Comment Re:Most reviews lob softballs, Not TheVerge. (Score 1) 195
- some tiles are animated, some not - pretty distracting experience.
I don't get this complaint. You want all tiles to be animated, or none at all?
Live tiles are very useful. They could do without some gratuitous animation, I agree. I guess they wanted some attention grabbers for the first few minutes in the store.
Human sense of sight is attuned to following motion. When you look at the calm, immobile surface of an interface, you are free to proceed at leisure, but when something moves, you usually skip immediately to moving part. And so, when I look at Metro interface, and I see animations in People tile, I have this urge to check it out instead... whereas the animations are just there to prettify the effect. And the truly important content, like missed calls are reported by static number.
This inconsistency made me move People tile outside of visible area, even though it is second most used tile in the phone.
- while the interface is responsive, you still need to do several taps and slides to get a result you can set a single tap under an Android or iPhone.
Any specific examples?
Sure. On my Android phone I have a small group of toggle buttons - WiFi, AutoSync, Mobile Data (called Cellular Data on my Nokia), Flight Profile, Silent. The best I can achieve for the Nokia is to get a shortcut tile to an actual interface. So instead of "touch, wait for effect" I need to "touch, slide to ON position, wait for effect". That's just for WiFi toggle. It gets worse for the Nokia - there are simply no equivalents to achieve one-touch change into Flight or specific profile. To up the ante consider starting the service in bright sunlight - I can do it on my HTC Desire by tapping certain part of my screen (to increase brightness or to turn on the services), while on the Nokia I need to slide and slide.
- battery - ye gods, hopefully those of you who purchase Nokia Lumia 900 do not experience the issues we have in EU with Nokia Lumia 800. In short, it's buggy, unpredictable, goes haywire in areas with worse coverage and generally tends to suddenly expire on you quickly. A show stopper.
A recent update has fixed it for my Lumia 800. It didn't feel buggy to me to begin with, it just drained too soon. I would very much welcome a warning chime when the battery charge gets low; I understand some people may hate it, but this helped me to avoid running out of battery with other phones.
Also, you can prevent most applications from running in the background unnecessarily, and there is a battery saving mode to shut down non-essential background activities when the battery is running low.
Apparently, there hasn't been an update distributed for my area (Poland). The phone quit on me suddenly with 3/4 battery left - it happened just once, but still it hurt. Through trial and error, me and my colleagues, found out that charging through USB connection leads to erratic behaviors. Also: traveling by train or using data services, like maps. I have the battery saver on, but the most irksome part is the sheer unpredictability of the experience. Unused, the phone survives 4-5 days (guess why it was left in unused state).
- no easy way to access file system.
This is a geek requirement. Even the matter of having a file system bears little relevance to what most people use their phones for. This one does not have removable storage, neither does it pose as a USB mass storage device (and it's a good time we'd moved on from that antiquated interface), so what would you need the file system access for?
Come on, this is 12 GB of wasted space waiting to be used for DVD images, install files, running live distributions. This is a personal computer one can use to actually do stuff. Limiting it to syncing with social networks and playing media is akin to castration. Why would I use a smartphone for braindead activities only?
Regards,
Ruemere
