Performance

Once beyond my initial impressions with the Icon I had to actually settle into the phone by moving my contacts over, installing applications that I use frequently, and get used to where everything in the OS is. Moving from android phone to android phone this is never a big deal for me but when moving to something completely different like this or the blackberry z10 it takes a little more time. This of course really isn’t the fault of Nokia’s or Microsoft even. I quickly installed foursquare, facebook, and even found a way to attach my Gmail email accounts to the phone in no time at all. My standard Reddit app on android wasn’t available but after some searching I did find another that had a high rating. I didn’t however find replacements for Snapchat for example, I thought this was a little odd considering how popular the app is.

Once I was done looking for apps and games I moved on to customizing my experience to fit me. With Android and iOS this is fairly simple, there are only a few home pages and there are a limited number of spots to put your links/widgets. Windows Phone OS takes a more fluid approach with just a single page that you can scroll for as long as you would like. A tile can be a link to an app or a widget or both. An example of this is the people tile that constantly changes but when clicked opens up my people listing. Each tile can be resized both larger and to a very small size allowing you to give priority to apps that you use more often by making them larger and easier to see while still keeping important but lesser used tiles up near the top in a group of small tiles. As a Windows 8 laptop owner the design of this is no different than the tiles that I see in my start menu, so picking this up and customizing it took almost no time at all for me. Once customized there is a lot to be said about the tiled layout, it is very functional, although as a regular android user I would like to see more options on changing the overall look when customizing the home screen to fit me.

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I touched on it a little with the mention of the missing Snapchat app but one of the biggest issues I ran into with the Windows Phone OS was the lower quality and quantity of apps. It reminds me a LOT of just a few years back when android played second fiddle to iOS when it came to apps. There just isn’t a large selection of apps and the apps I did find in the store that would be free on Android will sometimes run you a few bucks here. When looking for a google voice app for example all I could find were paid apps capitalizing on the lack of an official google app. This is understandable, but iOS does have some google app support, hopefully as Windows Phone OS becomes more popular this might become more of a priority for Google (not likely though). More importantly, apps that I did have like the Facebook app were worlds apart from the Android and iOS apps. Even navigating the Facebook app was a challenge. If I got a notification that someone replied to a status update, clicking on it would take me to the status update but you then have to open up the comments to see what they said. Photos in comments don’t show up as well.

When it came to email performance, I did run into issues with the stock email app not getting push notifications from my Gmail and just taking a long time to sync as a whole. Switching over to a POP email configuration did help this slightly, but what I wouldn’t give for a proper Gmail app that gets its notifications before my PC ever sees them.

Microsoft is doing everything they can to provide their own high quality apps to make up for it though. A great example of this is the free copy of Microsoft Office that comes with the phone. I have spent a lot of time trying to find office equivalent apps on Android and here we have the real thing. If only there was a Dropbox app and I would actually be able to get a little work done on the go.

Back to the phone itself, I was extremely happy with the performance of both the front facing and inside facing cameras on the Icon. When paired up with Nokia’s camera app you have every option available on a point and shoot camera built into your smartphone. The 20MP camera helped as well of course. I had the chance to snap a few photos in both low and high light situations and the detail was very impressive. I even snapped a picture of my finger to test its macro capabilities and frankly it was detailed enough that I decided it might not be the best idea to publish a detailed photo of my fingerprint.

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Cats inside, daytime with no flash

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Outside, daytime

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Inside with flash

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Front facing camera

When not taking photos with my smartphone or browsing the interwebs you will most likely catch me on a conference call or listing to music. My Nexus 4 has always done a poor job when putting people on speakerphone or playing music, especially when compared directly to a phone like the Icon. When on speakerphone I could hear everything perfectly something I can’t say about every phone with my slight hearing damage. Audio playback was just as good and could be played all the way to max volume without any issues. The best part of it all was that the alarm did a perfect job of waking me up when I needed it, except when I set it to cat sounds and I ignored them until my wife woke me up freaking out thinking a stray cat got into the house.

When it came time to actually do performance testing on the Icon I found myself a little more limited than I normally would me. For one a few of the benchmarks that I normally use haven’t made it to Windows Phone OS just yet, like 3Dmark. On top of that the apps I had like GFXBench were a little out of date and missing the battery benchmark that we use. Google Octane’s latest version continued to lock up on me as well. So my apologies for the short list of performance benchmarks this time around.

The performance tests I did manage to fit in tell an interesting story though. GFXBench show that the Icon’s 3D performance was a little on the low side, coming in lower than all of the phones I have tested recently with the exception of the older Shield. In Browsermark on the other hand the Icon’s Qualcomm Snapdragon™ 800 really pulled its weight putting in numbers up near the Shield and around the same as the MotoX. In the last test SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark, the Icon performed even better pulling ahead of the MotoX considerably. It’s obvious the Icon is extremely fast. With just the one benchmark that focuses on gaming performance I can’t tell if this is an issue with this benchmark or a larger issue. Hopefully the next Windows Phone OS phone that I get in will have more benchmarks available.

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Sadly without a battery benchmark I wasn’t able to see where the Icon stand compared to the competition. I can however say that with its 2420 mAh battery it did perform well in my testing, but I doubt it will compete with the big battery phones. Nokia does say that it is capable of 9 hours of talk time when using 3g. They also mention that you can get a maximum cellular network browsing time of 6.8 h and 9.2hours on wi-fi. With the wireless charging being available I didn’t run into any issues with the battery getting to low, even during our last LAN event where my phone dies quickly due to all of the people contacting me in combination with being in a large metal building that puts a hurting on cell reception.

 

 

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L0rdG1gabyt3's Avatar
L0rdG1gabyt3 replied the topic: #34615 11 Apr 2014 19:58
As a long time WP user... and by long time I mean I started with WinMo 6.1.. then had the excellent HTC HD7 with WP7, and now a HTC 8X with WP8 (and WP8.1 next week) I enjoyed your positive review.

One note to be said though when it comes to apps. For a reddit app, try Baconit, and for Snapchat, try 6snap.

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