...a Nokia Lumia Win 8 phone... I was excited...briefly.

I dropped my Samsung Note and cracked the screen....I felt sick but the phone still worked so I soldiered on but then it started having issues charging so I sent it off for repair. The company sent me a loan phone and I was intrigued as it was a Nokia Lumia Win 8 phone.
Never having used one of these, I was excited....briefly.

Let's cover the plus points first.

It sync'd with my car blue tooth connection and asked me if it should read out a text message and it did. It gave me the option of responding or calling the number. Now as this is a feature that it automatically  did with no setup, I was impressed, it is a feature that Android should embrace.

The battery life is not bad, better than both my Note and Apple.

Build quality.

That's it for the good points.

It needs rebooting almost daily.
It lost all signal in the middle of a phone call....in the middle of London.
The signal appears to be flaky and the call quality poor, particularly in the car.
You need to install Zune to be able to load music on to it.
No card slot for expandable storage.
Not particularly friendly to navigate with all the settings hidden away.
** suggest they use the top pull down menu bar as Android and more recently Apple, do.
I can't find anyway to stream music from the phone to my car. Android, Apple and Blackberry do this very easily. Even connecting it to the USB port in my car presents an errors.
Slow.

It is terrible. OK, I have to admit that I didn't read the manual but should I need to? I didn't with Apple, Blackberry or Samsung and they were all far more intuative.

My advice to Microsoft is to stop following the Apple route, ditch the need for an application to load songs onto your phones. Embrace memory cards. Produce a cut down version of the OS so we don't have to keep rebooting the phone. Put in a decent browser. Look into the signal issues and lastly, what is the point of having a phone that can hold music if I can't stream it to an external device, such as my car? It means I either buy another music player or carry CD's.

I was keen to have an alternative to Android and briefly, it appeared that Microsoft may have produced a better phone than Apple but alas, it was not to be, it is built well, just as Apple is but also requires hokey software to be able to do anything with the phone and you pay far too much for extra memory which in this day and age is a crime. I am missing the huge screen and my custom menus, I am also madly missing my Swiftkey Pro keyboard and the ability to "flow" in the beta version. It sucks not having Android and has made me appreciate more fully my Note, can't wait to welcome it back.