The Orange Snapper

I have been eyeing the Windows phone for a while now. It started with the HTC One Windows version, which unfortunately was hard to come by in Malaysia.

Then came Windows 8 and the 1520. Great but the software still felt sluggish although the camera feature looked interesting.

The last Nokia I owned was the 9300i Communicator back in 2006. Before that, it was the excellent N73. Great 3.2 MP camera with a feature called Nokia LifeBlog which when the phone were connected to a PC, would upload the photos and the SMSs onto a program akin to a diary. A great feature. There was no Mac equivalent unfortunately.

Even back then, the camera on Nokia had been half-decent.

Then with the announcement of Lumia 930 and Windows 8.1, my mind was made up. And the camera was just simply amazing, with a good built-in photo editor which made post-editing and posting onto Flickr a doddle. Dare I suggest that the snaps were better than my main phone, the iPhone 6 Plus.

There were three options as far as the photographs were concerned, the small 5MP jpeg, larger 20MP jpeg and 20MP DNG file - a RAW version essentially. Even the 5 MP looked great. I only tried manipulating then lather's files using Aperturebut found the whole process - transferring and processing - rather time-consuming. I prefer just to snap, edit and upload.

How about the other features? The app store wee's still pretty basic but there were the usual Facebook, twitter and Instagram. As long as there was push email and Google Calendar integration, I was fine. Not quite as much of a productivity tool as my iPhone, but it had potential. I wouldn't mind it as a second phone. So, the Android had to stay on the tablet for the time being.

All the photos, apart from the top were taken with the Lumia 930.