Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

Apologies, folks. Last week I was “on call” for work, and didn’t get to my “The View from Here” installment. And I’m not going to post it now, either. Other things on my mind.

Namely, the new Windows 8 phones.

After a long campaign, my wife has succeeded in dragging me into the Smart Phone Era. Last week, we turned in our old pay-as-you-go clamshell phones and spent some times trying to decide between iPhone, Android, and the new Windows 8 phone.

iPhones are expensive. Android was a “possible,” but Verizon had a deal on the Win8 phones. The deal was for a package with phone, case, and screen protector for $50 (cost $100, with a $50 mail-in rebate). Not bad. We listened to the spiel about how the phone will synch up with all our contacts and calendars in Outlook (a must, for me), and how the “SkyDrive” (the MS version of the iCloud) could hold all our documents, music, photos, etc. We played with the demo phone, customizing it, navigating the new interface. It all looked pretty slick, and having heard good things about the new MS_OS, I (as resident “techie” and thus the person who’d be setting this all up) decided to go Win8.

For those interested, the models we took home were Nokia Lumia 822, and as a phone–the Win8 phone as a standalone piece of tech–is a pretty impressive gadget. It works fast, can multi-thread downloads, moves easily between apps. It interfaces with Facebook and integrates FB contacts and regular contacts seamlessly. It has a “People Hub” where you can see the result (my wife really liked that feature, though for me it was “meh”.) The camera has built-in and add-on “lenses” that provide special functionality; e.g., one “lens” puts the camera into “scanner” mode and will recognize and interpret bar- and QM-codes. Ringtones are a snap to find and install. Most of the apps I use on my iPad had an equivalent for the Win8 platform (though not Scrabble, dammit!)

However, the minimalist “home screen” lack the variation of color that would make apps more recognizable. This is a detriment when you might have a hundred apps on the phone. Though you can customize your home screen, changing the shape and size and order of all the favorite apps there, the color changes only affect some of the apps (MS Office, for example, remains red no matter what theme you choose). And the second “app list” screen can get tedious as you scroll through page after page of apps, or go to the “alphabet page” that will allow you to go directly to a specific letter. Neither of these app-access methods allow for the customization and grouping you can create on Apple’s OS.

But where the phones really fall down is in integration and synchronization.

Plug the phone into your Windows 7 PC and it recognizes it, installs drivers, and recommends an interface program. This part went fine (though the interface program is bare-bones). It then asks if you want to import music and photos, and lickety-split, it will interface with iTunes to get all your music and photos (if that’s where you keep them).

At this point I was pleased, but confused…Music and photos, but what about contacts and calendars? I have MS Outlook 2010, so (in theory) it should be a snap. After all, if it interfaces with iTunes so easily, it should interface with Microsoft products even easier. Right?

Wrong. In order to import contacts and calendars from Microsoft Outlook 2010 to Microsoft Windows 8 phones, I must export all my information to a CSV file, create a new “Windows Live” account (aka Hotmail), import my files into that Windows Live account, and then synch the phone–Yes, the phone that was currently physically connected to my PC–synch the phone to the information on the internet.

In other words, the Win8 phone simply would not talk to Outlook on my PC. WTF?

I struggled with this for two days. There was loss of data each time I exported/imported/synched, so at best I was only able to get 80% of my contacts and 50% of my calendar entries. Moreover, the “SkyDrive” which also uses this Windows Live account, never recognized the account credentials, so I was never able to get it online, even after completely resetting the phone to factory settings and starting over.

We went back to the mall, handed over the Win8 phones, and got iPhones. At home, they synched up to everything within 30 minutes. No muss, no fuss.

I am not a fan of Apple’s “closed source” business model, and I feel ripped off each time I purchase another adaptor or charger or pay twice as much for Apple items than for others, but I they do work, which is more than I can say for the Win8 phones.

k