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Nokia Lumia 1020: First week’s impressions of Windows Phone

CN Tower at night
The CN Tower in Toronto, shot at night without flash on Nokia Lumia 1020

It has now been a week since I got the Nokia Lumia 1020.
The phone feels great in your hand.
The photos are very good.
You do feel like you live on an island.

Windows Phone is still a novelty.

I love the flat design and once you get its implementation of panels, its interface seems more fluid than iOS’ dependency on tabs. The user interface’s fit and finish are polished and smooth, nothing like the noisy bumpy experience on Android.

I am what I believe is an enterprise user.
I need impeccable email and calendar experience, as close as you would get in Outlook (however frustrating it is sometimes). Windows Phone is not there. It is smooth, but close (see gripes below). Microsoft can and should improve on this, but who do you talk to in order to ask?

Presently, with a week left for me to return the phone, I am swaying between keeping it and getting the new iPhone 5s. Below are some of the impressions I gathered over the last week.

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General

Nokia Ovi Mail: Not getting it

So I got an email today from Nokia inviting me to get an email account on their Ovi Mail service.

I was a huge fan of their Share on Ovi photo service until its redesign several months back. Instead of a service that empowered you to do more than anything Flickr could do, and integrated better than Flickr with existing services built into your operating system, it became a crippled photo album. It was bad enough that despite being a free service, I got a Flickr account for which I pay. I love Nokia. They are original, free thinking and build phones that unlike my iPhone, don’t lose the call about 20-30% of the time. If they only had a better operating system on the excellent hardware… but that’s outside the scope of this post; Ovi Mail is.

After reading about Nokia introducing push email to the Philippines I was keen to see what Nokia has to offer in its mail service. This in light of the fact that Nokia still offers Nokia Messaging that consolidates emails from multiple accounts to a single inbox, which supposedly Nokia delivers to your messaging phone. Sadly, it appears that instead of a step forward, Ovi Mail is another step into ho-hum direction. In one sentence, Ovi Mail is another webmail service. Really. And like Yahoo! mail and Hotmail, it is accessible only from your web browser. There are no instructions on how to use this account anywhere outside the web.

One place where Ovi could have been great is integration with, well, the rest of Ovi. Namely, Ovi’s contact book. That would make sense. Those are extra awesome because they back up, for free, all the contacts from your Nokia phone, and sync with it. Great service, great idea. On an iPhone that would be extra cash for Mobile Me, unless you have a Microsoft Exchange email account. Sadly, your Ovi contacts are not present in Ovi Mail. Tragic, perplexing, sad.

I just wonder, what were they thinking? Is there a compelling reason to use Ovi Mail that I am missing?!

Inbox
Inbox
Compose Message
Compose Message
Contacts
Contacts
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General iphone

How I got the iPhone to display my Microsoft Exchange account Sent Mail folder

So I gave up on my Nokia N95-8GB.
The fact that Nokia appeared to have given up on the phone I spent so much money on, its sluggish performance and the outdated operating system could not be compensated by the excellent camera and impeccable phone reception worldwide. That and lugging along a BlackBerry for email as well as the Nokia was silly. The fact that the work-issued BlackBerry Curve was worse in too many facets than it’s older predecessor is a different matter. So i got an iPhone 3Gs.

I love it!

It is fast, things just work, the Internet is usable and with you wherever you are. The virtual keyboard is a spectacular tool when you are dealing with multilingual situations, all the more with right-to-left languages, I love it. Best of all, it connects (unsupported by our IT of course) to our corporate Microsoft Exchange 2003 server account.

Yet I noticed something a bit odd: I was unable to view my Sent mail, viewable in Entourage and Outlook as ‘Sent Items’. Looking online leads to articles mentioning another issue in which Entourage has a problem displaying iPhone sent messages properly (this is sort of a solution), but the issue remains open on Apple’s support boards (and I will post my ‘solution’ experience on it once I am done writing).

When I joined my employer almost four years ago, IT assigned us a first initial+last name@company email addresses (e.g. Joe Blow will become jblow@company.com). Two years ago we migrated to the Exchange system of our parent company where the email address is first name+last name@company (e.g. Joe Blow get an email address of joe.blow@company.com) . I can still and do use my old email address and both work. When I got my iPhone (a true moment of joy), I set it up giving it the short email address (first initial+last name@company, or jblow@company.com). My domain user name is just first initial+last name and it seemed to work – except for the sent mail issue.

Yet that was the actual issue: I had to switch the email address specified in the iPhone settings from the short version (jblow@comany.com) to the long version (joe.blow@company.com). Once I made the change, sent mail appeared just fine. I am not too certain how this translates to other organizations; it may just as well not. But if your Exchange, or possibly Active Directory administrators added email addresses or identities to your account, you may be suffering from the same issue.

Additionally, I am not sure this can be done on the fly by just modifying account settings. I was bold enough to delete the whole account and set it up again. I would definitely try the account settings route first as deleting accounts is always risky (all my contacts were gone, of course). But I am glad it worked and I have access to my sent mail.

Hope this is of help for others. A device so close to perfect makes such imperfections so noticeable and maddening.

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