okay, kids, i bought another 920 today and so far almost everything seems to be working just fine. i'm still not completely happy with the photo section regarding creation of folders but i can work around that using skydrive. all's well that ends well. as they say.

well, monk, it was pretty simple. instead of allowing everything to be imported from my live account, i entered all my contacts manually. the birthdays of people in my contacts list are now showing in the calendar. about the monthly view, i can live with it being so small. like you said, that view doesn't get used very often. all this hubbub with buying it, returning it, and buying it again has made the phone cost me 35 bucks (the restocking fee) more than it should've but that is the price for my impatience. all in all, the 920 is a great phone. i'm glad i have it.....again.

just a coincidence, I'm sure.

i don't care who ya are, that's funny.

Well today I decided to bite the bullet and grab me one of these babies.  I did the math and worked out that over a 2 year period I'd spend just $200 more than if I stayed with my current rate of PAYG, and being as I get twice as many calls and twice the data, I figured what the heck, it's only a few bucks a month more than I'm paying now .  Besides, this piddling phone I have now is not that good [sorry mum], being underpowered, slow as a wet week and often quite unresponsive to touch commands.  With my clumsy, arthritic hands I need something that's more responsive and works first time every time.

So yeah, I go down in the morning to pick it up.  All is pretty much set up and ready to go, but I didn't have sufficient proof of ID [don't get me started on that one] on me at the time to walk out with it.  Oh well, it's not that far out of my way to pop back in the morning, show my ID and pick it up.... a nice shiny black one, BTW.  I like black ones, they look more elegant and sophisicated that the brightly coloured ones

I don't pay too much attention to reviews or statistics, because they can often be biased; weighted infavour of one product over another; smudged to creat illusions an an unfair marketplace.  No, I take on board the opinions and thoughts of people I have come to trust over the years, and from there I make a decision that's usually okay.

No, neither do I! In fact, I'd take an Android device over an Apple one any day of the week.  I have 2 Android tablets [1 x 7" and 1 x 10.3"] and an Android phone.  I have no qualms about the tablets whatsoever, both suit my needs and I'm happy with them.  The phone I currently have is just too slow and unresponsive, but that's not because of the OS, rather that it has a small processor and a touch screen with less than adequate receptor points.

As for the Lumina 920, well I want a phone that better syncs with my Win 8 PC, and while Samsung phones are excellent, Nokia and HTC are the only ones to release W8 phones thus far, and the Lumina 920, given what I have learned from the specs and the guys here, is the better option available to me at this time.

Nah, the Nokia comes out farther down the scale, but then it's a lot newer and hasn't gotten a proper foothold in the market as yet. However, that means nothing to me.  I would never own an iPhone because, apart from having issues with the company, the latest iPhone 5, according to many reviewers, critics and users alike, is a major disappoinment all round, from it's useless maps to the stale IOS operating system that seemingly has nowhere else to go... like it was once the market leader but now other developers have caught up and surpassed Apple's innovative ability, thus all the desperate law suits to try and claw something back.

Personally, I think Apple is much a spent force.  I mean, it isn't going away any time soon, but rather that companies such as Google and Samsung will leave it in their wake... sucking up their dust, so to speak.  I can't say as I like Google, but Samsung, for mine, has a better corporate image, a better attitude and a better work ethic than Apple, and that is what will burst Apple's bubble... and that, my friends, can't come soon enough, the smug bastards they [Apple] are.

www.google.com

I found some interesting articles typing your question into the search bar. 

Any opinion on the web or here is going to be subjective though and in the end what will matter most are app-ecosystem preferences, personal use needs, and individual company/brand loyalty.

For instance, I completely disagree with the reviews that bitch about the weight of the Lumia 920.  I find the slightly heavier feel of the 920 a rather big plus actually.  I recently watched a friend replace an iPhone after having sat on (with some force mind you) it and badly cracked the screen and I have to feel my 920 wouldn't suffer under the same circumstances.  I also (personally) find a heavier phone seems harder to drop/lose grip of.  The app situation is also a non-issue for me.  I would rather have one good app for everything I need my 'phone' to do, than 1,000 mediocre/bad apps all being shitty at the same thing.

As far as hardware is concerned, I used to be a fan of Samsung devices in the late 1990's (when their handsets had really good sound and call quality), later I moved over to some very solidly-built Sony/Ericsson devices (I still have fond memories of using mobile RDP to admin a remote server while on holiday in another country), later yet I moved to various Blackberry and iPhone models.  Today the samsung devices just feel flimsy (and easy to break......argh!) to me.  Sony/ericsson dropped MS support (which just seemed so damn shortsighted to me) and their latest few touch devices seemed to suffer some display/touch lag that I just couldn't handle.  Apple's iPhone has always had solid hardware but by their latest offering it seems they have ridden the first iPhone's innovative coat-tails long enough.  We don't even have to talk about how shitty and plasticy the last few Blackberry iterations have been compared to the solidly-built BB bricks of the past (the original BOLD for instance....with the exception of that sticky-as-hell trackball thingy that was a nice phone).

The OS however makes today's smart/superphone and there is where the shit gets dicey (personal for many people).  I always felt that android was "too open", and that it would always seem as if android couldn't/wasn't use(ing) the hardware at its disposal to the fullest.  iOS of course has gotten rather stale at this point and just seems too restrictive to be considered a "competitive" OS with growth-potential in the mobile marketplace.  Windows Phone 8 therefore is (in my view) the much needed breath of fresh air the mobile device market needed and I see nothing but good times ahead (more innovation from all device manufacturers)!

Of course I am not "the market", so if all you wanted was that, then just plug your question into the link provided at the top of my post and read away, otherwise you are once again stuck with my opinionated-opinion. 

EDIT:

Oh and starkers.....congrats!  

I'll venture a guess. To educate and inform others. Don't worry, kona, we all know you are immune to such activities.

Sadly, not really! Well not for the desired result.

You wouldn't believe the hoops and hurdles I had to jump...to get absolutely no f**king where.  I'm totally pissed, though more at the government imposed bureaucratic red tape... revenue raising obstacles deliberately put in the way to make life unnecessarily difficult.  No, f**king impossible!

Yeah, so I went back today with the requested proof of ID - my birth certificate; a marriage certificate; a decree nisi; my medicare card; my pension card; my lease agreement and tax file number.... an expired British passport that clearly identifies me as being who I say I am.  Nope, no good!  The bloke who was there yesterday and said that was more than enough, wasn't there today, and the store manager refused to put it through without a primary form of Australian produce ID... birth certificate; passport; drivers license; proof of age/ID card. 

So yeah, off I trots to the Department of Transport a frigging gain [where proof of age/ID cards are issued], and still no friggin' go. Despite having far more documentation than previous attempts, I still did not have enough acceptable forms of ID [meaning a current form of photographic ID] to get photographic ID... and their suggestion to obtain it would cost me 400 - 500 bucks for essentially a one-off need/event... to buy a fracking phone, because I'm never going to fly/travel OS again to ever need a current British passport.... and I can't get an Australian passport because I don't have enough ID to obtain Australian Citizenship to qualify for an Australian one, Catch frickin' 22, every which way I turn.  *insert numerous and frequent hard core expletives here*

Worse still, I went around to my ISP/Landline provider to see if I could get one there.  Still no go!  Despite being a current customer and able to answer all their security questions regarding my account, plus provide details only I would know, they still balked because my ID was/is insufficient.  Rats!!!

Then they suggested my missus sign up for it instead... yeah, right!  Everything went through normally until the last moment... they found she had a previous bill [she'd paid in full] that had been handed to a collection agency in error, and this precluded her from purchasing a phone with them, despite the error being theirs, not hers.  *insert a few dozen more expletives, fired off at rapid rate here*

*Okay, rant off*

Anyhow, things did improve some from there, though not entirely as we would have hoped/liked. We went to another phone shop and managed to secure a pretty sweet deal... for 2 phones at the same price as the previous [withdrawn] offers.  Thing is, we each ended up getting a Lumina 820 instead, which physically is a slightly smaller unit while retaining the same connectivity features, etc, though it lacks the 'no-cord' recharging feature of the 920. The reason for this is the only network with 4G connectivity, Lumina 920's plus an affordable contract is Telstra, the company that effed us around so much earlier in the day, and the only other telco with Lumina 920's under contract was seeking 120 per month over 2 years, twice that of Telstra, 4 times our current deal and could only provide 3G

At the end of the day, however, we have more than decent phones now and I'm not plagued with the POS Telstra phone that seriously struggles to qualify even as a paperweight.  Okay, so they're not 920's, and various commentators say they are slower due to a slower processor, but frankly, the salesperson gave us hand-on demos of both and there seemed to be little discernable difference... well none that would make a great deal of difference to us in our daily lives.

Oh, and edit, I just read that the 820 is rechargable via the Nokia Charging Plate, which is an optional extra with both the 820 and 920, though some dealers have included them with the 920 in bundles.  The little bonus we got was a spare rear cover bundled with ours, so we each have a black and the default red one to interchange as we like.... so I still get my shiny black one after all.

So, are we happy with our purchases?  Yes... definitively yes!  Okay, they're not the Lumina 920 as we first would have liked, but the 820 is a worthy and well equipped second best that I'm finding it very easy to use... which isn't bad for an old fart who's had very minimal contact with smartphones before, much less the use off.   I'm still finding my way around it, but yeah, I like the OS and tile interface, the responsive screen and the whole experience it provides.  The other thing I like is that it is nice and weighty and a good handful to get a good hold of.  So what if the screen is a tad smaller than the 920, it's not exactly piddly and I don't have to squint or use a magnifying glass to read it, not like with that other POS.  The other thing, I put a 32gb memory card in it so I now have 64gb of storage for whatever I like.

*EDIT*  Ah, it pays to read up on the manufacturers site, doesn't it?  A few people [some of them phone salespeople] told me that the 920 had a larger/faster processor than the 820, but that's not true, I've just been on the Nokia site and looked at the specs of both phones.  Each has a dual core 1,5Ghz Snapdragon S4 CPU by Qualcomm, so the difference is basically weight, case and screen size.

starkers, after reading the first couple paragraphs of your post, i thought you were headed back to putting your messages in bottles like you did in your earlier pirate days. i am glad it didn't come to that. if you are as content with your 820 as i am currently with my 920, you're one happy pirate camper. i really wish i hadn't been so impatient when i bought the first one. i feel like a fool for returning it so soon and then buying another one just a few days later.

also, you're right about monk. i appreciate his posts most times. he seems to know what he's talking about, that's for sure. and kona's just being kona. refute him with facts and he resorts to claims of being attacked. it's been that way for a decade, at least.

@ Starkers, I'm not going to re-quote what you typed but seriously, you had to go through all that just to get a phone and still you was denied. I truly hate what you have to go through like getting a home or a car...