Cam Newton and Me, Not to Be
I went to the AT&T store and paced around until I located the unadorned Windows Phone 8 section. I was actually more impressed with the HTC 8X than the Lumia 920, aside from it not having several of the features that were making the overall WP8 calculus seem to play out favorably for me.
The wireless charging hardware burden on the 920’s chassis is blatant and painful to see. I picked at the wraparound portion of the colored rear bezel for a few seconds hoping that it was an aftermarket case or jacket of some kind. It was not. It’s hard to talk seriously about weight differences on the order of magnitude of a handful of grams, but the phone was uncomfortably heavy at least on a perceptual level.
The screen was gorgeous as promised, really making my aging Eclair/Froyo-era device look toy-like, and perhaps challenging Kristin’s iPhone 5. I’d say that the vibrancy is challenged by the dichromatic proclivities of WP8, with perhaps more perceptive weight going toward a feeling of crispness around text versus a general feeling of unscientific “LCD nice-ness” in alignment with what we would normally assess on a television or computer monitor.
IE 10 for WP8 didn’t upset me in my brief moment messing with it, but I felt uncomfortable, more than I expected to feel, with the idea of me as a WP8 user. Something about watching the music app tiles fly by made me feel like I was renting a room in those shadowy, commercialized corners of Windows Media Player that I prefer to remain irrelevant to me.
In a similar vein, the online materials I read about SkyDrive integration, poor as it may be in some scenarios, made me also uncomfortable. After “upgrading” to Office 2013, I believe I was compelled to have a SkyDrive account registered under my name, although I am not using it. I think the point I’m trying to cobble together here is that I felt anxiety about leaving one ecosystem and entering another. I knew that my Gmail experience would be crippled, but just the feeling of “Windows” this and “Xbox” that had a more severe impact on me than I anticipated.
I felt like the phone I was holding wasn’t mine, which maybe makes the rest of this relatively unimportant. If you showed me a skinny, sleeker 920 that still supported wireless charging, I might see moving things to SkyDrive, or at least tolerating its limited use in the phone’s scope. But for now it just didn’t feel right. Nor does the S4, so I hold off on everything for now.