A Lumia Knockout: The Lumia 532 vs competition
A bright-green Lumia 532 went toe to toe with several other smartphones in a tech match-up and Lumia Conversations had a ringside seat to show you what happened in a multi-round match.
About 50 tech bloggers and members from the Indian press last Thursday got a sneak peek of the Lumia 532 ahead of its launch in New Delhi. Instead of a traditional press briefing, Microsoft India showed what the Lumia 532 can do in a boxing match set-up.
In the event (tagline: “Never Compromise”), the techies learned about the Lumia 532’s high-performance features. In the Lumia corner was Gourav Katyal, product-marketing manager at Microsoft while those in the other corner were our blogger guests: Rohit Khurana, Akshay Aggarwal and Jatin Israni.
The scene was set with the participants donning blue boxing robes (like Sylvester Stallone’s character did in the movie “Rocky.”) With their eyes set on their respective smartphones, they were ready to deliver some tough punches. Microsoft Program Manager Pranav Shroff served as referee and hit the starting gong.
Motto: Never Compromise
Aim: Perform assigned tasks in the fastest time.
Task 1: Compose a text message about your favorite food followed by two emoticons.
Result: The Lumia 532, powered by world’s fastest and smartest smartphone keyboard, won. The winning sentence was, “I love <heart> pizza <pizza emoticon>”, typed by Gourav.
Time check
Lumia 532: 12 seconds
Competition: 17 seconds
Winning feature: Word Flow keyboard with intuitive dictionary.
If you, too, want to write text messages quickly, check out our story on the best Word Flow tips for Lumia here.
Task 2: Read the latest Facebook status update by Pranav, the referee.
Result: With both smartphones unlocked, Rohit Khurana had to first open the Facebook app by going to the menu and then search for Pranav from his friends list and then head over to his timeline to find the answer. On the other hand Gourav with his Lumia just went to his contact list and saw the update right on his People Hub.
Time check
Lumia 532: 8 seconds
Competition: 12 seconds
Rohit Khurana: I have participated in some of the activities organized by Lumia team before but today’s Lumia Knockout was interesting and completely different. The challenges were on real-use case scenarios and I was pleasantly surprised to know that Lumia smartphones have so much built-in.
Winning feature: People Hub
To understand how it works, read our detailed story on People Hub here.
*(Both the Lumia 532 and the competition devices had a Facebook account configured for this.)
Task 3: Without unlocking the device, read out the number of unread notifications (messages, e-mails, missed calls etc.)
Result: We don’t like to rub it in, but exclusive to Lumia**, Glance screen shows the time and date, missed calls, emails received, calendar entries, as well as weather updates, a lock screen photo and health and fitness data without having to unlock your smartphone! Gourav won yet again.
Time check
Lumia 532: 2 seconds
Competition: Can’t be done
Winning feature: Glance screen. Read our recent story on Glance screen here.
Next up was another built-in feature for Windows Phone that had the tech community sit up and take note.
Task 4: Check the weather forecast for your lunch meeting next Monday.
Result: This task performed by Akshay Aggarwal, our next blogger, had him search for the weather forecast on the Internet whereas Gourav just tapped the calendar on his Lumia and opened the meeting entry marked for Monday. Voila, the prediction was 23 degrees Celsius.
Time check
Lumia 532: 8 seconds
Competition: 20 seconds
Akshay Aggarwal: These challenges today have demonstrated the power of Windows Phone. I had a nice experience and it is a great way to educate users and an interactive way to learn about various features of the Windows Phone.
Winning feature: Weather integration with Calendar
We have talked about how one can view weather conditions via the calendar entry in our earlier story here.
We could go on, telling you how the Lumia 532 won all the rounds, but instead, let’s hear directly from the tech community.
Akshay Aggarwal: “Lumia 532 is a great device in terms of performance. I especially liked the bit where Microsoft has heard its users and upgraded it with a higher RAM of 1 GB. The device is quite smooth, snappy and there are no performance issues. Overall, it looks like a great device.”
Abhishek Bhatnagar: It looks like a pretty good phone as far as the price and build quality is concerned. It doesn’t look or feel like a cheap phone. Design-wise there is nothing new but because it is an affordable smartphone, I don’t expect much. The camera is good. One can take good quality videos and pictures with it but one can’t record HD videos on it, which could be disappointing for some people but not for majority.”
Similar blogger meet-ups were also organized in the cities of Mumbai and Bangalore and you can probably guess who the winner was in those match-ups. That’s right, the Lumia 532.
You too can challenge your friends and come out victorious.
**With supporting hardware, on phones such as the Lumia 1020, Lumia 1520, and Lumia 830, Lumia 532.