Considering switching from iPhone to Windows Phone? Here's my hands-on experience.
I opted for a Nokia 920 in cyan. It's the most fully featured Windows Phone.
Customizing
Reading
Browsing
Notifications
On the iPhone if you've missed several text messages or notifications, as soon as you hit the power/home button again it displays a scrollable list of complete messages for everything you missed. On the Windows Phone you only see a partial message displayed on top of the lock screen as it happens, and then if there are multiple missed messages it simply shows a chat bubble with a counter on the lock screen- this means several more swipes and clicks to determine what you've missed and whether it's important or not. It's a surprising fail.
Emails
Overall I felt Windows Phone did a better job on presentation except for the emails with images. Emails with images don't download by default and require you to click to download them for each email. WP also doesn't handle images attached to emails very well requiring a few clicks to get them to load and display. The experience gets to be annoying quickly.
Other experiences not ready: receiving meeting invitations, music playback
What's disappointing about going back to the iPhone
I'm finding returning to the "small screen" beyond frustrating now after having a taste for how things might have been on the Nokia 920. Maybe the iPhone 6 will remedy this with a larger display, but even if that is an option it's likely not an option until 2014.
Finally the "Finder" interface for the iPhone feels dated and I'm frustrated that innovation seems to be happening on other platforms and not my brand of choice. I'll try and bide my time until Johnny Ive introduces something that draws me out of the interface doldrums. Until then I've all seen the shape of things to come on the Windows Phone, surprisingly brands like Microsoft and Nokia are becoming the new revolutionaries in the smart phone wars, and I'm becoming far less the Apple zealot I used to be.
