Existing programs
The Lumia 930 comes standard with apps calendar, alarms, app social, data insight, food and drink, Facebook, financial, FM radio, games, health and fitness, HERE Drive+, HERE Maps, maps, LINE, Lumia help + tips, transferring my data, MixRadio, music, news, Nokia beamer, Office, OneDrive, OneNote, storage insight, podcasts, wallet, travel, calculator, Skype, sports, video, Vine and weather.
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An attentive reader will notice that YouTube is missing from this extensive package. Fortunately, an official app can easily be downloaded from the Store. Furthermore, it is clear that Windows Phone is quite richly equipped on Nokia's. Free navigation, free music and you name it. Because of this, the Lumia still offers great value for money.
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The number of apps in the Store is increasing but there is still not much to choose from. In addition, mainstream apps like WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram still don't have the full functionality we know from iOS or Android. This really puts Windows Phone at a disadvantage.
Cortana
Together with Windows Phone 8.1, Microsoft announced its own digital assistant; Cortana. For the time being, she can only be used if you set the region of your phone to 'United States' and the language to English. But our first impression is one of wow! She even understands our coal English and she understands quite a bit. Of course you can ask her the usual things like open an app, call your girlfriend or put a reminder in your calendar but it goes way beyond that.
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She tries to make connections and can also remember memories linked to a location. Fetching flowers when you are near a flower shop for example. All these links can be found in Cortana's notebook. What we also found useful is that if Cortana doesn't understand you correctly, you can correct this by adjusting the text with the keyboard. Cortana can also handle your phone calls in case you don't want to be disturbed. This is called Microsoft "Quiet Hours" and it's actually the non-disruptive feature on iOS and Android. Unfortunately this only works if you have set your phone to English.
In addition, you can have Cortana songs recognized ala Shazam and of course there is a lot of humour in it. We can't wait for Cortana to be available in Dutch as well, although that might take a while. Also the competition is not yet available in Dutch.