My first iPhone was a 3GS, and for the past three years I have been thor­oughly inves­ted in the iOS eco­sys­tem. I’ve explored the depths of the jail­break scene, enjoyed the wealth of apps, and appre­ci­ated the pro­fu­sion of tal­ent in the iOS design arena.

Dur­ing that time, I also had sev­eral oppor­tun­it­ies to play with Android phones, but I was always put off by the inde­cis­ive and incon­sist­ent feel of the oper­at­ing sys­tem. Now, I own a Nexus 7 and firmly believe that Android 4.0 is a good indic­a­tion of where Android was try­ing to get all along. While Black­berry stumbles toward its next release, another player in the mobile space has been con­fid­ently assert­ing itself in the back­ground, fight­ing to gain some mind­share: Win­dows Phone.

I had never had a chance to play with a Win­dows Phone, mostly because the retail pres­ence and mar­ket­ing is awful around here. How­ever, I was always intrigued by what I had read about them; strong, unique design lan­guage, inform­at­ive inter­face, stream­lined integ­ra­tion of major social ser­vices, etc.

Now, cour­tesy of the kind folks at Nokia, I have the oppor­tun­ity to spend two weeks with a Lumia 900 — the cur­rent flag­ship phone — and I will be doc­u­ment­ing the experience.

Over the Rainbow

In order to fairly judge the Win­dows Phone, I decided to try and see if I could have it entirely replace my iPhone for the dur­a­tion of this two week period. Since they use an identical MicroSIM card, I could con­ceiv­ably hot swap between the phones as I please, but doing that wouldn’t really give me a sense of what it’s like to have a Win­dows Phone as my daily driver.

The trial Lumia 900 is a sleek black polycar­bon­ate slab, sport­ing a large screen, com­fort­ably roun­ded corners, and an unashamed sense of weight. Unlike my iPhone 4S, it feels sub­stan­tial and dur­able. I don’t feel the need to keep it in a case, and although I won’t be per­form­ing any drop tests, I’m con­fid­ent that it would have little trouble sur­viv­ing them.

There’s some­thing inher­ently play­ful in the design of the Lumia, as if it doesn’t take itself too ser­i­ously. Right out of the box, I was struck by how dif­fer­ent it looked from the usual selec­tion of smart­phones. Nokia has always been known for their phone engin­eer­ing, but the Lumia 900 is a par­tic­u­larly fine product — in cyan it would be truly striking.

The phone has four but­tons: a power but­ton, a cam­era but­ton, and a volume rocker. Though there’s noth­ing wrong with the but­tons them­selves, they are all laid out in a row along the right side of the body, and the fact that they’re identical to the touch makes it some­what chal­len­ging to hit the right one without look­ing at the phone. I sus­pect this is some­thing that I’ll get used to as I’ve used it more, but as a first impres­sion it seems ergo­nom­ic­ally questionable.

Right out of the box, I was struck by how dif­fer­ent it looked from the usual selec­tion of smartphones.

Without a doubt, the phys­ical attrib­utes of the phone are appeal­ing to me in gen­eral. Com­ing from the 4S, I expec­ted the Lumia to feel unne­ces­sar­ily bulky, but the truth is that for my big hands it feels per­fectly comfortable.

First Steps

Upon turn­ing the Lumia on, I was greeted by the Win­dows Phone logo and swiftly promp­ted to log in using my Win­dows account (formerly Win­dows Live ID). As more and more of our inform­a­tion lives in the cloud, I’m get­ting used to this sort of thing, and sure enough after enter­ing my cre­den­tials and log­ging into my WiFi net­work, I was taken to a beau­ti­ful home screen full of bright tiles that reflec­ted my cal­en­dar and con­tact information.That was easy.

Using a Win­dows Phone, there are sev­eral things that stand out imme­di­ately. The first is how integ­rated everything is; instead of hav­ing to go to two sep­ar­ate apps to post status updates on Face­book & Twit­ter, you can do both from your Me tile. This is not unlike iOS6’s noti­fic­a­tion centre post but­tons, though the abil­ity to post to mul­tiple ser­vices at the same time gives Win­dows Phone a slight edge here. Like­wise, keep­ing up with con­tacts is a breeze thanks to the robust People tile.

Unlike a stand­ard con­tact book, this app also shows the most recent Face­book, Twit­ter, LinkedIn, and Win­dows Live updates from all your friends, allows you to respond to those updates, and offers you all avail­able inter­ac­tion meth­ods right from within the same interface.

Fur­ther­more, each con­tact can be “pinned” to the start screen as their own tile, and you can even cre­ate groups of con­tacts and pin those, in which case you’ll have the option of send­ing the group an email or SMS right from the tile. These people tiles are fant­astic and a breath of fresh air when com­ing from iOS’ static con­tact book. The fact that I can pin all of my favour­ite con­tacts to my start screen and then see all their latest updates, post to their wall, call them, email them, text them, or even map their address right from within a single app is not only a huge timesaver, it’s also quickly become indis­pens­able. It seems like one of those no-brainer things that should be in every smartphone.

The one glar­ing down­side that I noticed was lack of Gtalk integ­ra­tion in the Mes­sen­ger app.

Other tiles, like the Mes­saging app, are like­wise more thor­ough than I’m used to. Instead of only allow­ing SMS mes­saging, the app also integ­rates Face­book chat and MSN/Live Mes­sen­ger, and con­ver­sa­tion threads are flex­ible enough to allow you to switch between these pro­to­cols at any point in time. It’s all about stream­lin­ing in Win­dows Phone, and the Mes­saging app is one of my favour­ite aspects. The one glar­ing down­side that I noticed was lack of Gtalk integ­ra­tion. Per­haps I don’t rep­res­ent the major­ity, but I use Google’s chat far more often than Facebook’s or Windows’.

The Big Leap

Once I had set up the basics — noti­fic­a­tions, date/time, col­ours, etc. — it was time to make the leap: put­ting in my SIM card and ditch­ing the iPhone. The Lumia swiftly picked up my Rogers sig­nal, auto­mat­ic­ally grabbing the 4G band since it’s an LTE phone, but only phone calls and reg­u­lar SMS mes­sages were work­ing. No MMS, nor data ser­vice. I popped open the Net­work Setup app that comes pre-installed on the phone and after a few seconds, it had prop­erly con­figured my phone and I sud­denly had all sys­tems go.

An amus­ing side-effect of Apple’s recent integ­ra­tion of iMes­sage addresses with iOS6 was that mes­sages from my friends with iPhones con­tin­ued to go to my iPhone even after I removed its SIM card. I had to manu­ally turn off iMes­sage on the iPhone in order to have all texts arrive on the Lumia as expected.

Now, as I pop­u­late the phone with apps and learn my way around the inter­face, I’m eager to see how com­pet­it­ive this phone is.

So It Begins

Win­dows Phone offers a very dif­fer­ent philo­sophy for mobile smart­phone usage, and I’m curi­ous to see if I can adjust to its per­spect­ive over the next couple of weeks. In the next entry, I’ll dis­cuss some of the issues I’ve run into with apps, some more fant­astic perks of the oper­at­ing sys­tem, and some unpleas­ant quirks too.