I finally decided to wave BlackBerry goodbye

Oct 13, 2014 16:31 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft has invested a fortune to make Windows Phone more popular and compete with Android and iOS in some specific countries across the world, but the current market share figures pretty much speak for themselves: Redmond failed to reach its purpose and Windows Phone continues to be way behind both its rivals, gaining ground only in emerging markets thanks to cheap devices.

Since the release of Windows Phone 8, Microsoft has constantly rolled out fixes and improvements that are supposed to make the platform altogether more usable, while at the same time working with Nokia, first a partner and now part of its very own business, to design new devices capable of competing with devices from Samsung and Apple (read Android and iOS).

The launch of Windows Phone 8.1 was the moment when I finally decided to give this mobile OS a try, even though I knew that giving up on BlackBerry would be mostly impossible.

Until now, I have tried pretty much all flagships on the market, including devices from Samsung and Apple, but I couldn’t really find one that would address my needs in the way BlackBerry did. I won’t comment too much on this because the majority of mobile operating systems out there do pretty much the same things, but some are not as effective as others, at least as far as productivity is concerned.

Just look at the BlackBerry Hub. Except for BlackBerry, no other company offers a feature that would allow you to manage all your accounts in such an effective manner. Of course, there are ways to do that on Android, Windows Phone, and iOS, but the BlackBerry Hub is simply much better for the way I like to get stuff done. It’s a matter of choice and BlackBerry was for many years the best option for me.

In just a few words, let me explain why I decided to jump ship and give up on BlackBerry for Windows Phone. It wasn’t Microsoft’s platform the one that convinced me to do it, but BlackBerry for failing to keep up with the others.

I really hoped that BlackBerry Passport would be a terrific product, one that would help the company gain ground and not only remain on the floating line, but also gain market share and win back customers who in the last years switched to alternative platforms. It turns out that Passport isn’t kind the device I wanted it to be and the square display, although it could really come in handy for email management, could be a nightmare for watching videos or anything else.

The bottom line is that BlackBerry actually pushed me to Windows Phone and now, with a few exceptions, I’m glad it happened. If you’re wondering why I didn’t choose Android or iOS, the answer is as simple as it could be: out of these three, Windows Phone seems to be the choice that could help me remain productive on the go. I work on Windows, both at home and at the office, so why not going all-in on Windows and choosing Windows Phone?

The choice has been made and I’m now a Windows Phone user.

My new phone is now a white Lumia 1520 that’s often referred to as the king of Lumias, not only thanks to its strong hardware capabilities, but also because of its size, which at the first glance makes it more of a tablet than a phone. It’s a phablet actually, and if you’re scared of big phones, you should really give it a shot for a few hours and see what it’s capable of.

I’m not going to talk too much on the hardware side of the Lumia 1520, because my colleague Cosmin Vasile already reviewed the phone, but this device is quite a mobile power horse that can help you get stuff done wherever you are.

It has a 6-inch screen with a resolution of 1080x1920px and Corning Gorilla Glass 2, a 20-megapixel camera with Car Zeiss optics, a quad-core 2.2 GHz Krait 400 CPU, 32 GB of internal storage and runs Windows Phone 8.1 fully up-to-date with Cortana and pretty much all the other apps currently available from Microsoft.

First and foremost, I do like the device. It’s huge, there’s no doubt about it, but it’s all just a matter of time until you get used to it. The phone feels really great in your hand, but there’s one thing that needs to be mentioned here: there’s no chance you could use it with just one hand. That’s what really came in less handy at first, but against, it was just a matter of hours until I discovered its full potential.

All in all, the device itself is really amazing and we’ll talk about it a little bit more in our future chapters of this article, but it was very important for everyone to know that the big size of the phone is tarrying only when seeing it and not when using it.

Windows Phone on a 6-inch device

My Lumia 1520 runs a fully updated version of Windows Phone 8.1, and given the fact that it has a 6-inch screen, you would expect a smooth experience across the entire operating system.

That’s not happening and now you’ll hear me complaining for the very first time about Windows Phone.

A 6-inch phone would naturally allow you to do pretty much everything on a single screen, with enough space for music, instant messaging, videos, and emails. But Windows Phone makes this really impossible at some times.

Fonts are so huge in a number of apps that it’s a nightmare to use them on such a big screen. Twitter and WhatsApp are the best examples in this case. The official Twitter app on Windows Phone 8.1 and Lumia 1520 barely displays four different tweets on the same screen, with the gigantic buttons at the top taking almost quarter of the main window. What a waste of time! For the sake of comparison, the BlackBerry Z10, which has a 4.2-inch screen, displays the same amount of tweets, but in a better organized and much more effective way.

Twitter on Windows Phone (on the left) and BlackBerry OS 10 (on the right)
Twitter on Windows Phone (on the left) and BlackBerry OS 10 (on the right)

Some would say that it’s not Microsoft’s fault because third-party app developers decided to use this annoying layout. And yes, they might be right, but Microsoft is partially at fault because it uses the same gigantic fonts all over the OS and there’s no way to adjust that. I’m not using the smallest possible fonts and the result is pretty much the same.

This isn’t the only annoyance I’ve found in Windows Phone 8.1 on my new Lumia 1520, but we’ll discuss more about everything in the next chapter, as I’m still hoping to find a way to fix them all.

As a short conclusion, don’t worry, I’m not here to criticize Windows Phone, I actually like it a lot. The home screen looks pretty amazing and so do some apps, the email client works really great (although I noticed that I couldn’t use Exchange because HTML content wasn’t displayed correctly, so I had to switch to IMAP) and Glance Screen is a feature that I can’t live without anymore.

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A white Lumia 1520 is my new phone
Twitter on Windows Phone (on the left) and BlackBerry OS 10 (on the right)
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