Initial review: Lumia 928 Windows phone

I decided to go against the consumer flow in choosing a Lumia 928 Windows phone as my next cellular "upgrade".  For me, the choice was mostly driven by professional considerations.  My phone is central to the operation of my small business, and I wanted zero games, apps, social media crap, or bloatware to be interfering with efficient operation of voice, text, calendar, email, and mass storage.  After two years of suffocating in Droid bloatware hell, I was more than ready for a much cleaner interface.

However, there was one other feature that cinched the deal on this choice. 

The camera.  Wow!!  That's a macro shot, a close-up of my kitchen sink where yesterday's dinner was looking positively forlorn. 

A macro shot, with a cell phone.  Look at that depth of field, contrast balance, and saturation.  My Nikon D3100 would not have done much better. 

Click on the picture to enlarge, but remember that this is significantly downsampled for blogging purposes.  The original looks even better than what you see here. 

Having a good camera is very important to me professionally and personally.  I had seen the 928's camera advertised as superior.  I do believe it lives up to the hype. 

Whence that dinner came: this is a phone shot of the interior of Rose's Seafood from a few months ago, taken with my Droid 3.  In my opinion, the Droid 3's camera has nowhere near the quality or use potential. 

A superior phone camera is not merely a self-indulgent choice in my case.  If this phone is physically robust enough to stand up to intensive use (and that's a big "if"), it will alleviate my need to carry yet another separate piece of equipment (namely a bulky DSLR) on certain professional job sites.  That would reduce my labor burden and it would also reduce wear and tear on my much more expensive DSLR. 

However, this Lumia is not a perfect design by any means.  I got rid of Android altogether in significant measure because the calendar feature on the Droid 3 absolutely sucked, in my opinion.  The Android OS just wasn't handling the interface with hosted Microsoft Exchange.  Annoyingly, I find that the Lumia's calendar is just as bad if not worse, which is exasperating and surprising given that Exchange is a MSFT product.  It has a very non-intuitive feel to it and, rather than being presented proactively with good summary of information, I have to hunt and peck to find the schedule details that I need. 

But the camera sure is fine.  And Rose's has excellent crawfish right now - best I've had in a couple of years.