Groove Music on Windows Mobile

Greg Leave a comment

[sc:mobile-category ]I’ve been running Windows 10 Mobile for a while now and with it comes Groove Music.  Windows WP8.1 I’d been using Modern Music as my music player as the WP Music app had been so buggy to start with.

With Windows 10 Mobile I decided to give Groove music a go and see how it was.

As a universal app it runs the same core as Windows on the desktop and the design is similarly very nice.

However, unlike the desktop version, the mobile version has significant issues.  Most notably around restarting payback after being paused for a while.  This comes to the forefront when you’re connecting to a car AV deck.

With WP8.1, it was seamless, get in my car, start it up and a few moments later music would start playing.

With Groove Music it just doesn’t work.  Most of the time I have to wait for the phone to connect, then force close Groove Music, restart it at least once (sometimes twice).  Then sometimes it will pick up my playlist, other times it looses the playlist and I have to reselect it.

It’s so bad it’s virtually unusable.

I’ve gone back to Modern Music which works much better, though still has a slight pause sometimes after connecting and before starting playback.  But at least it works 90% of the time, grove NEVER work.

Hopefully Microsoft will spend some time working on Groove before the official launch, but they’re running out of time real fast now.

 

Microsoft Devices 2015

Greg Leave a comment

[sc:hardware-category ]So Microsoft’s big hardware event has come and gone, much of the announcements were already known, but there was a big surprise at the end and now everything is official.

Hololens

Hololens is neat.  It’s a cool piece of hardware and it looks like we may now get to see what others can do with it.  But beyond that I’m not convinced I’d have a need for one.

Band 2

I’m not a big fan of wearables, but I have to say that the Band 2 looks to be a significant update.  Both aesthetically as well as functionally.

I’ve been tempted a couple of times to pick one up for the golf features, but just can’t quite bring myself to do it.

The one thing that stuck out to me was there was no announcement of expanding the number of countries it’s available in.

Lumia 950/XL

The specs on these leaked out ahead of the presentation so there isn’t really anything too surprising form the announcement.

The liquid cooling is a neat tech point but at the end of the day it’s not something that’s going to move phones 🙂

Continuum was demoed again and it’s impressive to say the least.  It was curious they didn’t demo it completely wire free (Bluetooth keyboard/mouse with a WiDi display) but I guess they wanted to show off the docking station.

The USB 3.1 connector is quickly becoming a must have on new phones and that’s a good thing.

One key point that I was interested in was the network bands that are supported by it, while it wasn’t talked about during the presentation, the Microsoft Store site had the tech details up just afterwards and it has a wide range of network support.

Most importantly for me, Wind Mobile looks to be supported.

Finally, they did announce the release, it was kind of vague.  November is a big month, can we expect it November 1st (no, obviously not) or Nov 30th?

Well pre-orders aren’t available yet, but should be soon, perhaps a ship date will be included then.

I’ll be ordering the 950 XL, I’m not sure I want that large of phone, but I have to admin my 925 seems very small these days so I’m going to hedge my bets on the larger handset and see what happens.

Lumia 550

This was mostly an afterthought, but I have to say the low-end Lumia look very slick, I would have liked to see some more details about it.

Surface Pro 4

There wasn’t as much known about the SP4 before the press conference, but in general it was expected to be a minor update to the SP3 and that was the case.

The larger display is nice along with the magnetic pen holder.  Thinner was good as well.  The new type cover is also a nice upgrade by the looks of it.

Before the announcement I was contemplating replacing my ASUS ZenBook with a SP4, but that all depended on two things

  1. Windows Hello support.
  2. USB 3.1 charging.

Well I got the Windows Hello support, but missed the USB 3.1 charging.  I can’t say how much I’m looking forward to replacing ALL my chargers with USB 3.1 power supplies.  I guess I’ll be waiting another year until the SP5 comes out 🙂

Surface Book

This one is a little weird, there was a rumor going around that a larger Surface would be announced but no one expected this.

Microsoft calls it a laptop, but it’s more like a hybrid.

It’s weird as Microsoft has been telling us for the last three years to replace our laptops with a Surface.  Then they announce a laptop at the end of the presentation.

It might have made more sense to announce the book before the SP4.

Either way, I’m not sure I’d ever buy one.  I look at that hinge and the gap between the keyboard and display and just know as soon as I set something relatively heavy on top of it that would be the end of it 🙁

Wrap Up

It was a good mix of hardware from Microsoft and the presentation went smooth.  The think that stood out to me though was the change in tone from previous presentations.

The presenters focused more on how it made you feel and how “magical” it was.  It sounded a lot like an Apple press conference when Steve Jobs ran them.

I don’t know if that’s a good way to go or not.  Either way though we’ll find out in the next few quarters when we see how the new hardware actually sells.

Windows 10 Mobile on my Lumia 925

Greg Leave a comment

[sc:windows-category ]So it was finally time to take the plunge and install Windows 10 Mobile on my phone.  I’ve been holding off to get a reasonably stable release as the only phone I have that supports Win10 is my main phone.

OS Install

First off, installing and enrolling in the Windows insider program was pretty straight forward, however before installing Build 10166 (which was the current release when did my upgrade) I of course did a full backup of my data.

There was quite a few reports that the upgrade process was not quite there yet and after doing the update that’s quite apparent.

After downloading the update, it took quite a while to install (close to an hour) and one it rebooted in to the start menu it went in to a continuous “loading…” loop.  It’s a well known issue caused by having many tiles on the start screen.

A simple hardware reset to factory defaults along with a re-install of 10166 cleared up the issue.

I spent a few days with 1066 and after 10512 became available I decided to upgrade but couldn’t seem to get the phone to identify there was an update to do.

After searching around for a while I finally figured out that after the 10166 install, my Windows Insider setting had been put back to the default of no preview releases.  Switching it back to the fast ring resolved the issue and the phone identified the 10512 release.

However after several attempts at installing it, it failed each time.  There wasn’t any obvious reason for the failure and the error message wasn’t very helpful.  After a few days of poking around I finally decided to reset the phone back to 8.1 and try and do a clean install of 10513 from that.

The Windows Phone Recovery Tool is used to go back to 8.1 and it re-flashes the phone from scratch.  The 925 only has a base 8.1 image available so after the reset, Update 2 had to be re-installed.

Once that was back on the phone, I once again had to re-enrol in the fast ring and then the 10512 update came down without issue.

However, when I went to install the English Canada keyboard, I found it failed several times.  It turns out that the 10512 update also resets your Windows Insider status so I once again had to re-enrol in the fast right.  After that the keyboard updates came down.

Restoring Data

Restoring my data was straight forward with two exceptions:

  1. One of my picture folders simply would not copy over to the phone and I have yet to find a way to create a new folder on the phone.
  2. I used “contacts+message backup” to export my SMS/MMS messages (my contacts are on my Exchange server so no need to do them) which worked fine, but after installing it on Win10 it didn’t show up in the settings menu.  I had to access it from the Store, which wasn’t a big deal, just a little unexpected.

Once everything was back I re-added my accounts and everything was up and running.

Basic OS Features

Overall there are a lot of similarities between 8.1 and 10, but there are also a lot of differences.  Here are some of my first impressions in no particular order:

  • The live tile “counts” look wrong somehow.  The font is too thin I think.
  • Live tiles often “flicker” when updating.
  • Live tile counts for e-mail are often wrong.
  • The application list feels very cramped to the left hand side of the screen, a bit of white space might be nice.
  • The notification center seems at little laggy at times.
  • There’s no easy way from the notification center to connect to a new WiFi network.
  • The lock screen font seems too thin as well.
  • Alarms no longer show up on the lock screen or the glance screen.
  • The new transparent keypad on the lock screen is neat, but I don’t know if I like it.
  • Overall performance isn’t too bad but it’s still pretty slow and unresponsive at times.
  • I don’t like the decision to switch the order of the task list.
  • The new cursor controller on the keyboard is a neat idea, but I still haven’t gotten use to it.

Data Usage

One big problem I found with build 10166 is that it was eating my cellular data really fast.  About 500meg a day, which is a problem with I only have a 500meg data plan 🙂

I had to turn off cellular data on the phone and I haven’t turned it back on yet though it looks like I probably could based on the current data usage from the phone.

Groove Music

Probably the biggest issue was using my phone as my music player in my car.  Connecting through Bluetooth was easy enough but Groove Music is still a mess.  Until very recently it “forgot” the current playlist any time it was unloaded from memory and it still doesn’t start auto playing correctly when the car stereo connects to the phone.

Groove Music has come a long way, but it still misses artist info and other details when connected to the car.

Overall Impressions

Microsoft is set to announce new hardware and presumably a release date for Windows Mobile 10 on Oct 6th, so are they ready?

Right now I’d say no, there’s a long way to go before I’d consider it ready.

But beyond that, I have to say I’m kind of disappointed with it.  Windows Phone 8.1 had a nice unified feel to it and Windows 10 Mobile feels like a hodge podge of ideas all thrown together, hoping to make a whole.

It feels like they’ve sacrificed the “sole” of Windows Phone to try and get market share, which is sad in some ways but not surprising at the same time.

 

 

ASUS ZenFone 2

Greg

[sc:mobile-category ]As anyone who has read my mobile phone articles will know, I’m pretty much a Windows Phone stalwart.  In the past it has been a much more coherent UI and a better overall experience for me.

However it’s been a while since I used an Android phone and I like ASUS hardware so I decided to pick up a ZenFone 2 as it works with Wind Mobile.  I’ve had a Blu Win HD for a while that I’ve been using with Wind as my mobile hotspot and while I like the Win HD, this was an opportunity to try out something different.

Hardware

The ZenFone is a pretty large phone, the 5.5″ display certainly dominates the front.  And if you’re looking for something light, this isn’t it either.

The phone is a powerhouse though, running an Intel Atom chip (I wonder if you could load Windows 10 on it?) and supporting dual SIM’s.

The box comes with very little, just the phone, a power brick and a USB cable.

The power button is on top and the volume rocker is actually on the back of it.

There are the standard 3 capacitive buttons at the bottom of the display and the back is removable, exposing the two SIM slots, the SD card slot and the battery.

Overall the hardware feels well made.

There are only two things I think they could have done to make it better:

  1. USB 3.1.
  2. Wireless charging.

Android

Getting the phone up and running was simple enough and connecting to the Wind network, the only issue I had was the fact that my mobile number isn’t set on the SIM so Android thinks it’s “unknown”.

Android has come a long way since the last time I used it.  The new Material Design that Google has adopted has made a much more unified experience out of the OS, in fact it reminds me a lot of Windows Phone.

Of course it’s not WP and nowhere is that more obvious than the home screen.  The grid of icons takes me back to the good old Windows 3.1 days.  Sure there are widgets available to add to it, but at the heart of it is still the idea of clicking icons to launch apps.

The first thing I did was to start removing some of the included apps.

ASUS has been pretty good at not loading too much bloat, but a few things, like the games back, just had to go.

Of course there are some Google apps you just can’t remove, so I disabled just about all of them.

Then it was time to install the Amazon app store.  By default the ZenFone doesn’t let you install apps from “untrusted” sources, which is just code for the Google Play store.  However that is just a setting and can be overridden.

After that I pulled down some of the standard stuff (like Twitter, etc.) from Amazon.  However there are a few things that don’t exist on the Amazon store and eventually I had to load up Google Play.

I made a few other changes as well:

  • The ASUS keyboard is fine, but I pulled down the Google default keyboard and am using it at the moment.
  • I disabled the “swipe to unlock”, it seems like an extra action for no reason.
  • The base browser doesn’t support DuckDuckGo, just Google/Bing/Yahoo for some reason.
  • I’m using FireFox as my default browser, it supports DuckDuckGo.

Overall it’s a lot better than it used to be, there are a few points of note though.

Mail

Microsoft gets e-mail, not just for the casual users but for the power users to.  Google still hasn’t quite figured it out because they’re rather you use gmail instead of someone else’s service.

Asus has included a mail client, but it’s really only useful for casual users.

I tried a few other mail clients (including Outlook, which really isn’t Outlook on Android) but none of them deal with folders very well.  I have lots and lots of folders and some way to “favorite” them for easy access is a must.

A recent update to the ASUS mail client at least includes a “recent folders” list, but it’s not quite there.

The other big issues with the ASUS mail client is that it doesn’t update the folder status often enough, you can have a message you’ve read on another system continue to be flagged as unread for a long time on the phone.

Settings

Settings are still a problem in Android, there are lots of them and they aren’t always the easiest to find.

For example, haptic feedback.  There are options for it in the ringtones, in the keyboard and in sounds settings.

Another example is the launcher them.  There’s icon packs, background settings, theme settings and others.

It’s great to have lots of options, but it needs a more coherent settings system to go with them.

VOIP

Unlike my previous points, this is where Android shines.  Microsoft has had the hooks for VOIP in Windows Phone for a long time but never took the next step and integrated VOIP in to the core of the phone.

Android has it built-in (even if the settings are hidden away for some unknown reason).

Setting up my VOIP number was easy and I could place and receive calls with it.

Things I haven’t tried yet

As this is my secondary phone, I haven’t transferred any music or photo’s over to it.  I tried the camera quickly and it works.

I also haven’t tried paring my car with it or any of my Bluetooth accessories.

Final thoughts

The phone seems like a good piece of hardware and Android looks to have come far enough to be usable.

However the mail client would be a real sticking point for me if I have to use it every day.

And it may come to that sooner rather than later.  In November when my current contract is up I will be looking to drop my Bell service and move to Wind.  However that’s going to require a phone that works on the Wind network and if the new flagship phones from Microsoft don’t support Wind, I’m going to have to make a hard decision.