I also have a Lumia that I use as a secondary phone. The device is nice, Nokia can surely make good hardware, however my problem is the OS.
The Metro UI is kind of nice, but it gets obnoxious. I've began to hate those animations. And when I do need in-your-face notifications, like for the weather or something, you don't have the nice widgets that you get with Android.
Also, Microsoft is in charge of the Facebook app and I don't get how in the world they managed to treat the login in that Facebook app as something separate than the phone's accounts. I also want to be able to manage what accounts are synchronized or not - because synchronization uses battery, plus notifications are annoying and for many accounts I only want to view the latest messages or whatever only when I open the app - and haven't found an option for doing so, unless you turn the battery savings on. While we are on the subject, the notifications bar is a joke.
The app store is full of crap. Microsoft has played the app numbers game, allowing some genuine crap in their store. Of course, both Google Play and iTunes are filled with crap, but the search and the ratings are usually enough for finding good stuff and both Google Play and iTunes also have very polished, very good apps for everything.
But the above don't really bother me as much as my last point - Windows Phone is at its core as restrictive as iOS. It does not allow installs of apps from third party sources and is basically defective by design ... for example, to do Wifi tethering, the mobile career has to wire you the settings that allow it. And it's been a PITA for me, because my mobile career couldn't wire me the settings automatically, since they don't have my phone model in their database. Isn't that awesome?
I use Amazing Weather hd as my lock screen, which takes care of the weather issue for me. But as far as other live tiles, you can turn any of them off if you want. I mean, you COULD just make a start screen that looked like android/ios with a ton of icons if you really wanted to.
I don't use Facebook so I can't comment on that, but most apps I've used (twitter, linkedin, hacker news, readit) have settings for syncing. I only let readit sync in the background personally.
The notifications bar itself is only there for a few seconds, so I'm not sure what issue you could possibly have with it. Notifications appear on the app tiles themselves, which I prefer (especially for when I add a person to my start screen and they call/text/email me). It doesn't function the same way as android/ios, but I prefer it.
Every App Store is full of garbage, there's no denying it. I've found the windows App Store much easier to wade through, though. It's still far below the amount of apps in the android/ios stores, and the few top rated apps are almost always the official (or best) apps. I haven't found an issue with apps, but it am not a huge app guy. I mostly use twitter and readit (for reddit, obviously).
I haven't faced any issues like your last one either, so I can't really comment. I have verizon and they have next to no support for windows phone, so I could see it happening.
The Metro UI is kind of nice, but it gets obnoxious. I've began to hate those animations. And when I do need in-your-face notifications, like for the weather or something, you don't have the nice widgets that you get with Android.
Also, Microsoft is in charge of the Facebook app and I don't get how in the world they managed to treat the login in that Facebook app as something separate than the phone's accounts. I also want to be able to manage what accounts are synchronized or not - because synchronization uses battery, plus notifications are annoying and for many accounts I only want to view the latest messages or whatever only when I open the app - and haven't found an option for doing so, unless you turn the battery savings on. While we are on the subject, the notifications bar is a joke.
The app store is full of crap. Microsoft has played the app numbers game, allowing some genuine crap in their store. Of course, both Google Play and iTunes are filled with crap, but the search and the ratings are usually enough for finding good stuff and both Google Play and iTunes also have very polished, very good apps for everything.
But the above don't really bother me as much as my last point - Windows Phone is at its core as restrictive as iOS. It does not allow installs of apps from third party sources and is basically defective by design ... for example, to do Wifi tethering, the mobile career has to wire you the settings that allow it. And it's been a PITA for me, because my mobile career couldn't wire me the settings automatically, since they don't have my phone model in their database. Isn't that awesome?