An ideal business phone.
I've been keeping on keeping on with the Lumia 950 and have to say I've grown to not really mind it. I have dropped trying to use it as a personal phone though, the iphone just fits my personal usage better, but for business usage it is meeting all my requirements.
It hasn't let me down in daily usage for work, email has come and gone as needed, the calender has updated and alerted me fine and the browser has been spot on. Interestingly I noticed that Instagram have finally updated their beta app for the windows platform. Perhaps a recognition that the platform has a bit of life in it yet.
I feel Mircrosoft are taking a bit of a left field play for increasing usage of the platform, these are great business phones and, just like Blackberry, if they can get a solid amount of sales to business users the platform is already a success.
I would love to try the continuum functions (hint, hint) as I love the idea of having a phone that is also my work computer by just plugging into a monitor. I had the motorola Atrix which did the same but it only launched firefox so was limited in what it could do. Having access to an almost full windows environment would be spot on for probably 85% of my daily tasks.
The carmera still is a bit of a let down. The files have very little room for processing before you see banding in the sky for instance. A couple of shots below -
I did discover that the Lumia studio software is likely the main issue though. Trying editing a couple of files in photoshop express yielded better results -
The processing power of photoshop express was much better and much more sympathetic to the file itself. I still had to be incredibly careful to avoid spoiling the image. I am happy with the images above but it was like stepping back in camera tech a fair few years.
The maps software hs been good but is missing one vital tie in that google maps has and that is traffic info. I used it to try and get from a to b for an early morning meeting. The maps decided to try and take me through a city at 8.45am but stated that it would only take me 25 minutes to get to the destination. The city it was taking me through at thime in the morning would have likely taken about an hour to get through alone never mind the added driving time. Perhaps I just have grown a bit to dependant on Google maps but the traffic updates in it are invaluable and are a real miss on the Windows phone.
As I have stated before, the iphone is grand for me as a personal phone but in a lot of ways I would actually look at the windows platform before Android now. I was a huge advocate for android for years but can't say I find any joy in using it anymore. The apps are there, certainly more so than the windows phone but there is just something, intrusive, about it that I find jarring.
So in a bizarre turn of events if I were to recommend a phone to someone now it would be in this order -
1. Get an iphone if you can manage to get more than the 16gb version
2. Get the best windows phone you can and accept that not all of the apps are available but that the six you will actually use on a daily basis are and they are grand.
3. Get an android phone but accept that you need to learn a lot about managing your own privacy.
*Part 1 of the review can be found here*
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