A friend works at a big company that traditionally has offered Blackberries to its workers. Employees can, however, select a Windows Phone. One would think that this would work wonderfully as the company is heavily dependent on Microsoft server-side products. How does it work in practice? “I know only one person who chose a Windows Phone. Whenever I go to her office there is someone there from IT trying to get the phone to connect to company email. It works fine to make and receive calls, but it can’t get on the company network.”
Anyone out there have a Windows Phone? What is the real-world experience like?
Related: my review of Windows 8
Microsoft was able to successfully get Windows NT to run on MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC, and other hardware platforms prior to 2000. Then in 2000 they dropped that and ran in the other direction. Now they have splintered their OS code base, nothing works together anymore, and their tablet OS doesn’t even have the same core API as the desktop OS. Microsoft calls it Windows only because the OS sends the same pixels to the display, but it’s completely different underneath. I don’t know who made all these bad decisions, but I am probably going to be on Windows 7 until I move to Linux at this point.
I have a Nokia Lumia 822 Windows Phone on Verizon. I think it is — overall — fantastic. Never had a problem with it connecting to any network, corporate or otherwise.
The OS (Windows Phone 8) is rock solid and responsive (no lag like my Samsung Galaxy Nexus running Android 4.2.1 unfortunately has). And apps on my Nokia phone don’t crash, or worse, cause my phone to spontaneously reboot unlike apps on my Android Galaxy Nexus (I’m looking at you, Android Yelp app).
The biggest minus I find is the lack of some popular social apps, most notably Instagram. But most other popular apps are there (like Facebook and Twitter). Also noticeably absent are many Google apps like Google Voice and Google Maps.
(Looks like Google simply doesn’t want the Windows Phone platform to gain any traction and went as far as disabling its web version of Google Maps from working on any Windows Phone).
The other oddity is that many websites do not recognize the Internet Explorer browser installed on Windows Phones as being a smartphone browser, so they default to their standard websites instead of defaulting to their mobile website as they would do if you were accessing them via an iPhone on an Android phone.
And if anyone is contemplating moving to a Windows Phone, I would strongly recommend that they just stick to a Nokia Windows Phone because some of best Windows Phone apps are the native Nokia apps like Here Maps and Here Drive (formerly known as Nokia Maps and Nokia Drive) which are in some ways better than Google Maps since one can download (for free) the maps of different countries (worldwide, including the United States map) so one isn’t dependent on being connected to a cellular network to use the maps on a Nokia Windows Phone.
That said, if price is no object, I think the Apple iPhone is the best smartphone out there (since its OS is rock solid too and there are far more quality apps on its platform than on the Windows Phone 8 platform). But between an Android or WP8 phone, I would now choose a Nokia WP8 phone, especially at the prices that most cellular phone providers are offering them. For bang for buck, they’re the best deals out there right now.
I’m highly pleased with my Windows Phone 8 Nokia smartphone.
@Architecture Boi,
running Windows successfully in a CPU architecture is not the problem.
Up until today reorganization, Microsoft had a division fighting division
and terrible political environment of CYA.
Several Tablet initiatives didn’t even have Office at launch because
of Office group was making money of PC.
Outlook is same way.
Mr. Ballmer only cared about protecting the profits.
Windows Phone were out on a island so had to reinvent API
for good reason. Latest being copying Apple’s iphone APIs.
Don’t worry now that Windows Phone will be merged with Windows 8.1.
you will have the same experience. Just have to buy a new phone.
Whether touch works on a desktop computer is another question.
I have a Nokia Lumia 920 (with Windows Phone 8) and I agree with Peter, the phone is amazing. Never had any trouble connecting to the company e-mail (it feels like I’m on Outlook at my PC – except for the intranet links, everything works seamlessly). Internet Explorer has a rather poor interface (especially compared to Chrome on my Android phone), some useful apps are still missing, but performance on the phone is absolutely stellar! Instant feedback, no lag, no factory restore every couple of months…
I have a Nokia Lumia 810 on T-Mobile. Overall, it is a nice phone; the screen is extremely sensitive to touch which can be good and bad (butt dialed a few times until I had to lock the screen). The screen is not nearly as contrasty in bright sunlight as they advertise. Nokia Drive is seriously overrated too, and although there are third-party navigation tools like gMaps (a substitute for Google Maps) or Co-Pilot GPS, a phone with native Google Maps support would be best, since Google has the best traffic crowdsourcing and can now work offline, and also because native Google Maps with Navigation works better than third-party gMaps for turn-by-turn navigation. The thing I don’t like about Nokia Drive most is that the map always rotate, there is no way to lock it north-south. Also, street names font is unreadable for me without having to zoom in.
Facebook application is not good, although they are constanly improving it. That should be less of a priority for a corporate phone though. 4G speeds are very respectable, but there will be no LTE software upgrade from T-mobile for this phone, although chipset is LTE-compatible.
It takes a long time for this phone to boot after complete shutdown, about 40 seconds. I rarely shut it down though, and waking up from sleep is instant. Battery life is quite poor, it will not last a day in heavy usage, even in power saving mode. In this mode, it will only sync accounts on request, which is a no-go for a corporate phone I guess. Without power saving, it syncs nicely from multiple accounts on different services, but somehow e-mails lose HTML style features – it is just plain text, with attachments. MS Office attachments can be opened and viewed natively, but forget about trying to edit any document.
One very serious drawback of this particular phone is leaky internal storage. There is a folder called “Other” that collects all kinds of duplicate copies of files, pictures, etc and keeps growing, eventually eating up all of your phone available memory. For other Lumia models, Nokia came out with a fix for this issue, but not for this particular phone. There is no file manager for this OS (third party or Microsoft), so it is impossible to look inside the folder and delete individual files. Again, other Lumia models have a utility that was issued later to fix this problem.
I have both a Windows Phone (Lumia 920) and an iPhone (4s). I can do everything I need with either. I’m an enterprise-environment guy, and that was your question, so I’ll give my perspective on that.
In either case, being part of the company network is an outside-in experience. I can’t join a phone to the Active Directory domain, nor start browsing files on a file share. So most tasks are done through web interfaces. For me, email is at the core of a business experience; here’s what Windows Phone (WP) offers:
– Microsoft’s Activesync to Exchange works great on both devices, delivering mail quickly and reliably
– WP displays a count of email, reset ever time I look at my email. iOS makes me actually read all email to change the number. I find this extremely useful, because usually I’m just watching for new stuff on the phone, and leave most actual email work for Outlook on the desktop, and this method leaves messages marked unread for easy identification
– WP is much better integrated with Exchange’s directory, offering to search it if contacts or email are not found locally. iOS can also search the directory, but you have to know where to look (most people don’t)
– WP groups conversations in a “collapsed” paradigm, which is quicker and more seamless than iOS’ open-in-a-new window functionality. WP’s method also leaves me in my mail list, so I don’t have to go “back” to resume working through the list
– WP has more complete support for creating and managing meeting requests. iOS seems to not be in sync with meetings I’ve already accepted in Outlook. WP also has a very handy button to quickly send an “I’m late” email or text to the meeting organizer or all attendees.
There’s more, but I’ll move on. A second key component, for me, is OneNote. This program is an awesome team tool, and WP allows me to sync all my OneNote content (through Sharepoint) into my hand. Just this last week, a new version was released for iOS that now supports opening notebooks from Sharepoint, so WP has lost some unique advantage here. However, another feature of WP comes into play next: pinning to the Start screen. This is incredibly useful for so many apps, but especially so for OneNote. I have a large amount of content, and find it invaluable to pin a specific page to the Start screen for immediate access. The functionality of Live tiles isn’t a big selling point with me, but the ability to create “deep linked” shortcuts definitely is.
Third, WP has Office built-in. I can view and do basic editing of Excel & Word docs, and even Powerpoint – but what, am I going to run a presentation from the phone? 😉 I think iOS offers apps that do similar things, accessing Sharepoint, but I haven’t tried it much.
Finally, there’s the issue of apps. On WP, I have a great GPS tracker and a super-fast Bible I haven’t been able to find equivalents in iOS. On the other side, Concur, Paypal Here, and Apple’s Remote apps don’t have WP versions yet (or ever as in Remote).
I’m largely a web-based user, and WP’s IE works just as well or better for me as Safari, and I often find that a company’s mobile-optimized web site works as fast or faster than a dedicated app (and I don’t have to install and keep an app up-to-date). I can write sites that work great in both browsers, and even though Safari generally better supports HTML and CSS standards, IE has some surprises in such things like a better input pad for number fields in forms.
I had a Samsung Focus WP7 and now have a Samsung ATIV S WP8. Both have worked great. I connect to Exchange and if I’m connected to work WiFi I can follow intranet links. The Nokia map apps are available to all WPs and I find Here to be great. Downloadable maps are fantastic, no need to get data on my last trip to California just for directions. I have no idea what Architecture Boi is talking about since everything has been converging on the NT core since 2000 and the API is the same for W8, W8 RT, and WP just varying subsets. Even the XBOX One will run W8.
My partner had a windows phone (and was its 4th phone using a Microsoft OS) and he finally gave up and bought an Android device. He said that there were many troubles with Outlook synchronization that were working on much older Windows Mobiles. It seems like Windows Phone is a consumer device and Blackberries and older WMs were corporate devices first.