Category: Mobile

[sc:mobile-category ]I’ve been running Windows Phone 8.1 now for a few weeks and there are a few things that are on my mind.

First off, it’s a great update overall, the following are just some items that seem to stand out to me.

Notification Center

The new notification center is a big improvement in 8.1, but there are a few things about it:

• the old behaviour of swiping down is gone, so you can’t just bring up the status bar any more for a quick check on your network status or battery level.
• the grab bar at the bottom is a little small, however as you can just swipe up from below the hardware buttons it’s not much of an issue.
• Store notifications sometimes act weirdly.  Normally when you get an updated app notification, when you select it you go right to the downloads page.  The same with toast notifications.  However sometimes you don’t and instead just end up at the store front.
• Notification options for e-mail are based on your inbox configuration.  If you leave your inboxes separate, you can set notification options for each one.  However if you use a unified inbox, you can only set notification options for the unified inbox, not the separate inboxes.

Xbox Music

The new Xbox Music app just sucks in comparison to the old Music hub.  It broke pinned playlists from the Music hub and often they still don’t work.  It needs some major work, first and foremost it needs to work better.  After that a full playlist editor and MP3 tag editor would be nice as well.

The best part of Xbox Music is that it’s just an app so Microsoft should (and have been) be able to quickly iterate through the issues.

Battery Life

Some people found battery life to be worse in the initial release, I didn’t have any issues and the recent update was targeted at some of those concerns.

6 Tile Wide Mode

My Nokia 925 supports the new 6 tile wide mode, but honestly it’s a little too small on-screen to be my preferred option, so I’ve stuck with 4 tile wide.

Internet Explorer 11

Even though by all appearances IE11 is a minor update, it has a major impact.  The ability to save and sync your passwords with your desktop IE is quite simply the best new feature in the entire 8.1 update.

Another nice item is the fact when you pin a site to your start page it can use the Windows 8.1 live tile configuration settings if the site supports it.  This means you can get live tile notifications from sites right on your start screen!

Cortana

Cortana isn’t available in Canada yet, but I’ve changed my settings and have it active.  I have to admit I don’t use it much, but the quite hours is nice.

What I’d really like Cortana to be able to do is to alert me for individual contact activity.  So for example if I received an e-mail from one of my contacts, to play an audible alert or do some other kind of notification that isn’t the default for e-mail.

Individual Volume Controls

This is a very good thing and that’s all I have to say about it 🙂

VPN

I’m still waiting for OpenVPN to support Windows Phone 8.1, it should be possible now.  If it does I’ll probably enable it and just to see what it’s like.

People Hub

The People Hub took a big hit in 8.1, it lost much of its usefulness as Microsoft had to admit that allowing third-party apps to manage the social updates was the way to go.  It would be nice to be able to set the default start page to be the “What’s New” instead of the contact list though.

Transparent Tiles

Don’t use them, don’t want to.

Calendar

The week view is so much more useful, but I do miss the agenda every once in a while.

 

[sc:mobile-category ]I’ve had the Nokia Wireless Car Charger for a while in my car, but I recently purchased a new car and didn’t transfer the mount over.

The new car had built-in GPS so I didn’t really need a car mount for my phone.  However I did find myself missing the wireless charging when in my car.  The Zens CupHolder Wireless Charger has come to the rescue though.

The first thing you’ll notice about it is the price, for what it is, it’s a little high.  A lower price point would make it much easier to swallow.  I found a Canadian distributor for it at Blueshop and I also had a discount code so I decided to give it a go.

The unit itself is quite nice, it feels well-built and does exactly what it says.  Overall it’s quite nice, I do have a few thoughts on it:

• The power cable uses a custom connector instead of a USB connector, as most new cars have a USB port in them it would have made sense to send a USB cable.
• The included power cable has a tightly wound stretchable cable, but that makes it hard to get through a compartment if required.
• The slot doesn’t have a front/back indicator on it so you have to guess which way to put the phone in.
• Inside the slot is a spring to keep the phone pressed against the charging side, but the spring is bare metal against the display, this seems like a recipe to eventually scratch your phone.  I’ll probably find something to place between the phone and spring.
• The slot is a little thin, it could have been a bit wider to allow for a larger case to be on the phone.

These are all small things overall, it’s quite nice otherwise.

[sc:mobile-category ]A while ago I upgraded my HTC 8X to a Nokia 925 which means my 8X was just lying around.

A friend of mine was still using an old BlackBerry and was stuck on his contract for quiet a while yet.  I offered him my 8X and he’s been using it for a few days now but he called me with an issue.

He plugged it in to charge and it started in to an infinite reboot cycle.  It would start-up, starting loading but before the “Microsoft Windows Phone” loading screen could be displayed it would reboot and start all over.

Doing a quick search turned up trying a hard reset, but it didn’t seem to let you do a hard reset in the cycle it was in.  Without the power cable in, the phone wouldn’t come on at all.

We pulled the SIM card but no difference.

While trying a few different things, I happened to pull the USB cable out while it was rebooting and instead of cycling again, it continued to boot all the way up.

It was a strange occurrence and we’ll have to watch to see if it happens again but the phone seems fine now.

[sc:mobile-category ]Today Microsoft release Windows Phone 8.1 to the developers preview program, which basically means anyone can download it by registering as a developer for free.

Microsoft released App Studio a while ago and you can sign up for free.  This gives you access to the Microsoft Preview program, which gets you Windows Phone 8.1.

App Studio is free as long as you don’t need to publish the app to the Store, so effectively anyone can get WP 8.1 today.

Getting the update is a two-step process, first a series of preparatory updates are installed, they’re relatively small and comes down quickly.  It does take a while to install, it goes through the standard data migration, but once complete your ready for WP 8.1.

The WP 8.1 update is much larger, it looks to be over 400 meg and it obviously requires a Wi-Fi connection to download.

Once downloaded it went through the same process as every other update, preparing to install, the gears screen and then data migration.  This was a much longer process and the data migration bar now breaks the process up in to multiple steps so it’s not so opaque.

Once installed, Microsoft prompts you to set some defaults and then your off to the races with the update.

The Start Screen

The first thing I noticed is that the status bar text and icons is no longer black (I use the light theme, so white background with black text) but grey.  It looks fine, just different.

Bringing down the new notification center effectively adds a second row of information to the status bar, the carrier your connected to, the percentage of battery left and the month and day.  It’s a nice touch.

Overall the animations and screen transitions seem faster and have been tweaked in a few different ways as well.  Nothing earth shattering but all improvements.

Another big feature that’s been brought to the Start Screen as an option is the six tiles wide mode.  On my Nokia 925’s 4.5″ display this looked a little small for my preference, but the extra tiles is quite nice.  I’m going to have to think about this for a while and see if I enable it or not.

E-Mail/Calendar/Contacts

E-Mail/Contacts is largely untouched but the big item here is full GMail support has returned using iCal, CardDAV and IMAP.

The Calendar on the other hand is a huge improvement over WP8.  The week view is much more usable and the year view is kind of neat.  I don’t understand why they dropped the Agenda view, but I don’t mind in the slightest, I hated it with a passion 😉

One other little item in the Calendar is Tasks, it’s available my bringing up more options on the button bar, but there’s lots of space left on the bar for it to have its own icon.  Just kind of weird they didn’t add one for it.

Internet Explorer

Most of the changes here are under the hood, IE 11 and other goodies are hard to see at first blush.

However a few items do stand out.

1. The stop/refresh button is now overlaid at the end of the URL.  A nice feature.
2. No limit on the number of tabs!
3. Tabs from your other computers are now available.
4. Password storage!

The Store

Automatic updates!  Nuff Said.

Search

Cortana is not available in Canada yet, though one would expect Microsoft to be enabling it soon enough.

There are a few tweaks to Bing search though and the best one is the ability to search the local phone for information.

Background Applications

Previous version of WP allowed you to block an application from running in the background, this feature has been removed from 8.1.  I would think Microsoft has thought of this and there must be some mitigation in the OS for it, but I haven’t found it yet.

Nokia Glance Screen

After the upgrade Nokia’s Glance screen is partly disabled, the time comes up but you have to go to Glance which will then tell you it needs to do a restart.  After the restart you can enable the rest of your Glance settings and everything works again.

I noticed before I updated the Glance settings that the phone ran a little hot and the battery was running down pretty quickly, afterwards it has been running fine.  I don’t know if this was coincidence or not.

Volume Controls

WP 8.1 also introduces separate volume controls for media and system sounds.  The new controls are a good thing, but I don’t like the interface so far.  By default when you hit the volume button it give you a status line with the current volume, but you have to tap it to bring down the actual volume controls.

There is also no single ‘mute’ button, you have to mute each control separately.

[sc:mobile-category ]Well it’s finally out, WIndows Phone 8.1 was announced last week at //Build/ and while they didn’t spend much time on it they did announce the big items.

First things first… when?  For most users it will be summer before they see it, a few will get it next month with some new hardware and developers will see it in the next couple of weeks.

Second… what phones?  They specifically called out all Nokia Windows Phone 8 devices, but they didn’t mention HTC or Samsung.  However the carriers did announce upgrades to both HTC and Samsung upgrades after the keynote.

Ok, now for the fun stuff, the new features:

• Cortana:  I’m not a big fan of voice control, but I have to say Microsoft made a good move in keeping the Cortana name.  It links two of their major consumer platforms together and let’s face it, it’s probably better than anything the marketing department could have come up with.
• Three Column Start Screen:  It’s been available on the Lumia 1520 for a while, so no surprise there.  Makes sense for larger format displays.
• The Start Background:  Kind of cool, but I think it detracts from the usability of Windows Phone so I won’t be using it.
• Lock Screen:  Now that’s a surprise, the angled text is kind of cool and I think  the API will be interesting as well.
• Action Center:  A sorely missing feature in 8.0, this will definitely be a welcome addition.
• Word Flow Keyboard:  The obvious parallel to Swype is clear and I have to admit I found Swype to be very hard to use.
• Skype Integration:  About time, Skype should be fully integrated with Windows Phone by now.
• Calendar Update:  Of all the calendar apps I’ve used I still believe the HP’s Touchpad WebOS version was the best.  Microsoft has at least started to update some of the core components of WP and hopefully this is just the beginning.
• Music/Video/Podcasts:  I’ve said before that moving most of the “User” applications out of the core OS and instead make them standalone applications made sense.  These are the first but I’d expect over the next few iterations to see other parts of the OS migrate to the Store as well.
• People Hub/Email/Accounts:  Nice to see s/mime and better social integration will be a big selling feature I’m sure.
• Wi-Fi Sense:  Sounds cool and the integration with Cortana to enable and disable Wi-Fi should make it easier to save battery power.
• Storage Sense:  Not much info on this, but hopefully it portends wider support for SD cards in new hardware.
• IE11:  Nice to see Microsoft continues to keep Windows Phone up to date with their core browser.  It looks like they’re also added password saving which will make it much more usable than before.