course not miss­ing the tre­mend­ous irony here. For years when I advoc­ated Apple products (in the rebel days) you had to explain that you don’t need thou­sands of pro­grammes (who uses thou­sands) when we had the best ones. Well, here it is on a mobile plat­form. Largely I have been impressed that there are the local apps that I do ‘need’ such as Dub­lin­Bus, Irish Rail, Irish Weather, but there are huge holes. I really miss Flip­Board for example and when people think about doing an App Win­dows Phone is a dis­tant third, if that, so the new and excit­ing ones seem to logic­ally appear on iOS or Android. It’s a cur­rent fact of life.

Text Selec­tion

Text selec­tion works, but it seems less than ideal. It reminds me of earl;y Win­dows iter­a­tions where Apple had grabbed the lead and pro­tec­ted the best way to do it, so Win­dows had to settle for second (and often less intu­it­ive) ways of accom­plish­ing tasks. My exper­i­ence with drag­ging the edit­ing cursor around seems to instill a less than pos­it­ive engage­ment with the user. I really have to move my fin­ger to well below the cursor pos­i­tion to get it to the place in text I want. Double click­ing selects a word, but some­times offers me sug­ges­tions and some­times not. iOS really wins here.

Inter­net Tethering

The com­bin­a­tion I am using cur­rently lacks any teth­er­ing cap­ab­il­ity. Although I rarely use it, there are times it is fright­fully handy and although prom­ised, it does not seem to have crys­tal­ized. I would blame my pro­vider, but alas, both the iOS and Android phones on same pro­vider have eas­ily imple­men­ted teth­er­ing. This is a glar­ing omission.

Can’t Cap­ture a Screen

Lack of Screen Cap­ture is an annoy­ance. Again not a deal breaker, but had I wanted to take a quick screen cap­ture for this post (I did want to) I can’t do this using the stock Win­dows Phone as delivered. I gather I can do some magic using the devel­op­ment envir­on­ment were I run­ning Win­dows as my desktop OS, but I don’t and from OSX there is not solu­tion. Its not a fea­ture I would use that often but there are occa­sions and this was one of them. No luck. In iOS being able to sim­ul­tan­eously press two but­tons is simply slick.

Where the Jury Still remain out

Man­aging the inter­change of inform­a­tion between my OSX-based desktop exist­ence and shar­ing cal­en­dars and con­tacts has meant a shift to using Google as my sole pro­vider. Frankly, I like my Mac Address Book and Cal­en­dar­ing, but their lim­ited integ­ra­tion with Google has always made this an either or situ­ation. Yes, I know you can kind of do it, but Apple has dragged its heal and pre­ven­ted this from being flaw­less. As a res­ult I have embraced iCloud and Mobile Me before it. I have used third party util­it­ies to do syncing and have had a mixed exper­i­ence. As a exper­i­ment I am attempt­ing to use the Google apps to man­age these things. It’s ok, but it means I have to jump some hurdles and the exper­i­ence of rely­ing on desktop based inter­faces to con­tacts for example does bother me and still calls for extra steps. Again Google Apps can but are not optim­ized for work­ing with other plat­forms. Try tak­ing your con­tacts back and forth between Con­tacts and the Address Book in OSX and see what data issues emerge. You lose pic­tures, the CSV that Google gen­er­ates has great issues with punc­tu­ation and is really messy. It is all a little bit of a mor­ass and I don’t have the time to sit and clean it all up, let alone on an ongo­ing basis. It is all parties really, and I appre­ci­ate put­ting cer­tain things in place to gently keep you with one of the other. It’s a busi­ness sense, but it is cer­tainly not user cent­ric. I per­sist with it.

Con­clu­sion

I con­clude in mid-experiment being remain­ing very impressed by Mango. The ini­tial aes­thetic appeal has trans­lated into a sur­pris­ingly well thought out and integ­rated smooth user exper­i­ence. The down­side is linger­ing vestiges of older pro­pri­et­ary products and pro­cesses that Microsoft hasn’t ques­tioned (but should) and simply tacked on (or in the scary case of explorer) left in a key pos­i­tion. These leave rough edges on the over­all exper­i­ence. I will look for­ward to see­ing how WP8 looks and if and hiow it will impact on the Lumia. I remain hap­pily listen­ing to the little chimes of mail arriv­ing on my WP7 smart­phone and will con­tinue to see how well the Nokia Lumia func­tions for me. The pic­ture I used for this post was appro­pri­ate I think as it high­lights the people app spring­ing from the people tile. I do have a sense that my Lumia is in fact People Phone. It is pre­dic­ated around people and inter­ac­tions and I think this is the most com­pel­ling part of the exper­i­ence. There’s much thought that has clearly gone into this and des­pite the rough times that both man­u­fac­turer and developer are exper­i­en­cing as of late I do hope that the exper­i­ence can con­tinue to be refined because there are some excit­ing things going on here.