In the past 2 years, I have had a hard time finding a good brand for smartphones. These days, all manufacturers care about is specifications and nothing unique about smartphones. But this is where Lumia’s are different.
DO Phone
The Lumia smartphones come in various colors and their strong points, one is better in battery life, while the other one is better in taking selfies, or another one is excellent at taking pictures with the rear camera.
The great about Lumia’s is that they share one common thing: productivity. With non Windows Phones it is usually a hit or miss based on the OEM software what you can do, and the features they put on the Android smartphones are simply not worth using, or most of us don’t know they are even there. Because they probably don’t realize what the customer wants.
Camera
If you look at the Lumia series, when we got the Lumia Denim update, everyone was very surprised. The 4K video recording capabilities and the rich capture feature which selects the best looking picture when you try to take a picture was just awesome. Suddenly the best experience to take pictures with smartphones had become Lumia. The Lumia 930 and 1520 were the one of the only ones to receive 4K video recording.
The Lumia 1020 did not however benefit from 4K video recording because the SoC was not fast enough, but it still did what it do best, capturing pictures.
Here below is the review of the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 3 which was recorded in 4K with the Lumia 930.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wD9hHz2NeMY&w=560&h=315]
Travel more efficient, do more
On Android, it took me quite some time to find a decent navigation app. Because either there are no available offline maps, or there is no voice available in different languages telling you where to go next. And more importantly, most of the time you cannot even get a GPS location fix.
With HERE Maps you can just view maps or start navigation by foot or by bike.
With HERE City Lens you can view the POI on your display and then point the camera in the direction you want to go. This allows you to quickly see which POI are in which direction. Very addictive!
HERE TransIt is probably my favorite app to travel with public transport. The user interface is so innovative that it allows me to quickly see which bus is coming when and how long it takes me to get there by showing the different schedules in a very intelligent chart.
HERE Drive is a full blown GPS navigation app that has all the features you could possibly want. You can see if there are traffic jams when roads are being marked red and quickly find a detour. There is voice navigation in every possible language which means it is very friendly to different nationalities. And then there are several premium features you should probably look at yourself, these you usually don’t find in premium GPS software or hardware from TomTom for example…
Variety
There is a high variety of devices to choose from and many different colors. Some models even allow you to replace the back cover with a different color, for example the recently released Lumia 640.
Lumia 535 different colors
Several models and their best characteristics
| * SD card * Office 365 subscription (limited?) | |
| * Extreme Battery Life * Camera: Good (13MP) * SD card | |
| * Selfies (5MP - wide angle) | |
| * Camera: Very good (20MP) * Video Recording: 4K * Excellent outdoors visibility display * Lots of RAM * Build Quality: Excellent | |
| * Camera: Excellent (41MP) * Excellent outdoors visibility display | |
| * Extreme Battery Life * Camera: Very good (20MP) * Video Recording: 4K * Large size * SD card * Excellent outdoors visibility display |
This table shows that there is clearly a Windows Phone for everyone, whatever you want in a smartphone, it is there.