How did it go?

tl;dr: It’s not a bad phone, it’s not a bad platform. In many ways it’s nicer to use than Android. I won’t be buying one, as there’s no incentive to replace my iPhone 4S.

The details: the hardware was fine, and even had a few bonus points: it was distinctive, it was fun, the display was outstanding and the battery life was impressive. The software was fine, and about what you’d expect from a relatively new platform that’s rapidly improving. I found it more pleasant to use than my Samsung SIII, which is a usability horror story.

The apps that were available were pretty good; now I’ve no longer got the phone I’m missing the London bus app, the live tiles, and the twitter client.

Windows Phone seemed genuinely innovative. It was let down by some of the Windows legacy (reboots), but it wasn’t as bad as I thought.

At the end of my time with the phone, Nokia asked me to complete a survey. I’ve added some of the comments here, and expanded on them a little.

What did you like about the device?

The physical rounded shape and device yellow colour.
The amazing screen (size and colour).
The mapping software.
The innovative UI.
The “friendly” interface (“Let’s get started / goodbye”) – the UI felt a lot less “formal” than iOS.
The browser.
The speed.
The smooth animation.
All-in-one design (no need to insert battery or SD cards) – although everyone scorned Apple for this, I think it’s a big advantage. Messing around with batteries and SD cards is tedious.

What didn’t you like about the device?

Always turns on when charging.
Some buggy software.
The weight.
The speakers.

What did you use most / were most surprised about / was unique to Nokia

Most used email, maps, apps such as Foursquare, live weather tiles.
Most surprised by low-light performance of camera (magic!)
Surprised by the amount of storage – fit music and photos on without making a dent in spare capacity.
Battery life was reasonable – it took several hours of continuous use to drain it.

Will you be purchasing the device now that you have trialled it?

No.

Unfortunately Nokia didn’t give me the option to expand on that response, so here’s my explanation: I have an iPhone 4S, and it’s good enough. The 920 doesn’t offer anything more over my current phone to make me think I need to switch right now.

It’s worth noting that I would never have considered another Nokia Symbian phone. I’ve been bitten too many times by terrible Symbian experiences, and I swore the Nokia N95 would be the last phone I ever bought from them. With the release of the N9, that would have changed – if Nokia hadn’t killed the platform. 

Before this trial, I had dismissed WP8. However, if I had to replace my 4S with another device, I would now consider Nokia’s Windows Phone devices amongst the options. Wireless charging would be a big part of the decision – I loved that feature on the Palm Pre. I’m not sure if live tiles are enough of a killer feature to get me to switch; it depends on what comes next in iOS, I guess.

Based on the Firefox OS phone, it seems the device would have to be less than €200 unlocked in order for me to consider it as a spur of the moment purchase.

It depends very much on Mozilla’s and Telefonica’s ability to execute

I should have added something about their partners’ ability to execute. I tried to buy a geeksphone this morning. It was not a happy experience.

The first problem is the page that lists the phones is built dynamically, and the site is hitting the maximum allowable database connections. The result is this error:

You might argue that this is just the result of high traffic, and it could happen to any busy site. But this is a basic error, and a nasty error message. This sort of detail should never be exposed to the user. If the site is too busy, put up a “sorry, we’re too busy” page. It’s deeply embarrassing for the architects of the mobile web to fall down on the basics of web-based e-commerce. You wouldn’t want your phone’s dialler to give a 404 or 500 error, so why let your shop do it?

When you do get the page to load, you’ll notice those great headline prices – €91 and €149 – have now become €110.11 and €180.29:

This is because the phones were advertised exclusive of taxes the first time around, which was just silly and confusing. Set pricing expectations and then manage them, don’t jump around all over the place. There’s no consistency.

Next, when you finally get a page to load, the “Add to cart” button doesn’t often work. More database errors:

If you do get the phone into your shopping cart, during the checkout process, you’re asked to agree to some terms and conditions of sale. (With some pretty peculiar wording that suggests a hasty translation: I agree to the Terms of Service and will adhere to them unconditionally.)

But good luck if you want to read those terms, as you’ll either get another database connection error…

… or you’ll get a copy of the Terms and Conditions, but in Spanish:

And then it’s on to the payment processing screen… 

And finally, if you’re lucky, you’ll get the order confirmation page. Nothing wrong with that? Nothing apart from “ourcustomer support”. Details!

Apparently the problems weren’t too bad, since the Keon is now out of stock. That suggests a number of people were successful, despite the database problems.

I’ve no idea how many Firefox OS devices were available. My order number suggests more than 300 devices have been sold, but I don’t know if that’s Keon and Peak, or just Peak.

I really do wish Mozilla, Telefonica, and Geeksphone well in launching a new device and building the open mobile web ecosystem. But I also wish they’d pay attention to execution. If you want to win at the Game of Phones, you need to get the small things right and have a relentless attention to detail.

The new Firefox OS phones from geeksphone are nearly here, with the announcement that next week they will be available from the currently-dormant online shop.

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It was back in 2009 that I got a Palm Pre, perhaps the first commercial demonstration of “HTML for (almost) everything”. The turbulent history of that device is well-known, but shouldn’t detract from the core idea of building the entire user experience and applications using web technologies.

So I’m excited about Firefox OS, but thus far I’ve been sceptical about the platform’s ability to get developer attention, to build an ecosystem, and to reach a scale that makes the platform viable in the long-term. It depends very much on Mozilla’s and Telefonica’s ability to execute, and to get other device manufacturers to actually ship hardware.

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As a small nitpicking example of execution, there’s no nice semantic URL I can point you to for Firefox OS. The best I could find is http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/partners/ or possibly http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/partners/#os. For developers it’s a little better, with https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Mozilla/Firefox_OS.

I could talk about my disappointment with Mozilla‘s engagement with LiMo Foundation, where they had the opportunity to become the de facto web runtime as well as to demonstrate to mobile operators how to effectively work in an open source and open development model. If that had worked, we could have seen a precursor of today’s Firefox OS in 2009, rather than waiting four more years. Maybe some version of Firefox OS would be ascendant, and not the Android hydra. 

It’s churlish to criticise Mozilla alone, when the rest of the LiMo membership frittered away any opportunity for leadership in web runtimes because they couldn’t play nicely together, but I do think Mozilla missed a trick by not adopting a platform approach much sooner. Even as late as 2010 key people at Mozilla seemed to have their head in the clouds, when I had a heated discussion about the importance of web runtimes at GUADEC. I suspect that today’s Firefox OS is more the result of luck and external enthusiasm around B2G rather than any clearly-planned advance strategy.

Thankfully I think the team at Telefonica have a clear vision of what’s needed from Firefox OS, and with their experience of running “the thinking man’s developer engagement” (BlueVia), I suspect they also have a good idea of how to take it to the developer market.

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One factor that’s changed my mind significantly about the likely success of Firefox OS was my trial of the Nokia Lumia. With a limited selection of apps in the Windows Phone app store, I was forced to rely rather more heavily on web apps for some core functionality and to fill the gaps, to get me through the day.

When the Palm Pre first launched, many websites were simply unusable from a mobile device. My time with the Lumia showed me how far along the mobile web has come (and how far it still lags behind), but one thing was clear: in the last few years, it’s now become possible to survive with web apps and a good mobile browser. Many companies need to address the desktop market with good websites even whilst building native apps. For those companies in particular, being Firefox OS-friendly is a simple step and a no-brainer.

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What’s eye-catching about the geeksphone announcement is the pricing of the new devices: the Keon is €91, and the Peak is €149. That’s a great price for a smartphone. I was curious to see how the specifications stack up against similar phones, so I did a quick comparison using information from the encyclopaedic GSM Arena.

I compared published specifications against the last attempt at a “web runtime” mobile device, the HP Pre 3. I also compared against the iPhone 5 and iPhone 4S, the Samsung Galaxy SII / SIII / S4, and the Lumia 920.

The raw data is below in a spreadsheet, but from first glance these geeksphone handsets are not bad devices, with some obvious economic trade-offs – mostly around CPU and memory. When comparing prices you’ll probably want to factor in a good fast microSD card since the phones are light on storage. It will be interesting to see how well Firefox OS performs on those CPUs – but given announced future devices are even lower-spec, I would hope that lots of optimisation will make them sufficiently usable.

The Keon should be fine for development, but for normal use I’d most likely go for the Peak. Based on the specification, it seems like a realistic day-to-day device. At this price point, they are cheap enough to risk some money on for experimentation.

Of course the raw data doesn’t cover things like differences between chipsets in real life – see Why a Snapdragon S4 Galaxy SIII Is Awesome for an interesting discussion of this.

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Finally – there’s a Firefox OS Hack Day coming up in the UK at the end of May – which should be a good opportunity to do some development with the devices.

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The raw stats:

Note pricing data is approximate. If you notice any errors or can provide any more details, please let me know.

I acquired this car at the start of 2007. It seems my average mileage per year has been pretty constant, even without consciously trying to hit a certain point. The only dip was in 2008-2009, when coincidentally I also achieved Carte Blanche status on the Eurostar.

I suspect this year will be significantly lower, given:

• the high price of petrol makes the choice between car and train travel a little easier
• there’s better connections to airports from where I’m now living
• I’m within walking distance of three decent supermarkets and have a smaller kitchen with less space to store large (car load) quantities of food

I suppose I should do the sums and work out the cost per mile for maintaining a car, and see whether it makes economic sense to keep it. Maybe it will give me an excuse to get a Brompton?

There is a line of pubs and restaurants along the Quay (Henry’s, Browns, La Tasca), most of which are better off skipped. One exception is Dockmaster’s House, around the back, which is a pretty good Indian restaurant.

The Marriot is just a short walk (across a bouncy bridge) to the heart of Canary Wharf (or one DLR stop if you want, but really the bridge is nicer). Canary Wharf offers more choice.

Note that if you need to do some gift shopping, there is also a mall running underneath Canary Wharf with a good selection of shops.

Note also that compared to the US, all of these restaurants will seem ridiculously expensive. Some places I’ve been to:

• Wahaca – innovative Mexican tapas from a former Masterchef contestant. Lots of small tasty dishes. Pick 3 or 4 each. Informal atmosphere.
• Canteen – “English” food like sausage and mash, roast chicken. Great comfort food. Informal.
• Plateau – posh European (fancy burger, croque monsieur). Smart. Go for the view, not the food.
• Roka – very good Japanese.
• Smolenskys – expensive English pub. Decent burger.
• Jamie’s Italian – celebrity chef Italian food. Excellent pasta. Casual. Usually quite busy. No booking unless parties of 6 or more.
• Boisdale – steak and chips with jazz. Steak isn’t up to American standards, but an ok atmosphere.
• Gaucho – steak and chips. Almost American standard.
• Le Relais de Venise L’Entrecôte – steak and chips, covered in secret sauce. Actually pretty good.
• Krüger – Need a good full English breakfast? Look no further.
• Byron – fancy burgers.
• Café Rouge – overpriced French food, chain restaurant. Food is ok though.
• Sri Nam – pretty good Thai.

For the full list, see the Canary Wharf website (which may be a bit out-of-date; the Battery Club has gone, for example).

Some other local delicacies:

• Noodle Street Pretty reasonable Chinese food, that delivers to the door.
• The Grapes, ancient boozer owned by Gandalf. Tiny, atmospheric. A 10 minute walk along the river from Canary Wharf.
• The Narrow (by celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay): picturesque and packed pub by the river, a pleasant 15 minute walk from Canary Wharf along the riverside.

 Feel free to ask if you have any questions or specific requirements.

Alfred, one of my favourite Mac apps, has been updated to version 2. If you have been waiting for it to be updated in the app store, be warned it’s only available through the Alfred website (see also Alfred and the App Store, and Alfred and the future of OS X).

There are some good workflows available for version 2 already. They are a crazy blend of catnip, napalm, and rocket fuel. You need to buy the Powerpack before you can use workflows, but given the functionality boost this brings, it’s well worth it.

Some particularly delightful workflows include:

• Open with Sublime Text 2.
• Compare Finder Items in Kaleidoscope (Kaleidoscope is an awesome diff/merge app).
• Remove Duplicate Contextual Menu Items: it’s funny and sad that this is even a thing. Finder “Open with” is a persistent annoyance with OS X.
• Dial with your iPhone from Alfred. Works with (and requires) Prowl and Growl.
• Top processes based on memory or cpu usage (see top workflow on github).
• Timezones.
• SSH with smart hostname autocomplete (see usage instructions; see how to set iterm2 as the default SSH handler).

And there’s more … www.alfredworkflow.com via @twleung. 

Here’s some thoughts after just over a week with the phone, a timeframe which captured fairly typical activity: going to the shops, going to the pub, going to a business meeting, and nipping across to Germany to spend a few days with family. All in all, a good opportunity to road-test the device.

Some random observations:

• It was nice being woken up by a different ringtone. I think I’ve got really sick of the iPhone kicking me out of bed every morning.
• I missed Siri, especially when cooking. “Countdown 20 minutes” (or however long those potatoes take to boil) is the most. useful. feature. ever. The Windows Phone 8 speech recognition doesn’t seem to cover this yet.
• Installing multiple apps is really tedious: go to app store, find an app, click the app, click install, get a weird pause, get shown a download screen, get taken to app list, curse, hit the back button until you’re back at the app store. It’s almost as jarring as the iPhone dumping you out of the app store and onto the home screen so you can see the progress of your app download.
• The one stand-out feature so far is the here.com maps. This is good, because it’s Nokia’s differentiation on top of stock Windows Phone 8. Of course, you can download HERE Maps on other Windows Phone devices (and iOS), but it was great to have them installed by default.
• Microsoft must have a ton of designers, and yet they still use a floppy disk icon to indicate Save? And worse, sometimes they don’t, they use a tick instead. Consistency? Not so much.

And that brings us neatly to the crux of the problem with the Nokia Lumia 920: any review of the device has to take into account Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8. And no matter how good the device may be, it is frankly hobbled by the Windows legacy.

So on with the review. I made this review by taking screenshots on the phone whenever something struck me as noteworthy, and by keeping a longer-form log in Microsoft OneNote.

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WP8 has a very strong design, which at times works against it. For example, I hated the Kindle app’s presentation in the app store and in the app list; I was forever looking for the person reading under the tree. 

Incidentally, I also had problems with the Kindle app; it would occasionally try to sync twice on startup, which usually resulted in it crashing. Several launch attempts later, it finally settled down. Some work required there, I think.

Over the course of the last week, I downloaded several apps from the store (mostly free or trial, but a couple of paid apps too). Aside from the ugly path error during download, there was only one occasion when this didn’t work, when trying to install the Kindle app:

Most of the apps you’d expect to see were available, but not always in the way you’d expect to see them. For example, Fruit Ninja was available, but it looked very fuzzy on the Lumia’s screen.

That’s a real shame, as the screen is one of the standout features of the Nokia hardware. It’s also an old version – from early 2011 – and many of the store comments are requesting updates. The iOS version of Fruit Ninja is just a few months old. The Android version of Fruit Ninja is from March 2012.

The situation may be different for other games, but Fruit Ninja was the first to catch my eye, and is a game I know well.

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Let’s talk more about maps. I tried them out on several occasions:

• finding a route from a train station into central London for a meeting
• finding a route from a tube stop to a restaurant for brunch
• trying to find a nearby pub
• finding the location of my holiday apartment in Berlin
• tracking my location across Berlin’s metro system

Only searching for a pub was less successful than it could have been – based on experience and a race against an HTC Android device, Google Maps would have been more effective.

A standout feature of HERE maps is the ability to download maps for offline use. Google Maps offers limited caching, but not quite as effectively. This Nokia Maps vs Google Maps Youtube video demonstrates it nicely. Given o2 only give you 25mb of data per day in Europe, being able to download 601mb of German maps before I set off was a real life-saver.

The maps also looked good, and felt like the best bits of TomTom’s navigation and Google Maps combined into one. A couple of examples of using the navigation:

The map overlays also worked very well, in particular the public transport overlay. Here’s what they look like in Berlin:

It was also really nice to be able to pin locations to the phone’s home screen for quick and easy access. Note also my XBox avatar in the screenshot, offering some great personalisation by leveraging different Microsoft properties:

I did notice a few glitches. During my travel across Berlin, I kept losing the data connection. At one point, the phone was very convinced that I was in fact in London – even claiming to have established a GPS lock:

Another glitch was frequent updates to the terms and policies for using the maps. These would be displayed and required confirmation, but as they were shown in white text over the top of the map, it was impossible to read them:

The final glitches are more of a user experience fail:

• Every time I launched the maps app overseas, I got reminded to download maps. The first time was useful, but if you’re using the maps frequently abroad, it gets really annoying – especially if you’ve downloaded the maps for offline use.
• The compass icon for launching maps from the home screen was less than obvious, and the name “HERE Maps” doesn’t have sufficient recognition (yet). I asked a couple of people to start the maps app, and both struggled to do so.

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Some things didn’t work so well.

Voice recognition is handy on a mobile phone, and although I couldn’t set a countdown timer for my spuds, I was happy to try it out for searching bing. Because I’m a sadist, I tried this in a crowded and noisy pub on St Patrick’s Day. Accessing voice recognition is just like the iPhone – you hold down the equivalent of the home button until prompted to speak:

We were having a typical pub conversation, involving rivers running green in the US in honour of the Irish saint. So my voice search was “Saint Patrick’s Day Chicago”. How was this interpreted?

Windows Phone decided to search for “patrick stacey croyden”. This was excellent entertainment value (and possibly some clever geolocation optimisation), but needless to say did not deliver the required results. A couple of additional attempts failed, and so I gave up. A friend tried on an HTC Android handset, and was successful on the second attempt.

WP8′s version of Internet Explorer in some ways is really very good: fast loading, smooth scrolling, good rendering, and a wonderfully uncluttered browsing experience that maximises the visibility of page content.

There were a few sites that didn’t work for one reason or another. Surprisingly, the BBC was subject to unfortunate wrapping of headlines. Unsurprisingly, the excessive crap on forbes.com didn’t render properly, and ended up messing with some page content. Frustratingly, I was unable to enter start or destination airports on Easyjet’s website. Those were the only significant glitches I noticed, despite doing quite a lot of browsing.

However, it’s not all roses with WP8 IE. The minimal UI has a few drawbacks: extra taps required to access tabs (I recommend changing the “address bar button” in settings to display tabs), extra taps required to get to favourites, inconsistent back navigation (sometimes it goes to the previous page, sometimes to the previous app) and no forward navigation.

The browser is also poorly-integrated into other apps. The mail app is a particular example. It would be wonderful to be able to open emailed links in the phone’s browser, but long presses on links only offer the option of copying the link. This seems very odd. If you want to open an emailed link in a browser, or share the link to social networks, or bookmark a link or pin it to the start screen, then you have to manually copy it and paste it into the browser’s URL bar:

The mail app is broken in other ways, too. Microsoft have pursued an admirable security policy of not downloading any email images by default. But there’s no setting to change this. Unfortunately, this means that almost every email you receive looks rubbish, until you track down an image and click “Download pictures”. And that includes emails from Microsoft themselves:

As I was travelling to Germany, I needed to send some text messages in German, so I wanted to swap keyboards. I had to RTFM to find out how to add language packs, and once I did find out, I was surprised by how large they were. This was particularly annoying as the first attempt to download failed, requiring me to go back in and restart each language pack download.

I was unsurprised but disappointed that installation of the language packs required a phone restart. I was rather surprised that the installation took over five minutes to perform (although in fairness I was warned of this).

Once installed, the language packs worked fine. Switching language worked just the same as on iOS. Predictive text was predictable.

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It’s not all doom and gloom. There are some great things about this phone and this platform. The things that stand out so far about WP8 specifically:

• It has a unique and interesting user interface, that stands out from other platforms (and actually works, unlike the Windows 8 desktop train wreck).
• It uses gestures in some places, and I can only hope for more in the future (for example swipe up to close apps in the tasks view).
• Pinned apps and live tiles are useful and look great.
• WP8 had most of the apps I wanted to use (I think London Tube Deluxe was the one I most missed).
• The browser capably handled most sites I threw at it, and there are websites to cover most of the missing apps (e.g. TfL and traintimes.org.uk for Tube Deluxe)
• The integration with bing is useful and well thought out.

And about the Lumia hardware in particular:

• The battery took a hammering and lasted well (including several hours of non-stop browsing and twittering).
• The screen is amazing (and I say that as an iPhone 4S and a Retina iPad user): bright, startlingly clear, vivid colours.
• The bright yellow case makes the phone easy to find (seriously) and injects some fun into the day. It’s not another boring black or aluminium or plastic slab.
• The camera is magic – I’ve never seen a phone camera work so well in low light situations.

One of my favourite features of the phone was the ability to automatically pull a new image for the lock screen every day. They were all beautiful. For example:

And with that, I’m going to duck out of doing a final summary. I have a few more hours to play with the phone before I pack it up and send it back to Nokia, so I’ll save my final conclusions for another post.

Guess what plugin seems to be causing the problem?