Category: Mobile

[sc:mobile-category ] Well Bell finally rolled out GDR to my HTC 8X and here’s what I’ve found so far.

Installation was pretty standard, about a 210meg package, installed in two steps.  First the ROM update and then the data migration.  Overall it too probably 5 minutes or so.

After coming back up three things caught my attention:

1. New IE settings
2. Data Sense
3. FM Radio

On the first load of IE after the update a new settings dialog box popped up, several new options (or ones I don’t remember for the last first time) came up:

1. Reduce data use by sending URLs to the Data Sense service
2. Send browsing history to Microsoft to help improve Bing services
3. Use SmartScreen Filter to help protect against unsafe websites
4. Send a Do Not Track request to websites you visit

No real explanation on the first one so I disabled it.  I assume it probably sends the request to MS and then proxies it to try to shrink images and other content for size.  Not something I want a third-party to be in the middle of so I disabled it.

The second one I disabled as well, MS doesn’t get my browsing history and likewise, SmartScreen was disabled as well.

I left the Do Not Track enabled, it can’t hurt even if it doesn’t help much either.

Data Sense is kind of neat, it’s wrong on my phone, but neat non the less.  I have a 500meg data plan and it currently things I’ve used 44meg, while Bell thinks I’ve used 133.  This could just be due to the fact that this is the first month and Data Sense doesn’t have enough data to go back far enough in to my usage.  I’ll keep an eye on it next month when things reset and see how close it is to what Bell reports.

And finally the FM radio.  It’s not really useful, but having the hardware support it and the OS not kind of was irksome.  On my old Zune HD I did use the FM radio once in a while so I might use it on my phone as well.  Have to wait and see I guess.

There are three other things to note about GDR2:

1. There’s been a change in the Mail app, when you change to a different folder, the folder list has a brief pause and a “loading” animation now that wasn’t there before GDR2.
2. I have a BlackBerry Music Connect in my car to add Bluetooth support to my radio, previously when I shut the car off, the Bluetooth connection would drop and the music would continue to play (that was a bug).  Now on the disconnect the music stops correctly but instead of just a pause it is a stop (which is another bug).  This means the current play list stops and is no longer accessible from the lock screen.  You instead have to unlock the phone and restart the playlist from the music hub.  You can get around this by pausing the music before shutting off the car, but it’s defiantly a bug in the updated Bluetooth code.
3. I’ve re-installed Skype and so far the phone hasn’t locked up on my yet so I’ll give it a few more days and then say MS has fixed their VOIP instability issue.

So far so good, another touted feature of GDR2 is better battery life, still too soon to say if there is any difference, but it will be something else to keep my eye on.

[sc:mobile-category ]A few weeks ago Microsoft rolled out an upgrade (v2.8.0.84) to Skype for Windows Phone 8 and well, lets just say it didn’t go well.

Around the same time several other apps on my phone had updates, including Facebook, Lync, WhatsApp and Netflix).  Shortly there after, at least one a day, when unlocking the phone I would be greeted with the standard “Resuming…” screen.  Hitting the home or back button didn’t do anything and bringing up the task list just showed the current app was the start screen.  Trying to switch to another app simply brought the resuming screen back.  Leaving it for a few minutes didn’t do anything and the only option that worked was to restart the phone.

At first I thought it might be The Weather network as it seemed to happen when I had been using it and then locked the phone.  However I quickly found that not to be the case as the task list clearly showed the current task to be the start screen.

My next step was to start removing apps that were running in the background, the first one I pulled was Facebook.  After several more removals, I found Skype to be the offending app.  Removing it has since returned stability to my phone and I haven’t added it back yet.

I’ve been continually surprised how little attention Microsoft has focused on the WP version of Skype, this just confirms in my mind that the Skype executives view WP as a second class citizen.

[sc:mobile-category ]Recently a thread on the Windows Phone UserVoice site brought up an interesting topic, where are the updates to WP8?

The just of the reply from Joe Belfiore was “be patient!”.  That really kind of ticked me off.  We’ve been patient, we’ve been waiting since WP7 for many of the simple features found on other phones with no movement on any of them.  Sure he’s basically saying that a lot of development time is being taken up by keeping the underpinnings in line with new hardware, but come on, a little bit of time on the UI surly can’t be that taxing.

How about just throwing us a bone, a couple of simple things surly are easy enough to do.  How about some profiles for ringtones and alerts?  How about a better calendar view (maybe a weekly view?)?  How about feature parity with Outlook for creating new recurring calendar entries?  How about being able to set alert settings per app instead of just the big bucket of “All other notifications”?

These are the kind of thing that you can assign a single developer to do and they’ll get it done in a day or two.  Maybe a week at most for something like the recurring calendar stuff.

Microsoft wants us to believe that they can’t manage to do two things at once.  That they are so resource constrained that the only thing they can do is upgrade the underpinnings to support new hardware.  I’m sorry, when you’re fighting tooth and nail to get market share you don’t have the option to ignore half of the work you need to do.

Seriously MS, open the pocketbook and spend some of that almost 5 BILLION dollars you earned last quarter and hire a few more programmers to throw at the WP UI team.

Source: WPCentral

[sc:mobile-category ]Well that was quick, Adore already been updated with address book support.  It’s kind of weird address book support as you have to search for a name and then when you select the name it just fills the number in to the dialer page so you have to swipe back over to actually dial it.

But as they say one small step for VOIP…