Windows 8 phone vs Android

Upgrade time is fast approaching – I may not, but Mrs Grips hates hers with a passion so will be going for something reasonably powerful.

Now, we both really like the look of Windows 8 phones, but the main issue seems to be with app availability. Some people say they hate W8 but some love it. As with all these things, one man’s meat is another’s shite phone of course.

I notice that there’s no Strava, and no Instagram either. Mrs Grips says she wants Instagram but I suspect she can do much better with Photoshop Elements which we have, especially since she’s usually taking pictures with a real camera rather than phone.

She is most interested in Twitter and FB, but of course there’s always apps you don’t know you want until you find them. Kids’ games and stuff are a hit too in this house.

The thing you will loathe beyond belief with the Windows phone is that bing is the default search engine and because of the way the phone is built, you have to use bing.

And it really is an absolutely rubbish search engine.

Apart from that, it seems quite nice.

love my androids, we have 6 androids round the house now.
7 inch Novo tablet
10 inch samsung galaxy tab2 10.1
Old Htc Desire HD – used as a music player, IP camera montior for the cheap cctv we use as a baby monitr (althoguh we can use any other droid fone to do this too)
Samsung Galaxy S3 my phone
Samsung Galaxy Ace 3 wifes fone
Rikomagic MK802 2 – TV hdmi server thingy.

Windows is game over in this house..

Oh.. didn’t know that about Bing – that is truly awful. Is it not possible to change?

Office is a bit of a draw still though.

I’m just looking into the Sony Experia Z. I like the fact it’s water resistant.. could be really useful for me. I’m always putting my phones in a plastic bag in a pocket when exercising.

Good phones from Nokia, we have the lumia 820 models.
plenty of apps, including 3rd party strava and instagram although i don’t use either. Easy enough to use google on a live tile if you feel the need as well.
good battery life, great camera with lots of apps, great screen and a really intuitive OS.

works for us.

Experia Z looks like it might not last a day on battery. What’s the life like on your Nokias?

Lasts me a day with moderate use. Its a bit heavier than an iphone 5 for example, so bigger battery than some.
you don’t have to use the built in bing BTW, just set up a google tile on the start page and press that and google!

Definitely try a Windows phone before buying. I was absolutely, definitely getting one…. then tried one and got an iPhone instead. Nothing wrong with it per se, just didn’t work for me

I really like my android but the word coming from those testing out W8 mobiles for our company is that they’re really popular.

Battery currently on 41% BTW

Muddydwarf is right, you can create a tile but the inbuilt search engine will always be bing. I’ve heard you can change it by setting the language to be Russian but we never tried it. I think my son just has a google bookmark.

Also, the phone doesn’t like being dropped on hard tile floors only a couple of months after you’ve bought it.

Saw a mate at the weekend, who I’d describe as a non-geeky normal end-user, who had recently changed from Android to a Windows phone.

He swapped straight back to Android under the cooling off period for the simple reason that he found the mapping/navigation on Windows to not be a patch on Android.

If that’s important to you…

I dont think battery life on any phone is lengthy nowadays, its not something you really should consider a deal breaker.
Mrs 101 has a nokia lumia 610 windows and she uses IE not bing, although the way the phone is designed means she turns it on all the time without knowing

I would say the app availability on android is the best, I have only paid for 3 apps, all the rest are really good free ones. For any problem that needs to be solved there is normally a wide range of apps to do it.
The wifes Ipad annoys as there are very few free/open source type apps.

Plenty of free apps on WP8 if you opt for Nokia as they have their own app store that more than doubles the number available. Non Nokia handsets are still limited by not having access to that.
I really haven’t missed any apps by moving over from android.

I dont think battery life on any phone is lengthy nowadays, its not something you really should consider a deal breaker.

I just need it to last all day, so 18 hours or so max. Less than that IS a deal breaker.

PS can you say if you’ve got a Nokia W8 phone or an HTC?

PS can you say if you’ve got a Nokia W8 phone or an HTC?

Its a Nokia. Mrs 101 is very happy with it, but she’s not really a big tech person and is happy with the way the camera works (very well) and that she can surf a bit and ring and text.

I wont be getting a job reviewing phones…. 😕

EDIT – def will last a day, you can switch on a battery saver option

Can’t comment specifically on the Xperia Z, but all of the reviews for the Xperia T that I have just got slate the battery life.

It was rubbish to start with, but now I’ve had it a couple of weeks it seems fine. There was loads of unnecessary syncing going on that I have stopped, I’m not playing with the settings all the time and I am back to my usual cycle of use.

It’s also got NFC built-in and I’ve just got some NFC tags, so I’ll be setting one up on the bedside table to stick it onto airplane mode when I go to bed. No point having it talking to the network while I’m asleep.

There are a few annoyances with the phone (data warning everytime you turn data back on, for example) but overall very happy with it.

Battery saver disables syncing.. I’d like it to last a day with syncinc.

The wifes Ipad annoys as there are very few free/open source type apps.

Don’t agree with that. There’s plenty of free stuff in the App Store plus loads of apps for the grand price of 69p, 99p etc. I really don’t get why people spend £100s on a phone or tablet then whine about paying tuppence for a bit of software.

sorry molgrips, should have said that it will last a day without the battery saver being switched on, but can be used if your running low. Mrs 101 hammers her texts and emails and walks miles with her radio playing and is still going strong by the time she gets home. Only at night does she crawl over me to plug it in, usually as i’m just dropping off to sleep 👿

Oh yes, Nokia have a deal with OS about mapping access. They are currently the only manufacturer to offer offline OS mapping it seems.
I have a free OS app that covers the UK 🙂

White101, sounds good enough.

OS mapping also sounds great 🙂

Assuming you work somewhere where you have a desk, if you want to use every feature of your phone constantly, spare charger on your desk is an easy solution to battery life. I use one for days when i do a few hours of gps, loads of using the web to look things up, push email on all the time etc.

If you have to do any serious editing of word docs etc on your phone, wp8 might be good, but the latest android is very very good and very well supported by developers. Got a nexus 4 and it really is brilliant.

Oh, the nokias have ‘wireless charging’ – a pad you drop your phone onto and it starts charging. Bit of a gimmick and the pad came free with MsD’s contract phone, still nice bit of kit to have though.

Not a gimmick…apparently this is the way everything is going to be going…

I’ve got w8 on my desktop and it does appeal having my phone on the same so, but I don’t tend to share things between the systems just now (currently android) so I’m not sure it would be an attraction…I stopped logging into windows about 3 days aft getting the desktop so can’t remember my login details so that is unlikely to work anyway!

Android works very well for me…battery life is a serious deal breaker for me…I just can’t see why people go for all the fancy toys but can’t then go away anywhere that doesn’t have a power socket to use every night…but then I’m quite happy to go bothy’ing or camping for a weekend where plugs don’t appear on the list.

My galaxy S2 will last 2 days with ‘reasonable’ wifi and data usage. I don’t have the synch switched on for anything and I have wifi, data, GPS switched off and only activate when needed. I also have the screen brightness turned down to about 30% – which made the biggest difference. If I need it brighter I hit the auto option and then switch it off when not needing it. Screen brightness seems to be the big killer of battery so making adjustments can make big savings on battery life.

As to the original question…afraid I’d stick with android…I’ve spent the last 3+ years with it and know how to make it work for me…would not be adverse trying a windows phone but suspect it will take a good wee while for me to adjust.

One thing i will say about Windows Phone 8 is that it is really fast compared to android, but if you are buying like a quad core android anyway that doesn’t matter

Windows here and love it.

No Strava, but there is Endomondo…no great loss any how is it? If your that bothered there is an App called Chaser that some guy has written that records your ride and loads it direct to Strava

I much prefer Windows to Android, Android feels less slick than Windows.

Never had a browser issue, just a shortcut tile, don’t quite get where people are coming from on that one, that’s really picking at straws for faults.

Windows 8 is very very good. Buy a PAYG nokia 620 for £130 from Carphone Whorehouse, buy a sim only deal for £10-15 p/m with anyone but Three (as the phone is unlocked to all networks but a three sim won’t work) and that’s all the phone and contract you’ll ever need.

Yes its a low spec phone but there’s nothing missing on it, its fast and smooth – battery easily gets me through 36 hours and its rock solid reliable.

Cheers

Danny B

I’m quite tempted by the new Nokia 720 which apparently gives 3 days usable time and 13 hours talk time on 3G / 23 hours talk time on 2g.

Office is a bit of a draw still though.

Polaris on my Galaxy Note does Word and Excel. Has a pdf viewer too, so not really much more I’d want on that front.

No Strava, but there is Endomondo…no great loss any how is it?

I have been tracking my training with Strava segments, it’d be a minor shame to lose that. Having said that, a mate just pointed out that you can use a Garmin GPS just as well, which I have. So that’s probably become less of a deal breaker this evening 🙂

I’d be upgrading with Orange – been with them for ages and get good kickbacks.

Just played with a W8 phone. Nice. I like the home screen and I like One Note too.

Experia Z otoh is nice enough but perhaps too big for the pockets in my shorts, which defeats the object of getting a water resistant phone.

Got a Lumia 920 for work and a S3 for personal stuff. Like both, both have +’s and -‘s. Windows seems to be a better work phone, especially as it has MS Office integration. S3 seems slighter better for personal, more relevant apps. But at the end of the day both are good.

Which handset Molgrips?

I loved my Windows 8 phone. HTC thing

Sadly, it didn’t like my in car blue tooth hands free system and, driving all over the country I really needed it to work but, sometimes it would, sometimes it wouldn’t.

I found out its a well documented issue dating back many months October 2012? With no solution yet.

I doubted there would be a solution as the windows 8 phones only have a few Bluetooth profiles or something.

I took mine back and swapped it for an IPhone I didn’t want but, to be fair to the iPhone, it’s superb. It works. I didn’t want an iPhone because I hate ITunes. I found software that allows you to put music on your phone without iTunes so I am a happy bunny now.

I believe windows 7 phones are ok on Bluetooth but avoid windows 8 phones if your car is more than a few months old. Mrs Coolhandluke likes her windows 7 phone apart from not being able to get Kandy Crush app or something.

Google windows 8 Bluetooth problems and you will find loads of folk moaning on the Microsoft web site asking for a solution.

Oh, the windows 8 phone also used to turn off in the middle of the night and not wake me up with the alarm because it was off. They might have sorted that issue by now though.

EDIT, think my handset was an HTC 820

you can upload to strava from other software – doesn’t have to be the strava app, surely ?

I have a Nokia 920 and really like it. As a work phone it is pretty good as it does Outlook sync nicely. Bluetooth had a couple of issues to start with in my car but is now pretty solid. Very nice camera built in. Not big app user so for me it was no big deal and even with Apple / Android the fact that there 000’s of apps means little to me as that just seems to mean more meaningless crappy apps to wade through.

Wifey also now has a Nokia having been adamant that she didn’t really want to change from her old HTC Wildfire. Tried an 820 and really liked it. Was impressed with the camera and is now a very happy WP8 user. If you have a Live / Hotmail / Outlook email address then you can get seamless sync between the phone and SkyDrive such that photos automatically get sync’d to Skydrive and are then immediately available on your Windows 8 machine or Xbox. Personally I don’t really like Android phones as they have always seemed a bit clunky and unfinished.

Son has an HTC 8S which he likes. Apart from when he dropped it and cracked the screen. Prefers it to the old HTC Android he used to have.

And as for the contrast between Bing and Google – over the past couple of years I can’t say I have noticed that much difference between them. The comments above slating it tell me the person either is just an MS hater or hasn’t used it for a long time and is going on what others may have said rather than making their own assessment.

I use the 920,had a few weeks still don’t know how to use it,ive got big hands,but is heavy,not into apps,but the social media hub is good,if you got time to wait a model called the catwalk is due after summer an will be metal 920,an lighter

you can upload to strava from other software – doesn’t have to be the strava app, surely ?

I’m just realising this, yes. I have a Garmin Edge for biking, and for running I can use Endomondo and just sync later. I used to use Endomondo and only switched to use segments to track progress.

I was sold on OneNote for mobile, but then I just found out it’s available for Android anyway.. then I read it doesn’t sync with OneNote 2007 (which I have) THEN I realised that it actually does, or tries to, and it’s sitting there opening my online notebook right now.. but it’s not coming up.. but it IS downloading something.. hmm…

EDIT aaaand.. it failed. Boo.

Then I found out there’s not YET an iPlayer for WP.. but they are working on a web-based client..

It’s still a dead heat. I’m not sure I will get an Experia Z though if I do stay with Android because it’s probably too big for my running shorts pocket.