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| Lumia 2520 |
The Lumia 2520 is Nokia's first attempt at building a Windows tablet. The device runs Microsoft's Windows RT, an operating system dropped by other hardware manufacturers who found little appetite for hardwrae running the OS; as a result, apart from Microsoft itself, Nokia is the only company left still making RT-powered devices now.
I've been using the Lumia 2520 as my everyday tablet for the last couple of weeks and I like it a lot. However, it seems to embody the issues that Microsoft has to tackle when it comes to tablets and the decisions it needs to make around operating systems and the future of Office. (Nokia's devices business will soon be part of Microsoft when its €5.4bn acquisition is complete, of course, and the pair have been collaborating closely on hardware for several years now).
The Bing weather app looks great, as does maps (which I prefer to Nokia's Here), and there's an understanding across the device that big, sharp images play well on tablets. There's clearly a strong design principle behind the UI — the tablet as a next-generation magazine; beautiful, curated, interactive.
But it's striking that the 2520 is also still very much a PC experience, including the irritation of Windows updates. That 16:9 aspect ratio screen that makes it so good for watching video also means that I never felt any desire to use the tablet in portrait mode at all, while the lack of a rounded and bevelled corners (such as on the iPad) made holding it for too long quite uncomfortable and had me longing for a kickstand.
And, while an iPad doesn't feel diminished by the lack of a keyboard, to me the 2520 does — in the same way that the Surface only really makes sense with the keyboard attached. As such, there's something a little bereft about this device, almost as if it's mourning its lack of a keyboard, but soldiering on anyway. Still, Qualcomm's Snapdragon 800 processor keeps everything zipping along.
The Lumia 2520 runs Windows RT 8.1, which does a fine job of the basics. Unfortunately, just doing a fine job of the basics doesn't win prizes anymore. While the default apps are nice, the lack of variety available in the Windows Store (compared to Google Play or Apple's App Store) also reinforces the sense that deep down this machine really wants to be a PC.
One of Microsoft's issues is that Windows has never been a competitive advantage when it comes to selling hardware to consumers: for decades, for most people, it was the only choice they really had.
In the tablet world that's no longer the case: few care that their Kindles or iPads don't run on Windows, even fewer that it doesn't have Office.
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