gdgt

My head won the battle with my heart over whether or not to get the dead-end Nokia N9 but when I saw that the wonderful hardware Nokia has designed for the N9 was going to be repurposed for use with WP 7.5 I was very excited as I was already a big fan of WP 7, though unable to commit to it as my primary phone OS due to lack of key aspects like multitasking and IM.

WP 7.5 has changed that and with the great hardware of the Lumia 800 I've been happily using this as my primary phone for over a week now, having switched from an iPhone 4S.

The OS really is delightful, Microsoft has taken a fresh approach to it, very different from iOS and its clone, Android. There is a ton of functionality baked it, obviating the need for a lot of apps but there are still some key ones missing: Skype prominent among them (though we can assume that since acquiring it Microsoft has something exciting in the works).

I vastly prefer the on device media handling of Zune to the iTunes equivalent on the iPhone.

Other than the point about apps noted above the only other area where the iPhone 4S has a distinct edge is with the camera: outdoors and indoors with good lighting conditions the Lumia 800 is very competitive producing sharp images with true to life colors. However, things change in lower light conditions, especially indoors, where the iPhone 4S still dominates pretty much every other phone out there.

However, there are some very nice photo editing apps, notably Clever Photo and Photo Labs that I was pleasantly surprised to find - easily on par with what's available for iOS.

Finally, I prefer Microsoft's approach to cloud storage, document and photo handling with Skydrive compared to Apple's iCloud - I've had various problems with iCloud not syncing documents across all of my devices and I think the photo handling in iCloud is a bit silly - it's fine on iOS devices (with Photo Stream) but as there's no web-based access for images one has to use a client (like iPhoto) to access images on a desktop/laptop, the same thing goes for documents. With Skydrive Microsoft offers web-based clients with a pretty robust set of tools and functions.

Update (1/29): the most recent software update has upgraded the battery life from decidedly average to best-in-class: am now easily getting 14+ hours of regular usage including continuous email, IM, soical network usage, music/podcast (at least 1-2 hours over Bluetooth) and 20-30 min of phone calls.