Bringer of Colour, Enabler of Technology!

Ok. Today marks my full work week with the Lumia as my primary phone. To date my commentary has been about pretty personal applications. Let’s talk about my experience with actual work applications.

For the most part at work I use a smartphone mostly for what used to be called PIM applications. (Personal Information Management) – these include:

• Email
• Calendar
• Tasks
• Messaging (text messaging)

I also use it to:

• Take notes (Evernote)
• Snap whiteboards for conversion into documentation
• Search the web
• Collate & remember travel info (Tripit)

and very occasionally I’ll read attachments like productivity documents, and presentations.

Ok – Email.

Now I prefer the way Windows Phone 8 renders email to the Windows 8 email client. Again, however, I’m struck how the Metro interface manages to clutter the screen, and waste space. When I use my phone for email, it’s typically to “triage” my inbox. Check out my post here on the 4 D’s to Inbox Zero The first thing I do is to scan emails to delete, the second to delegate. What I need is a quick way to do that scanning – i.e. I need to see as much information from about emails in my inbox as possible.

Check out these two screenshots:

These are at the same ratios to each other as the actual devices.

On both phones you can see the same number of emails (5) On both phones you can see the sender, the time received, whether there are attachments. Whether the email is read or not.

But on the iPhone, despite the smaller & lower resolution screen you can also see:

• When last the email client was synched (bottom status bar)
• All the phone health (top bar) – i.e. connectivity, battery life etc.  (Note: you can swipe down on the WP8 to see additional phone telemetry)
• 3 lines of the message body per email vs only 1 on WP8
• Emails from the same sender & subject as a thread vs only the same subject on WP8
• Finally on iPhone, the initiating sender of a thread is highlighted vs the most recent on WP8

So I personally find it quicker to do that “delete,” “defer,” “deal with” triage. How much quicker? Enough to impact my workflow. Most triage can be done from sender & subject line. But there are enough emails that I have to open on the Nokia before I can make a triage decision, that slow me down.

Note I typically only triage my email at the beginning and the end of the day, or if I’ve been in a number of back to back meetings and away from my laptop for some time. For me, at least, this is an important enough process to keep my Inbox under control. 

How can this be though? The screen on the Nokia is significantly bigger, with more pixels, and more importantly, more Pixels per Inch. In other words, the Lumia should be able to display more information, not less.

Have another look at the images. You’ll notice a full 20% of the available display is taken up with irrelevant titles. The Inbox doesn’t even begin until below the iPhone Inbox. The bottom of the display is wider again on WP8. In short, a great device is rendered less useful by the User Interface Design.

There are other little annoyances in the Inbox too:

• On WP8 I can only see one Inbox at a time, not the consolidated Inbox of all of my service providers
• I can’t easily delete a single email. Rather than swiping and hitting delete, I have to click the Select button, then select the email I want, then Delete (or Move) Note: This is analogous to pressing the Edit button on iOS. Great for multiple emails, just slightly longer for single emails.

What about the body of an email?

Here you can see that Windows shows more content than iOS. Not much more. Definitely not as much as it could display, but sufficiently more on a long email to allow quick reading. You’ll also note that WP8 handles the email headers better too. There is nothing worse than tens or hundreds of recipient addresses in the To: or Cc: fields of an email on a mobile device.

Tap on an email address on the iPhone though, and you get the persons full contact details, plus options to connect with them. On Windows you get just their email address, and the opportunity to search your various directories to find them.

I can hear people already going: “Really??!? Aren’t you just being a little pedantic?” and yes, for the individual email, perhaps I am. But from 3 inboxes, I get a combined 200+ emails per day. The only way I maintain Inbox zero and sanity is by using my phone to keep on top of it. If I spent just 15 seconds more per email, that would be up to 50 minutes extra per day I have to spend trawling through email.

If the Nokia, with it’s larger screen size let me deal with email quicker, across all service providers, I’d put up with the weight and battery hit. I really would. It’s that important to me.

But it doesn’t…

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I’m nearing the conclusion of the first week with this phone. Finally the comments have started to die down. Brett’s insistence on the Ferrari Red device, combined with the sheer presence of this (still feeling) massive phone, achieved its outcome. Everybody from executives to colleagues; customers to friends; have inquired and commented about the Nokia.

It’s also interesting to observe the polarisation of opinion. People are very invested in their smartphone choice, even if they’re self-proclaimed “non-technical.” And this leads to emotional debates. It’s hard to say “This doesn’t work for me” without being accused of being a fanboi, or devotee.

Of course I’ve witnessed many religious debates over the years, Novell vs Windows, Netscape vs IE, Notes vs Exchange, Oracle vs SQL, Windows vs Linux, MS vs FOSS, and on, and on… …but this debate seems to be the most widespread, and the most personal. My wife hates the WP8, probably even more than I do. My daughters played with it for a while, but went back to the comfort of their phones, proclaiming they’d never buy Windows. At the office a fellow Chief Technologist uses Windows Phone 8, but on the HTC One, because of its smaller size and “longer” battery life. Others use Android and laugh at (their perception of) Windows less configurability compared to Android, and less functionality compared to Apple.

It is like religion. Everyone has an opinion.

It’s also like having a baby. Everyone volunteers their opinion too.

Which leads to the most hyperbolic claims about the “death” of an organisation. More on that in another post. Let’s get back to the phone.

Yesterday I mentioned my car stereo wouldn’t recognise the Lumia. Well it does pair via Bluetooth. Great for music (of which I haven’t put any on the phone – will have to get around to that), navigation, and phone.

Where it falls down is in the ability to pair simultaneously with a couple of devices. Maybe I got the settings wrong, but no matter how much I tried I could only have the phone paired entirely to the Kenwood, or to my Plantronics headset.

Because the installers never installed a mic with my stereo there’s a terrible echo. So I typically use my Plantronics for calls, and stereo for navigation and audio. Actually in thinking about it, this might not be a Bluetooth split, because I always charge the iPhone from the stereo. So it may be my audio and navigation use USB, and phone my BT headset.

Either way, it’s another annoyance. Something I have to work around. The only way I can hear the navigation through the stereo is via Bluetooth. The compromise is to hear navigation via the headset, or calls via the stereo.

I’m very conscious at how pretentions this post sounds. How very #FirstWorldProblems. But if you’re going to invest more than $500 on a phone, you might want it to enable all of the benefits you’re paying for.

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