On Thursday I decided to check out the Nokia Lumia 925’s video capabilities. That’s a frame grab above I continue to be impressed with this phone’s image quality.
Indeed the video, which I’ve entitled Strathfield to Central for obvious reasons, is the highlight not only of Day 3 of my Nokia Lumia 925 / Windows Phone 8 trial but of the entire trial so far.
I had hoped to embed the full video here. But I’m on mobile bandwidth today, and unless I upload a gigabyte or two of data, it simply won’t do it justice. So it’ll have to wait a while. Stand by.
Meanwhile, here’s the rest of my bullet-point observations from Day 3.
- Confirmed: Handling the phone while it’s acting as a Wi-Fi hotspot all too frequently causes client devices to drop out. Windows Phone 8 calls this feature “internet sharing”. What seems to happen is that when the 3G/4G data link dies for any reason, the phone decides that without an internet to share, it’ll stop bothering with Wi-Fi to connect to it. This is in contrast to my Samsung Galaxy S III 4G running Android, which treats the 3G/4G link and the Wi-Fi link as independent network interfaces. Mind you, that’s all mere supposition on my part. I’ll confirm it with Microsoft and Nokia on Monday.
- There’s no built-in flashlight app — something I discovered at around 1am while trying to walk down a cold, dark, deserted rural road. I can’t remember whether Android comes with one by default, or whether it’s a default Samsung thing, or whether it’s a third-party widget that was carried across automatically from one phone to the next, but it was a surprise to suddenly find myself without it.
- The phone’s numerical keypad and all the buttons for speaker, mute etc can’t be on screen at the same time. You have to switch between the two modes, as shown in the image above. This is somewhat annoying, particularly as it looks likes there’d be room for all of them on one screen.
The trial continues until the end of Tuesday. You can follow it live on Twitter, where I’m using the hashtag #LumiaWP8trial.
Read all posts tagged #LumiaWP8trial (RSS feed).
[Photo: Approaching Sydney Central, a frame from the movie Strathfield to Central. Download full-sized image (2.6MB).]
That’s great and all, but why would I want one?
I mean, Windows…
@Ben: I’ll be blunt, Ben who is getting his comment published even though he hasn’t left a real email address, that does sound a bit like mindless tribalism. “It’s Windows therefore it’s bad.” Sigh.
I’m hardly a fan of previous desktop and server incarnations of Windows, but after having been using Windows Phone 8 for nearly a week, I can see where they’re coming from. I’ll have much more to say about that when I wrap up this trial.