Man alive, my posts are becoming quite alarmingly long. Hey, take them as a stream-of-thought almost-review of WinPhone. :P

I don't think it's fair to say you can't do things with WP8. There are many things you can't do, true, but it achieves most of what most people want from their phones.

If you don't care about the WP kinda-sorta-review feel free to skip from here to the next bold line

With the 520 I can go on the internet with plenty of speed (using IE, even - not that I wouldn't replace it if I could, but amazingly it seems to be doing its job acceptably), I have Facebook, Whatsapp and Evernote, offline GPS (with more GPS apps available if I could be arsed to install them and download their maps), a music player that actually, incredibly, works well in stock form (the lack of a good stock player is something I've never forgiven Android) and TuneIn radio.

There are things I can't do, of course. IE is, well, IE, which is a constant background annoyance in my mind not so much for its problems (the WP8 version doesn't really seem to have many), but because when you've hated something with extreme emphasis for the past 18 years, suddenly finding out a version of it actually works does not automatically eliminate all the hatred.

The Facebook app works OK when it's open, but when it isn't the system-resident applet can't quite seem to catch most private messages and display the notification.

The music player can't read Ogg Vorbis, which I like to use to shrink my music library so I can fit more of it on flash memory with no appreciable loss of quality.

And I can't replace the keyboard. I've always thought when you have a touchscreen that allows you to slide and gesture, maintaining the qwerty metaphor is an inefficient relic of habit and tradition; this is why I love Messagease, and why I dislike qwerty touch-boards. (Yes, I do know about 8pen; suffice to say, even my enthusiasm for different keyboards has a sanity threshold.)

But as far as qwerty touch-boards go, the WP8 one is the least evil I've seen. I can actually type at decent speed on it - entirely because of the word prediction and error correction, without which it'd be a constant nightmare of going back and fixing mistakes.

Most of this stuff wouldn't be a problem in Android. There are browsers aplenty, alternative Facebook apps by the dozen, the entire system is Vorbis-compatible and I can't possibly be bothered to count all the alternative keyboards that have come out.

But, and this is the key issue, getting all this stuff to work smoothly and with no multitasking issues in Android would require a phone costing rather more than the 520.

Stop skipping here

Give me a quadcore Android phone with two gigs of RAM for €100 and I'll ditch the 520 and WinPhone so fast it'll make your head spin. Until that happens, I'll stick with what works well without hurting the wallet.

Money. As I mentioned previously the N9 is expensive even second-hand, and a Jolla goes for three to four times the price of the 520. I emphatically don't want to be walking around with €400 worth of hardware in my pocket. If I lose the 520, or smash it, or someone steals it, I'll be pretty damn unhappy, but more for the lost data in it and the hassle of getting and configuring/customizing a replacement rather than for the loss of the hardware itself. If that happens to a Jolla I'll be rather more miserable for much longer, not to mention more paranoid about actually using it for fear it might be damaged. This is also the reason (aside from the expense itself) why I won't buy an expensive high-end Android phone, or any iPhone.

And before you tell me the N900 was pretty expensive in its day: I got mine third-hand for a song because it had a dead battery and USB port and the owner couldn't be bothered to fix it.

How so? I loaded my music library in Windows MediaPlayer and it put everything on the phone effortlessly. In fact, putting content on MTP devices is the one thing I ever use WMP for - I tried using Winamp, but it couldn't keep the tags consistent across the link.

Not sure about emails, but yeah, the calendar app sucks. The reminders strike me as particularly stupid: you have 5 minutes, 10, 15, 30, 60, then the sanity stops and you get 18 hours, one day, and then a massive jump to one week. Because clearly nobody could possibly want a reminder, say, three days before the event.

I'm lazily looking for an alternative, if one exists; in the meantime I'm pretty happy using Google Calendar. It has no synchronization with WP8 devices, but it has the wonderfully simple and efficient option of sending you SMS messages as reminders - whenever you choose.

It probably is due to corporate security. WinPhone doesn't strike me as a system that would take kindly to high security limitations, user permissions and such. They don't seem to come built-in, so you'd need separate apps providing security, and those by necessity need to modify the system at a fairly low level - and modifying Windows at a low level has never ever been a smart idea.

Either this or you're using some badly programmed app for your firm that's screwing everything else up.

This might have something to do with the stupid, stupid, stupid fact that WinPhone shuts down the wifi link whenever the phone goes to standby. The constant connects and disconnects as everyone keeps taking their phone in and out of sleep can probably cause some pain in an environment that's already full of various other connections and network links.

You'll get no disagreement from me on this one. WP8 phones are thought for the non-tech-savvy, and in general for people who'd rather not bother with a smartphone if they only could avoid it - not for nerds, and most certainly not for hackers. It requires a good disposition to compromise for a nerd to use WinPhone; good thing is, the compromises are of the kind that annoy you somewhat, not that make you want to throw the damn thing out of a window.

Nowhere did I say I'm aiming at super-devices, I just think it's ludicrous to spend so much money on a device that isn't one.

You may be right though, the Neo900 might be fast enough to load stuff just as fast as the 520, or maybe even more (though I'm not at all sure its single-core A8 would exactly rock my world). But the bare motherboard costs from €500 to €700. There's a limit to how much expense is justified by an efficient and open OS, and as far as I'm concerned this is very far above it.

No disagreement here - I've been a PC gamer since day one, on a mighty 8088. :P