KPH tech blog

The main reason for my purchase of a Nokia Lumia 820 was because of my financial circumstances and budget. I’m now a graduate and still looking for a job, but when I was looking for a new phone last year, the most I could afford was around £26 per month due to my low income as a student, and thus my options were pretty limited. An Apple iPhone 5S, iPhone 5C, or even an iPhone 4S on £35 per month was too much.

I guess I could have settled for a mid-range phone such as a Blackberry Curve model or a Samsung Galaxy Ace, but I already had a fourth-gen iPod Touch and a perfectly able feature phone on Pay-As-You-Go, and really wanted an upgrade of the two for relatively low cost. I really liked the Blackberry Torch, a sort of slider phone with its combination of touch screen and physical Qwerty keyboard, hidden underneath the screen, but the keyboard buttons were way too small (and I’ve got paper-thin fingers).

I had considered the LG Nexus 5, the official ‘Google/Android Phone’, but my past experience of Android wasn’t great; I’ve still got a HTC Wildfire, which I managed to wreck by not using the Nandroid function to back-up a copy of Android 2.3 Gingerbread, before I confidently installed CyanogenMod 10, a Custom-ROM flash build of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

The Samsung Galaxy Ace seemed like the ideal option, available on a cheap £7.50 per month contract, although when I gave the phone a test-drive in the store, it was just too slow and incapable of executing simple tasks quickly, like opening an app.

While customization was something my iPod touch lacked on iOS6, even though I subsequently Jailbreaked it, I wanted a phone that was capable of making calls and sending texts and emails, and one that was different and fresh. That was when I stumbled upon the Windows Phone operating system.

At the time (February 2013), I had seen three Windows Phones around my £26/month contract budget; the Nokia Lumia 800 (WP7), Nokia Lumia 820 (WP8), and the HTC 8X. I liked the tile-based Start Screen (similar to the Start Screen on Windows 8), and cosmetically I preferred the HTC 8X, but after some initial research on the Windows Phone platform, I had found that Nokia were developing apps themselves that were only being released for their Lumia phones.

Having been impressed with the reliability of my feature phone,  a Nokia X2-00 with a 5MP camera (I still keep it as a spare), my attention was drawn straight to Nokia. Both the Lumia 800 and Lumia 820 were availabe for around £26/month, but unlike the Lumia 800 which had a smaller screen and ran on an outdated Windows Phone 7 OS, the Lumia 820 had a large screen, 8MP camera and ran on the latest Windows Phone 8 OS. I’d been used to using the 3.5 inch screen on my 4th-gen iTouch and, certainly, the move up to a 4.3 inch screen was a noticeably large one, but once I’d gotten used to it, I was able to utilise the phone and its features.

Obviously, price wasn’t the only thing I had considered, and as I have already mentioned, my attentions were drawn to Nokia’s own apps developed for the WP8 platform. While WP8 lags somewhat behind iOS and Android in terms of features and number of apps on the Windows Store (compared with Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store), I’ve been impressed with Nokia’s Panorama app which has allowed me to capture many panoramic photos over the past year, something I could do (but not very well) on my basic Canon Powershot camera. Here’s a panoramic photo of Ipswich Waterfront that I captured using the Nokia Panorama app:

Hopefully I’ve given you an insight into why I purchased a Windows Phone. While I will agree that there are those of you who don’t like Microsoft, I’m pleased with what they’ve achieved lately, given that the age of Desktop PC’s is drawing to a close and they’ve been forced to enter the mobile market to stay in competition. There have been problems along the way for my phone, such as the mysterious growth of ‘Other Storage’ on my 820’s internal storage, but a simple backup and reset has always solved these problems. Although Windows Phone 8.1 has already been released to developers, when it is ofiicially released this summer, I shall compose a review of Nokia’s Lumia Cyan and combined WP8.1 updates, and how the system has been improved.

Chris Kenworthy.