Why Nokia’s Windows Phones Are Better Than Good Enough

Nokia just announced two gosh darn attractive Windows Phone handsets. The first "true" Windows Phones, the company says—and makes a pretty convincing case that they are. But rather than making everyone hot and bothered, Lumia seems to be leaving people cold. Here's why that's wrong. There's not much disagreement that the Lumia 800's got looks; the collective shrug seems to be rooted deep in the spec sheet. So let's walk that down. First off, Fearless Leader Joe Brown, who's got boots on the ground in London today, reports that the Lumia 800 is fast. Joe currently uses the Samsung Focus—the best Windows Phone out there right now—and used the iPhone 4 for a stretch, too. He knows fast from fast. So if you were looking for first-hand assurances, there you go. His full, favorable hands-on impressions are here. Still not sold? Okay, let's take it strictly by the numbers: 1.4GHz single core Snapdragon processor (yawn); 512MB RAM (double yawn); only 16GB of storage (bleargh); not a "Super" AMOLED screen (uhh... yeah that probably sucks!). To listen to some of the noise out there, each and every of these supposed half-asseries should be enough to sink a modern day cellular telephone before it even launches. But here, for these phones and on this platform, they don't matter very much at all. Let's talk RAM. (It's always the RAM.) Look, folks, a lot of RAM is nice, but it's an unnecessary luxury on phones, especially Windows Phones. The iPhone 4S gets by just fine with its own 512MB of RAM, and while Android's top-tier handsets mostly come with 1GB, that's not really analogous to Windows Phone. The latter doesn't support full-on background multitasking, for one. Mango lets apps run in the background, but in a suspended state, with APIs running for doing things like playing music and transferring files. When you switch back to the app, it "rehydrates" itself, but apps aren't truly running parallel in the OS, like they do on Android. WP also limits the amount of memory that an active app can use, so even if a handset were loaded with bonus RAM, it wouldn't matter. And with Microsoft's battle against fragmentation being what it is, it's doubtful that any manufacturer would get the green light to prove different. Read more @ http://gizmodo.com/5853494/why-nokias-windows-phones-are-better-than-good-enough?tag=nokia