Well after a few days of setting things up and testing (with a prepay account) I have finally switched my phone to my regular on account plan. I have a couple of coloured backs on order for it too, although they are difficult to get in NZ; fortunately it doesn’t cost too much to have Amazon post one across to NZ.
The built in email app works fine with Exchange, and the Gmail app works fine with Gmail, and the Outlook app from Microsoft works fine with Live accounts. The advantage of using the Outlook app instead of setting up my Live account from my Windows phone as IMAP, is that it immediately brought down my address book from Windows Phone, which includes all the phone numbers I previously had stored. However it doesn’t look like the app can access IMAP accounts which means I will have to use the Gmail app; fortunately it isn’t as messy to use multiple email apps as it is on a PC because their notifications are all integrated into the notification centre that comes up on the lock screen and when you pull down from the top.
Live tiles are all the rage in Windows Phone of course, but they are limited, and the notification centre in Android is probably just as good overall, although I will miss having the visible calendar that showed everything by default, and will have to make sure I keep up with what is in my calendars by some means. I am guessing the Outlook app should be able to do calendar notifications.
The biggest issue for any Android user is apps that will only work in the phone’s internal memory, which is most of them. You can disable many of the built-in apps that you don’t use and free up some space, or a small number of apps can be moved to the SD card. The problem is that an old trick of using the Android Device Bridge application running on a PC to force move apps to the SD card is not possible in the latest versions of Android (this is running 5.1, which it was easily updated to soon after I started using it). So Google is not making it easy for people with lower priced phones to make the best use of the onboard memory as a lot of apps will not be installable. For me I am just OK with using the Chrome browser to view Facebook and Trademe and some other sites.