lumia

Since my day job is running an IT Department, I like to keep up with all different kinds of technology. I’ll often get equipment to test out and utilize in order to be able to talk about it intelligently and give the appropriate pros and cons.

To this end I recently obtained a Nokia Lumia 1020 smart phone. It runs the Windows 8 Phone OS and sports a 41 megapixel camera. It’s a very nice piece of hardware, and takes amazing pictures. It doesn’t have all of the applications I normally use on my iPhone, but I could live without some of those for the most part. The thing that really locked me in ended up being Apple’s Messages app.

Messages is the app on the iPhone that you utilize to text other phone users. It also has clients that run on Mac computers as well as the iPad. It’s very convenient to set it up everywhere. When people send you something on Messages, it shows up on all of your devices at once.

You can associate your phone number as well as any number of email addresses to your Messages account. I think at this point, you can find me by my cell number and something like 6 different email addresses. This is awesome, yet it really locks you in.

You see, while testing phones, I used a SIM card adapter to move my SIM card from my iPhone to the Lumia. I was able to fire up the Lumia, make and receive calls, and connect to the internet via LTE. Everything was awesome, until someone tried sending me a text via Messages.

Since I have Messages set up on a couple of computers and an iPad in addition to my normal iPhone, any time someone on IOS tried to send me a message it went to those devices and not the Lumia. I even had my wife try to send me a message using only the phone number, but, since her contacts had that number tied to my email addresses, it automatically sent through Messages anyway and bypassed normal SMS.

Unfortunately, the only way to avoid that is to go to all of your devices and disassociate your phone number from your Messages account. Once you’ve killed off the phone number, then people texting directly to that number should be able to get through. But the problem is all of the folks on IOS with your email address in their contacts. Those will still try to send via Messages rather than the phone number. So to really make sure you receive everything as a text message, the best bet is to disassociate everything from your Messages account.

It’s a pain in the ass sure, but it’s really the only way to do it. Otherwise you are bound to miss something coming through.

I do this for a living, and figuring it out and taking care of it was a pain for me. I can only imagine the normal end user trying to leave the platform. It would be a nightmare. So kudos to Apple, they’ve done a good job of locking you in a way that’s very friendly on the feature front, but a huge pain to ever get out of.

Rather than staying full time on the Lumia for as long as I wanted, I just switched back to the iPhone. It wasn’t the lack of Instagram, Flipboard or Sonos that ultimately killed Windows 8 Phone for me, it was the grip Messages has and my laziness to play whackamole in all my settings. Well played Apple, well played.