Good but....Windows 8 Lumia 520 Review
I like the phone itself. The operations are smooth, Cortana is actually quite nifty. It will need a bit of updating upon purchase but it's worth it and certainly improves usability.
Where Windows fails, and hard is the apps and games. It's just a particularly poor selection of.
One constructive criticism of "Cortana" is that unlike Siri, where the ability to recognize your voice automatically for example if you say "Hey Siri" the program will respond, Cortana does not do this. It seems like there might be an app to make this possible but it's $7 for a feature that should ideally already be incorporated into the program.
I also find the standard podcast organization to be quite unintuitive and poorly designed. I can't seem to just easily find a list of just podcasts I've downloaded! In fact I've never found that list, I'm not sure it's even an option at all. It's also difficult to find quality podcasts unless you already know what to look for.
While I like the interface and it's smooth, has good customization, and looove, love The Weather Channel app overall my impression at times is Windows Phone is the little sister trying to prove itself. In time I'm sure some of these issues will improve, but the problem is I'm dealing with these issues right now and occasionally find myself wishing I went with an Android phone instead.
I am very happy with the fact that I can replace the battery and expand the storage with a micro SD card! This is great. I ran into a small issue trying to get apps onto the SD card initially(If you also had this issue, this advice may help you) Downloads should be set to be put onto your phone(look under storage sense), while the apps should be set to go onto the SD card. When I had my settings for downloads to go onto the SD card everything went into pending. Download needs to be set to the phone, but once downloaded, the app should install onto the SD card.
I'd say it's good overall, but quality of apps, games and so on need to be improved incredibly. While there are some good things out there, there's a lot of games/apps that are just garbage and bring the whole feel of the experience down a peg.
Mostly, don't confuse this device as an Iphone or Andriod. It is it's own operating system. I think I expected too much familiarity to something like IOS. There's a learning curve, but this is a decent budget phone overall with surprisingly great quirks you might not expect. Battery saver, Data Sense(helps you not go over data usage). Screen Projection ability, Quiet Hours, Find My Phone ability, and more are some of the included gems of the Lumia 520.
Verified purchase:Yes
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