A few days with Windows Phone 8.1 and a Nokia Lumia 925

I misjudged Microsoft. When they presented Windows Phone 7 in 2010, my mind was elsewhere. And when it wasn’t elsewhere, it was prejudiced. As Joe Belfiore showcased the Metro UI and apps, I thought it was fairly interesting, but superficially I just saw it as a mere derivation of the Zune UI, and found hard to believe it could withstand the weight and scope of an entire mobile operating system. I also remember thinking It’s Microsoft: this thing will also be counterintuitive and unreliable. In my defence, my scepticism was mostly informed by the terrible, terrible experience I previously had with Windows Mobile 6.x on an old Samsung smartphone (which my wife had given me to play with after upgrading to an Android phone). Windows Mobile 6 on that phone felt like using a miniature Windows 98 or XP on a 3.5‑inch display with a toothpick-sized stylus. To say it was awkward is the greatest understatement.

Recently, and unlike with new Apple products introduced in the past, the whole debate around the iPhone X was leaving me utterly exhausted. I tried to go back to this little project I’m slowly putting together, a short book containing observations on the evolution of iOS’s user interface, but in the end I felt like trying something completely different. So an idea came to me: let’s take a belated look at Windows Phone, provided I can find a suitable device without spending too much money. I asked around, and shortly after a kind soul was sending me a well-used Nokia Lumia 925 basically for the price of shipping.

A brief aside, before proceeding further: this piece doesn’t want to be a comprehensive review of Windows Phone 8.1, nor does it intend to serve as a guide to the operating system. For that, among other resources, Matt Gemmell did a great job with his article from 2015 titled Windows Phone. If you want to have an idea of what it’s like to set up a Windows Phone device and perform a first exploration through its main features and first-party apps, do check Gemmell’s guide, filled with clear explanations and an abundance of screenshots. In this article, I’m merely offering a series of observations and impressions I had while discovering what is an entirely new place for me, and in the process I’ll share a few screenshots of things and details that surprised me in a positive way.

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Let’s go on then. When the Lumia 925 arrived, I was instantly impressed by how good it felt in the hand. It’s slightly wider, slightly thinner than my iPhone 5; the feel is different, the way you handle the two phones is different, the hardware buttons are positioned differently, but you quickly find your way around it. The Lumia 925 feels both light and solidly built. It has a polycarbonate back like many other Lumias, but the phone is encased in a rounded aluminium frame that gives it a more ‘flagship’ feel. I’m also glad to have received a model with an AMOLED screen rather than LCD because I was curious to see the difference between this display and my iPhone’s. The Lumia 925’s display is very nice and bright, more readable than the iPhone’s in direct sunlight. Like with many displays of this type, colours do pop and are vivid, but not as sickeningly saturated as I’ve seen on some Samsung phones.

Also of interest is that the Lumia 925 and the iPhone 5 are of similar vintage and have comparable specs. The iPhone 5 was introduced in September 2012 and discontinued in September 2013, while the Lumia 925 was introduced in June 2013 and discontinued two years later. The iPhone 5 has a dual-core 1.3 GHz Apple A6 CPU; the Lumia 925 has a 1.5 GHz dual-core Qualcomm Krait CPU. Both phones have 1 GB of RAM. The Lumia 925 display is bigger — 4.5 inch with a resolution of 768×1280 pixels (15:9 aspect ratio); the iPhone 5 display is 4‑inch with a resolution of 640×1136 pixels. Pixel density is slightly higher on the Lumia — 334 ppi versus the iPhone’s 326 ppi. The Lumia’s main camera is 8.7 megapixels. The iPhone’s is 8 megapixels.

The Lumia 925 appears to have come with a stock version of Windows Phone 8 preinstalled, which immediately auto-updated to 8.1 as soon as I connected the phone to my home WiFi network. As far as I can tell, the process was fast and straightforward. What happened next, I honestly did not anticipate.

As soon as I started exploring the OS, the initial impression was much, much more positive than I expected. Everything was fluid, smooth, responsive. Scrolling, swiping, jumping in and out of apps… The whole phone felt, well, newer than a 4‑year old device. I had previously carried out a similar experiment, trying out a Sony Xperia phone with Android Ice Cream Sandwich to have a better understanding of the Android platform. And now that I’ve experienced Windows Phone as well, I can say that, while Android’s user interface strikes me as being fairly derivative of iOS’s in many aspects, Windows Phone’s UI feels fresher, more original, from the very start. Matt Gemmell sums it up nicely:

The interface of Windows Phone is clean, high-contrast, readable, and uses large text and flat colours throughout. There’s almost no embellishment at all, instead providing information spaces rather than discrete screens or objects.

The aesthetic really speaks to me. It’s easy on the eyes, and very sci-fi.

It also uses animations and transitions sparsely, and that’s another good thing in my book.

And mind you, the Windows Phone interface doesn’t look original simply for the sake of it. Just like rounded rectangles are Apple’s trademark shape, Microsoft here makes the square tile the foundation of the visual language of Windows Phone’s UI. Tiles, squares, sharp rectangles are everywhere, from the Start screen, to the icons, to certain controls, to the shape of the keys in the virtual keyboard. Even the transition when opening an app, with all the UI elements shifting in position, looks like a tile floor that is summoned beneath your feet as you step forward. And I like how this even ties to the Microsoft logo — basically made up of four tiles itself — which is also the Start button.

Here are some examples:

On the left, you can see a screenshot of the app list view. You enter this view by swiping left on the Start screen (or by tapping on the right arrow that appears at the bottom of the Start screen), and this is where you actually see and access all the apps you’ve installed. The tiles on the Start screen are essentially shortcuts (aliases for you, long-time Mac users) to the apps you typically access most frequently. If you have a lot of apps, it can be tedious having to scroll down all the way if you want to launch, say, an app whose name starts with ‘W’ (like Weather). The quicker way is to tap any group-heading letter, and you’ll be presented with the screen on the right, where you can jump to any desired section. It’s really faster to carry out than to explain, really, and in some cases it’s even faster than swiping five app screens on the iPhone to reach the desired app. As you can see, tiles everywhere.

Tiles are also present in apps like Music and Store, where they act as tappable category labels:

Other examples:

On the left: setting an alarm. On the right: the virtual keyboard. The tile metaphor again.

You can see much more examples by scrolling through the already mentioned Windows Phone article by Matt Gemmell. You’ll see tiles and squares everywhere throughout the system.

As you can see, this is beyond flat design — it’s positively 2D. There isn’t even a hint at a drop shadow. All these angular shapes, big typography, high-contrast elements, bright flat colours, instantly reminded me of many film title sequences designed by Saul Bass — and that’s perhaps one of the reasons I immediately liked Windows Phone’s UI. But it’s not just that. It’s the consistence, the rigorousness. At first glance, it looks as if Windows Phone had a simpler set of human interface guidelines than iOS, but, by sticking to it without deviations or concessions, it has resulted in a more coherent, predictable interface. Predictable is good, because once you familiarise with the position of the main interface elements system-wide, you’ll know what to do and where to tap in whatever app you’re in. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly I was able to pick up gestures and navigation.

While some find it off-putting, another aspect of the interface I like so much is the emphasis given to text and typography. This is where the ‘transit system information’ aesthetic joins the tile element in being foundational in the UI (it was originally called ‘Metro’, after all). The main goal of Windows Phone’s user interface is to provide clear information and clear visual cues above everything else. Icons, where present, are essential, stylised like street signage or information panels you find in public places.

But what if, as it sometimes happens with apps, some icons are a bit obscure or ambiguous? (See, for example, the OneDrive app above.) No problem, because as you invoke additional menus by tapping on the three dots in the bottom right of the screen, explanatory labels always appear under every icon. You always know what a round button does.

By the way, one detail that strikes me about the OneDrive interface is how the invisible grid design of the elements creates a self-sustaining architecture in the page’s white space. The big tiles suggest the grid, as does the clean placement of labels and item names; there’s no line separating the bottom bar (navbar) from the rest, but your eye uses the 3‑dot handle as a reference point, and that’s enough to suggest where the main page ends and the navbar begins. When you tap the handle, the expanding section is revealed as a thin, icy layer overlapping the page.

Using the Nokia HERE suite of navigation and transit apps is fun, and it’s perhaps the best example of the use of colours and typography. Here’s an example of detailed directions in the HERE Transit app:

The big text headers are tabs, so you can tap them and see the next travel solution. The colours match the actual colour code of the Metro lines here in Valencia. I find information displayed this way to be very readable, immediate, and cool. (I chose a dark theme for my phone. If you prefer a light theme, the background will be white and the text dark, of course.)

I also love the use of typography in the Dictionary app by Flow Simulation. This is an example of a third-party app that gets the spirit of the 2D and typographic ingredients of the user interface in Windows Phone 8.1:

The main interface, on the left, shows a sort of ‘word cloud’ that isn’t just ornamental — each term is tappable and you get the definition. If you start a search in the traditional way (on the right), words start appearing below as you type. Nothing earth-shattering, sure, but I really like the effect. It’s a nice app, fun to use.

Another simple, yet surprisingly effective interface element in Windows Phone is the accent colour. It is used to give the whole system a dominant colour of your choice, but it also highlights specific elements of interest and indicates an ‘active’ state wherever present: if you see the accent colour on a switch, it means it’s active. On text, it could mean that the highlighted word or words are tappable and do something (like Read more in an app description in the Windows Phone Store); or, in the case of the email client, that a message is unread.

Here are the start+theme settings, and the picker for the accent colour. Tiles, again:

A matter of apps

Every time you bring up Windows Phone, the song remains the same: its failure was 1) the lack of apps in general and good-quality apps in particular; 2) the consequent vicious circle where people lose interest in the platform because ‘there are no apps’, and developers are not incentivised to write apps if there are so few people interested in the platform; and 3) some strategic choices on Microsoft’s part that didn’t help much in making the platform more widespread, and alienated many in the already small user base — especially in the transition from Windows Phone 8.1 to Windows 10 Mobile (at least, it’s what I’ve been told by other Windows Phone users).

Some people warned me about this when I announced my intention to take a dive into Windows Phone 8.1, but I must say that what I found wasn’t exactly the ghost town I was led to expect. I was prepared to the mess that was the webOS App Catalog when I got my Palm Pre 2 (just a few months before HP destroyed everything) and while it’s true that compared to iOS or Android, the choice of decent apps in Windows Phone is limited, my experience was pretty much the same as Matt Gemmell’s — and I’m writing this two years and a half later. His remark:

The Windows Store certainly has far fewer apps and games than either the iOS App Store or the Google Play Store on Android, but in terms of the apps I use every day, I actually didn’t find many notable omissions.

I haven’t either, and thankfully what I found still works (unlike on webOS). You have to explore a bit, read the reviews (which I found refreshingly articulate and helpful), and sometimes just try an app and see for yourself. My rule of thumb — if an app has a crappy icon, it’s very likely a crappy app — proved to be right most of the times. The flip side is that I did find mediocre apps with nice icons. But all in all, I can’t complain. At the moment I have about a hundred working apps installed in total, which is not bad at all. I’ve found good photo editing apps, good camera apps, clients for my cloud services of choice (Dropbox, Box, and now I also have a bit of space on OneDrive), the official Telegram client, the official Twitter client (spartan but functional), a great Instagram client (6tag), podcast apps, weather apps, dictionaries, news apps, unit converters, ebook readers, even a minimal Instapaper reader and a Simplenote client, a great YouTube client (Tubecast), PDF readers, barcode scanners, VLC for playing videos, and so forth. I’m not really a gamer, so I can’t say anything meaningful in this regard.

Ultimately I feel I ended up with a system configured with just the essentials, but a functioning system nonetheless, and that works just fine for me. Yes, because — and this is what truly left me astounded — I could definitely use this phone with Windows Phone 8.1 as my primary device should something happen to my iPhone. There are a few minor things I’d miss, no doubt, but nothing absolutely crucial.

(The funny thing is, a lot of people crave choice in an app ecosystem, but since we’re creatures of habit, in the end we keep using the same subset of smartphone apps for 90% of our daily activity. On my iPhone I have 150 or so apps installed, but in terms of apps I use heavily or extensively every day, I’m guessing they’re not more than a dozen. Having 30 different photo apps is cool, but when you keep using the same four or five, while the other 25 are on the device ‘just in case’ or because there’s one that gets occasionally used for a particular filter which works very well only with specific subjects, well, in the end it’s not so different from having six photo apps installed. Sure, maybe having just six apps is more boring. People bore easily, too.)

Other miscellaneous bits, and things I especially like about Windows Phone 8.1

Emoji suggestions to replace words was already a feature in Windows Phone 8.1 before arriving on iOS.

Tap to wake, too.

The Notifications + Quick Actions screen (Action Centre): In Windows Phone 8.1 you have Action Centre, which, from an iPhone user’s point of view, can be considered a merge of Notification Centre and Control Centre. You access it by swiping down from the top of the screen. And while it isn’t as feature-rich as the combination of those two in iOS, it’s faster to access, and its Quick Actions are customisable:

On the left: Action Centre. In the top area you have quick access to a set of controls, just like iOS’s Control Centre. These are the default four, but you can customise them by picking from the selection shown (partially) on the right. What I also like is that from Action Centre you have direct access to All Settings. Below the Quick Actions area is where notifications will appear (a new email, in this example).

The Camera app supports ‘lenses’, allowing third parties to skin and add features to camera interface. This was implemented in Windows Phone 8.0 (2012), two years earlier than Extensibility, a similar feature introduced in iOS 8 that allows filters and effects from third-party apps to be accessed directly from within a menu in the standard Photos app, rather than having to import and export photos through each respective app to apply effects. (Source: Wikipedia)

I’m pleasantly surprised that Windows Phone apps appear to weigh much less than on iOS/Android. Dropbox is 13 MB, for example, and a lot of the apps I’ve installed so far weighed on average 2 to 8 MB. I realise that, once downloaded, the apps get unzipped and end up taking a bit more space than the nominal download size, but they’re still more lightweight and less bloated than on iOS or Android. The proof is that, with the operating system and a hundred app installed, I still have 6.71 GB free on this 16 GB Lumia 925 (note that I also transferred 1.7 GB of music on the phone). A 16 GB smartphone running Windows Phone 8.1 is therefore more usable than a 16 GB iPhone, as far as software bloat goes.

There are free trials for paid apps in the Windows Phone Store. The implementation is seamless. Usually, during the free trial, an app will have only a limited set of working features, and/or it may display advertisements, but at least you can have an idea of the experience that is not limited to a bunch of static screenshots.

The ability to easily add a word to the phone’s dictionary (and therefore to the predictive keyboard).

Speaking of the keyboard — I never understood how people could claim to type faster by just swiping on the keys without lifting their fingers. I tried third-party keyboards on the iPhone with this feature, but I’ve never been able to type fast this way — I was actually slower and making a lot more mistakes compared with typing in a traditional fashion. But the Word Flow keyboard on a Windows Phone 8.1 smartphone is another thing entirely. I don’t know if it’s the physical shape of the smartphone I’m using, if it’s the keys that are taller than on the iPhone, or their shape, but after a few attempts I noticed that it’s quite effective and I really can type fast. Maybe not actually faster than typing the usual way, but certainly faster than using a third-party keyboard on the iPhone.

I really like the ability to customise the Home screen (or rather, Start screen) with tiles and live tiles. I find this approach much more useful than what iOS offers (Android has widgets at least). Not only can I choose which of my most-used apps to put there, but 1) I can decide to have bigger tiles for the things I need to access most quickly (bigger tiles means bigger buttons to tap); 2) Apps featuring Live tiles can provide additional, real-time information on the screen without even having to launch them (e.g. Weather, News headlines, RSS feeds headlines…); 3) I find satisfying to be able to change the layout however and whenever I see fit, rearranging tiles to my taste and needs. An acquaintance still using a Windows Phone device told me that he has arranged his Start screen tiles ‘ergonomically’, i.e. in a way that the most used apps are all represented by 1×1 tiles he can reach without moving his thumb after unlocking the phone. You may object that this little game gets old soon. I can respond by saying that iOS’s Home screen has been essentially the same since 2007.

I like that I still haven’t found a UI element that is too tiny to tap accurately. I have small fingertips, yet I’ve always had trouble tapping the little ‘x’ button to clear up notifications under iOS. No such problems on Windows Phone 8.1 so far.

Conclusion

My Windows Phone 8.1 experience on this Nokia Lumia 925 has been a complete surprise. I went in rather ‘blind’, not knowing exactly what to expect, but at the same time with a baggage of scepticism and prejudice because it was something made by Microsoft, and I’m a long-time Mac user from the Jobsian school of thought (“Microsoft has no taste”). And boy, was I so wrong.

I’m going to quote Matt Gemmell one more time, because his experience closely resembles mine:

Windows Phone is a compelling and surprisingly mature mobile platform. Its aesthetics are bold and information-focused, and it has all the functionality that a truly modern mobile OS needs. I’m very comfortable when taking a Windows Phone device out with me instead of an iPhone.

There are little differences that require some mental adjustment, and there are some rough edges. There are idiosyncrasies, as with anything — but on the whole, I really could switch full-time. I didn’t expect to be able to say that.

Maybe I’m just used to iOS, rather than bored with it. Maybe I don’t need the customisation and personalisation of my Live Tiles. Maybe Apple will finally do something with the stale, static Home screen in iOS 9 [They did not.]. I’ll certainly be watching, and I’m not throwing my iPhone away.

What I’ve learned, though, is that there are absolutely other viable options — including one from Microsoft. It’s not corporate, or jargon-filled, or business-centric. It’s not cluelessly enterprise-focused, to the exclusion of regular users.

What it is, though, is a boldly different yet mature and capable mobile platform, with an aesthetic that I find exciting, and an obsessive dedication to presenting information cleanly to the user.

Perhaps my experience was very positive also because I got the right hardware (this Lumia 925 has solid specs compared to cheaper Lumia models) — but still, no complaints. I expected I’d be fiddling with the new toy for a couple of days or so, then put it aside, but I keep returning to it. These days I’ve been carrying both my iPhone 5 with iOS 10 and this Lumia with Windows Phone 8.1, and one of the things that kept amazing me was how smoothly everything worked on the Lumia. Nothing stopped working unexpectedly. The OS never froze, got sluggish, or displayed strange or unexpected behaviour. I don’t know how multitasking works in Windows Phone 8.1 at the technical level, but assuming that apps and processes are frozen like on iOS, then I can say multitasking on Windows Phone 8.1 appears to work well.

The Lumia 925 never stopped being responsive under heavy load or with many apps open (CPU-intensive tasks made it noticeably warm, however). More importantly, Windows Phone 8.1 and the Lumia overall felt snappier and smoother than iOS 10 and the iPhone 5, especially when transitioning from an app to another, and when typing on the virtual keyboard. There are moments on the iPhone when the lag during typing becomes apparent, even annoying. In Windows Phone 8.1 with the Lumia 925, the keyboard kept up all the time without exception. This assessment may be a bit unfair towards the iPhone — in the end, it’s running iOS 10, a much updated version of the OS it originally shipped with (iOS 6), while the Lumia 925 shipped with Windows Phone 8.0 and can’t be upgraded past 8.1, so the hardware/software integration is tighter. If I could make a test with an iPhone 5 running iOS 6, it would probably be just as responsive. On the other hand, I must say that Windows Phone 8.1 hasn’t aged that badly and it’s certainly more viable than using an iPhone with iOS 6 today.

To be honest, I thought the experience with the Lumia and Windows Phone 8.1 would turn out to be like other tests with vintage hardware and software from other platforms (Android, webOS): a fascinating study of the user interface, but ultimately something I couldn’t be comfortable using day to day. I thought the amount of working apps would be limited, like on webOS. I thought I would have had to babysit background processes and watch out for stuck apps draining the battery, like it happened with Android when I tried out that 2011 Sony Xperia with Ice Cream Sandwich. Nothing of the sort. This Windows Phone setup and the Lumia 925 are definitely going to become my secondary/backup phone — at least until apps and services stop working or get abandoned.

Now that I’ve used (and own) iOS, Android, webOS, and finally Windows Phone devices, I think it’s really sad that today it’s just iOS vs Android, basically. The real pity is that, UI-wise, the ‘loser’ platforms are, in many aspects, more innovative, creative, daring, and in most cases more consistent than the two giants.

I was prejudiced, and underestimated Microsoft’s efforts when they introduced Windows Phone 7 and the following versions. After giving it a fair try and extended use, I’ll say that Microsoft has done a great job with the UI. My experience has been enjoyable and satisfactory, and I didn’t see that coming. Maybe if fewer people in tech hadn’t been equally prejudiced and sceptical, things could have taken a different turn and Windows Phone could have been a more successful platform overall.