Yesterday was a very busy day for me, presented to the entire Catapult Sales and Management team about our new Office 365 Accelerate program, ran to a client meeting, back to the office for another client meeting. Now it is lunch time, am I hungry, yes, do I have time to eat and do what I really want to do before needing to head back to my client for work, no. So I forgo lunch and make a trip down I-25 a few miles to the Park Meadows mall and the Microsoft Store. I called around and the only place that had what I was looking for in stock, the Red Nokia Lumia 920, was the Microsoft Store. Walked right in and had one in hand and paying for it minutes later! The Microsoft Store Rep was having a little trouble getting my new SIM card activated, but it was quickly resolved and I was off with one of the coolest phones I have ever owned!
What is not to like about this phone? The Red color just pops and with the glossy finish it just screams, hey check me out! I am not going to spend time here with the specs of the phone, so if you have been living under a rock for the past six months, here is a rundown of the phone, http://www.nokia.com/us-en/products/phone/lumia920/specifications/. One thing that I will mention about the specs is that the phone supports the superfast LTE 4G spectrum, and an added treat of the day, AT&T launched LTE service in the Denver area, so I had great speed on the phone when not connected to a WIFI network.
This phone comes with the new Windows Phone 8 software, and between the dual core processor and the new OS this phone hums along. After getting some of my apps installed, I noticed immediately how much faster they loaded and performed flawlessly. Windows Phone has also been centered around tiles on the start screen. This is a great way for a user to make a phone theirs, you can move around and add and remove tiles to customize the layout of the start screen. Windows Phone 8 added another great way to customize the Tiles, now you can choose from three different sizes of the Tile.
Above is my start screen, you can see examples of small, medium and large tiles. The other thing about the Tiles is that they are LIVE! As you see above the top Live Tile is my calendar and shows my next appointment. The People Live Tile keeps showing pictures of the people in the People Hub. You can see emails that are unread in my various email accounts and a missed call.
This is the lock screen, same coolness can see missed calls, unread email and my next appointment just a glance.
One cool new feature is the Wallet, now I can store credit cards, loyalty cards, and other things in here. I can use them to securely buy things with my phone. But one great feature of this is that I can prevent anyone from buying anything, especially my daughter, from the store. The Wallet has a pin and you can configure it to protect Store purchases. This brings up another great feature, Kid’s Corner. This is an area I can setup for my daughter to use. I control what apps, games and music. It creates a phone within a phone and ensures that my daughter won’t do anything on my phone that could be damaging!
The Xbox Music service, formerly Zune Music, is great. Now all my music is stored in the cloud and made available on any device I sign in with my Windows Account. The music doesn’t not get stored on my phone automatically but is available to play streaming. I can select individual songs to download, this is nice for times I won’t have service or more importantly to avoid using my data plan when playing music. The one ask I have of Microsoft here is the ability to download an entire Playlist at once, and not require me to download each song individually. I mentioned the Windows Account earlier, and this really is what brings everything together, within the Office Hub and OneNote app I now have all my data stored on my SkyDrive. All my achievements in Xbox games are attached to my Xbox game status, on and on and on!
The Phone also has NFC (Near Field Communication), Bluetooth, wireless, an awesome display and camera, on and on and on. It is loaded with everything, even wireless charging! Overall this phone is better than advertised, it is just the best phone I have ever had and highly recommend it to anyone!