So today's the day Nokia held their big event in New York and showed off the Lumia 920 and Lumia 820, the first phones running Windows Phone 8. I've been half-following the liveblogs on my lunch break (turkey sandwich, cold coffee, the usual), and I have to say the phones look genuinely nice. Bright yellow one, a red one, that PureView camera with the actual optical image stabilization built into the lens assembly instead of just software tricks. Wireless charging built right into the shell if you buy the right cover. Fine. Good for them.
Except I bought a Lumia 900 back in April. Ninety-nine dollars on a two-year AT&T contract, matte cyan, felt great in the hand, and I liked it enough that I told at least four people to go buy one too. And back in June, Microsoft already told all of us that WP7 phones, mine included, are never getting Windows Phone 8. Not a chip issue they can patch around, not a driver thing — the OS underneath is basically a different kernel now, closer to Windows NT than the old Windows CE stuff WP7 ran on. So instead we get "Windows Phone 7.8" sometime later this year, which as far as anyone can tell is just the new resizable Start screen tiles bolted onto the old guts. No native code apps, no NFC obviously since the hardware isn't there, none of it.
I'm not actually mad about the hardware move. I get why they did it. You cant build a real modern OS on top of an aging embedded kernel forever and pretend everything's fine underneath. What bugs me is the timing and the messaging. They let a bunch of us buy in hard back in the spring, ran ads with the whole "Nokia and Microsoft together" pitch, Joe Belfiore doing demos, all of it, and five months later the actual flagship phones show up running something our devices flat out cant run. Eighteen months from launch to obsolete-by-announcement isn't unheard of in this industry, I know that, I've been doing this blog since November of last year and I've watched it happen with other platforms too. Still stings different when it's the phone in your own pocket.
A friend of mine who's way more into the numbers than I am pointed out something interesting on Twitter this morning: this is basically the same move Nokia pulled with Symbian owners a year or two back, new flagship, old owners left holding a phone that's suddenly a dead end. Feels a little on brand at this point, honestly.
Anyway. The 920 has some specs worth mentioning if you're actually in the market rather than nursing a grudge like me. 4.5 inch screen, PureMotion HD+ display that Nokia claims works fine even wearing gloves (its September, this matters in a few months), 8.7 megapixel camera with the floating lens stabilization I mentioned, and a battery that's noticeably bigger than what was in the 900. The 820 is the cheaper sibling, swappable back covers, slightly smaller screen, less impressive camera. No US pricing yet that I've seen, and no firm release date beyond "this fall," which is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Also, completely unrelated, my coffee maker died this morning mid-brew and made a noise like a dying fax machine, so that turkey sandwich lunch was extra necessary. Small stuff.
I'm not going to pretend I'm switching phones the second the 920 hits shelves. Two years left on this contract and AT&T doesn't exactly do early upgrades out of the goodness of their heart. But I'll be watching the reviews when they land, and if the camera is half as good in real use as it looked in that stage demo today, I might actually be tempted to eat the upgrade fee. Just annoyed I'm not getting there on my own terms.
If you're on WP7 too and feeling the same way, I'd genuinely like to hear how you're planning to handle it — ride out the contract, jump ship to Android, or just wait and see what 7.8 actually looks like when it shows up. My inbox is open, such as it is.