The Lumia 925 comes with several exclusive (and non-exclusive) Nokia apps like HERE Drive+, HERE Maps and Nokia Music, as well as other Nokia apps like Nokia Care and HERE City Lens. We love the HERE Drive app that offers offline navigation complete with turn-by-turn directions. As we mentioned in our previous reviews, Nokia continues to set the benchmark in navigation apps, even ahead of Google Maps.
The other services included are HERE Maps, which is a huge improvement over the stock Bing Maps, and Nokia Music, that offers unlimited music free for a year. For some reason we were not able to connect our Nokia Music account with this handset.
The software also includes the mobile version of Microsoft Office, Skype integration and a great email client.
As mentioned in the Camera section, the phone comes with some lenses, which also show up as stand-alone apps. These are Bing Vision, Cinemgraph, Panorama, Camera360 and Nokia Smart Cam.
PhotoBeamer is another interesting app that lets you beam your photos to any computer over Wi-Fi, providing an instant, wireless slideshow you can see over a large screen. During our tests, this worked as advertised.
We also love the software keyboard.
The 925 also comes with a host of pre-installed apps like BIGFLIX (entertainment), Cosmopolitan (lifestyle magazine), Flipkart eBooks, and Zomato (food/ restaurants guide).
However, the annoyances with the OS still remain. One of the major among them is the lack of quality apps. Many mainstream apps including Instagram, Path and even Pocket are absent from the Windows Store, though you can find some third-party alternatives. For instance 6tag is a nice third party app for Instagram. The new Facebook app now levels up to its Android and iOS counterparts while the native Twitter app is also good enough.
The lack of a centralised notification tray/ hub is still a pain point. The 'Me tile' tries to fill that gap, at least for social networking needs, but the experience is a little crippled. For instance it's not possible to do a reply all for tweets.