I wonder how that is possible, unless you need some specific WP application at work, something that you cannot do without.
At my workplace, naturally, the devices offered by company to employees are Nokia-brand devices, and since Symbian went it's way all you can get is Lumias.

However, a growing number of people turn that offer down (or accept the device and give it away to children/parents/spouses) and buy their own devices, used to be N9's and iPhones but now I see more and more Samsungs, Sony's and HTC's around the coffee tables.
And as it happens, I am not the only one who preordered Jolla, even as I sure was one of the first to get it

Frankly, I never understood this "spec race" mentality. It reminds me of GHz race of late 90', or video RAM race for GPU's in 00' (being notorious overclocker, gaming-rig builder, etc, I always laughed at it very hard).

What's use for super-duper awesome hardware specs, if OS (that you're locked to) is so limited, that you won't ever have a chance to use those spare processing power, for anything meaningful? And belive me, for such mundane tasks as browsing web pages, you won't feel that additional cores/RAM difference between Neo900 and hardware0ze super0ze <whatever> device you might be aiming at.

Me - I'm gonna swap triple or quadruple as much hardware power, for unlocked bootloader and (as) open (as possible) operating system, any day. I'm really not interested in buying high-end hardware, just to have spare, unused horsepower, OR excuse for poorly educated devs to write closed-source bloatware, filled with memory leaks and lack of optimization.

But - a side note - it is the same with gaming consoles, and people are still buying them, even if it's against any logic, so...

/Estel

Man alive, my posts are becoming quite alarmingly long. Hey, take them as a stream-of-thought almost-review of WinPhone. :P

I don't think it's fair to say you can't do things with WP8. There are many things you can't do, true, but it achieves most of what most people want from their phones.

If you don't care about the WP kinda-sorta-review feel free to skip from here to the next bold line

With the 520 I can go on the internet with plenty of speed (using IE, even - not that I wouldn't replace it if I could, but amazingly it seems to be doing its job acceptably), I have Facebook, Whatsapp and Evernote, offline GPS (with more GPS apps available if I could be arsed to install them and download their maps), a music player that actually, incredibly, works well in stock form (the lack of a good stock player is something I've never forgiven Android) and TuneIn radio.

There are things I can't do, of course. IE is, well, IE, which is a constant background annoyance in my mind not so much for its problems (the WP8 version doesn't really seem to have many), but because when you've hated something with extreme emphasis for the past 18 years, suddenly finding out a version of it actually works does not automatically eliminate all the hatred.

The Facebook app works OK when it's open, but when it isn't the system-resident applet can't quite seem to catch most private messages and display the notification.

The music player can't read Ogg Vorbis, which I like to use to shrink my music library so I can fit more of it on flash memory with no appreciable loss of quality.

And I can't replace the keyboard. I've always thought when you have a touchscreen that allows you to slide and gesture, maintaining the qwerty metaphor is an inefficient relic of habit and tradition; this is why I love Messagease, and why I dislike qwerty touch-boards. (Yes, I do know about 8pen; suffice to say, even my enthusiasm for different keyboards has a sanity threshold.)

But as far as qwerty touch-boards go, the WP8 one is the least evil I've seen. I can actually type at decent speed on it - entirely because of the word prediction and error correction, without which it'd be a constant nightmare of going back and fixing mistakes.

Most of this stuff wouldn't be a problem in Android. There are browsers aplenty, alternative Facebook apps by the dozen, the entire system is Vorbis-compatible and I can't possibly be bothered to count all the alternative keyboards that have come out.

But, and this is the key issue, getting all this stuff to work smoothly and with no multitasking issues in Android would require a phone costing rather more than the 520.

Stop skipping here

Give me a quadcore Android phone with two gigs of RAM for €100 and I'll ditch the 520 and WinPhone so fast it'll make your head spin. Until that happens, I'll stick with what works well without hurting the wallet.

Money. As I mentioned previously the N9 is expensive even second-hand, and a Jolla goes for three to four times the price of the 520. I emphatically don't want to be walking around with €400 worth of hardware in my pocket. If I lose the 520, or smash it, or someone steals it, I'll be pretty damn unhappy, but more for the lost data in it and the hassle of getting and configuring/customizing a replacement rather than for the loss of the hardware itself. If that happens to a Jolla I'll be rather more miserable for much longer, not to mention more paranoid about actually using it for fear it might be damaged. This is also the reason (aside from the expense itself) why I won't buy an expensive high-end Android phone, or any iPhone.

And before you tell me the N900 was pretty expensive in its day: I got mine third-hand for a song because it had a dead battery and USB port and the owner couldn't be bothered to fix it.

How so? I loaded my music library in Windows MediaPlayer and it put everything on the phone effortlessly. In fact, putting content on MTP devices is the one thing I ever use WMP for - I tried using Winamp, but it couldn't keep the tags consistent across the link.

Not sure about emails, but yeah, the calendar app sucks. The reminders strike me as particularly stupid: you have 5 minutes, 10, 15, 30, 60, then the sanity stops and you get 18 hours, one day, and then a massive jump to one week. Because clearly nobody could possibly want a reminder, say, three days before the event.

I'm lazily looking for an alternative, if one exists; in the meantime I'm pretty happy using Google Calendar. It has no synchronization with WP8 devices, but it has the wonderfully simple and efficient option of sending you SMS messages as reminders - whenever you choose.

It probably is due to corporate security. WinPhone doesn't strike me as a system that would take kindly to high security limitations, user permissions and such. They don't seem to come built-in, so you'd need separate apps providing security, and those by necessity need to modify the system at a fairly low level - and modifying Windows at a low level has never ever been a smart idea.

Either this or you're using some badly programmed app for your firm that's screwing everything else up.

This might have something to do with the stupid, stupid, stupid fact that WinPhone shuts down the wifi link whenever the phone goes to standby. The constant connects and disconnects as everyone keeps taking their phone in and out of sleep can probably cause some pain in an environment that's already full of various other connections and network links.

You'll get no disagreement from me on this one. WP8 phones are thought for the non-tech-savvy, and in general for people who'd rather not bother with a smartphone if they only could avoid it - not for nerds, and most certainly not for hackers. It requires a good disposition to compromise for a nerd to use WinPhone; good thing is, the compromises are of the kind that annoy you somewhat, not that make you want to throw the damn thing out of a window.

Nowhere did I say I'm aiming at super-devices, I just think it's ludicrous to spend so much money on a device that isn't one.

You may be right though, the Neo900 might be fast enough to load stuff just as fast as the 520, or maybe even more (though I'm not at all sure its single-core A8 would exactly rock my world). But the bare motherboard costs from €500 to €700. There's a limit to how much expense is justified by an efficient and open OS, and as far as I'm concerned this is very far above it.

No disagreement here - I've been a PC gamer since day one, on a mighty 8088. :P

I recently got a Blackberry Z30. I think it's pretty amazing. The OS is crazy efficient in its design. TRUST ME: this is not the OS you remember. The OS borrowed a lot from Meego/N9, but is less convoluted IMHO. Seriously, I don't know why the Blackberry 10 OS isn't more successful. I am thoroughly impressed. I still use my N900 as a media player, because it's super flexible, has excellent sound quality, and has FM radio (though FM radio is enabled in leaked BB10 updates). I am debating on whether to sell the N9. I can't imagine ever using it now--except as a backup. But the N900 is forever.

And the Z10 recently was going for crazy cheap. I really think people should consider BB10. It does have a file browser. :-) And is the only OS supporting flash currently, I believe. And if can run a lot of Android apps.
And the "Hub" is genius.

I have a hint for Blackberry: if you're gasping for breath under the attacks of your competitors, desperately need to get some users back and have managed to make a decent OS that actually stands a chance, you might not want to put that OS in high-end phones with high-end prices that would push away the majority of potential customers even if they weren't already afraid you'd die tomorrow and drop support for your €600 phone.

Make low-to-medium end phones, regain a sizable portion of the pie, and then you can go for the high ends.

The Z10 still sells for €400 upwards here, which is a lot for a model that is no longer hot, barely supported at all by app writers and unlikely to remain supported by blackberry itself for long.

The only way I'd ever see myself going for a Blackberry now would be if they pulled a HP TouchPad and sold off everything at super-discount prices.

Fair enough. I remember being a little shocked, too, when I first saw proposed prices. Then, I gave it a second though, and frankly, for (highly) mobile computer in my pocket, I don't see any better way to spend same amount of money (buying six N900's doesn't count ). Also, Neo900 folks have quite solid explanation for price range, *and* for hardware specs possible to achieve.

Currently, my finances aren't in state allowing purchase of Neo900, but I still think that "voting by my money" - even if it means saving for quite long time - is a way to go for supporting such initiatives. After all, it's a choice of throwing my (hyphotetical, at this point ) money at big fat company that *doesn't* produce devices I like, or throwing 2x or 3x more money on project that does *exactly* what I like, getting the best possible (at time of writing) device, that suits my needs.

Otherwise, instead of spending money on what please my inner "geek", I would force myself to change my regular usage to something resembling winphone/android/ios gray mass. This is something that is far below considering.

Also, there is a huge chance, that by throwing my money at correct project, I'll participate in making possible creation of even better, future device with FOSS spirit - instead of ensuring, with my purchase, that some andro/windocrap company will release next useless device in 6 months.
---

so, summing it up, I understand your points of view (and even feel sympathetic re "price pain"), but not necessary agree, that "giving up" to lame devices is a way to go.

Cheers,
/Estel

Saying Jolla is barely out of vapurware status is insulting, i mean the Jolla crew basically pulled of a miracle

quite

I disagree, tho' it is o/t. Jolla did themselves proud - a great achievement, no doubt. The miracle however, will be to survive, as Jolla "phonemaker" in the long-term.

Fair enough. I just read on Wikipedia and it says Jolla announced their intentions in july 2012. Considering they've made a system and phone from scratch, I suppose a bit more than a year's development time isn't long enough to call it vaporware. I probably felt that way because I've been waiting for a better OS for a while now, and it seemed to me more time had passed than it actually has.

I have heard the general rule of thumb in the industry is that it takes at least 18 months to do a new phone. Of course you can try to shorten it, for example, by buying already completed reference phone from ODM. If you want hardware changes or want to run OS that isn't already adapted and tested on the hardware then it might not expedite the process much.