Category: Mobile

[sc:mobile-category ]Over the last few weeks we had some new Windows Phone 8.1 information and rumors turn up, so what’s the scoop?

On-Screen Buttons

First was on-screen buttons (from @evleaks on Twitter via wpcentral.com), which is interesting as they do make sense in general.  Just like on-screen keyboards, you can do lots of things with a set of on-screen buttons that just can’t be done with physical ones.

For example, if there’s no more pages  to go “back” to you can visually disable the button instead of having to simply do nothing when the button is hit.  Also screen rotation can move the buttons are required, instead of them fixed to one side of the phone.

Important to note is that while on-screen buttons seem to be coming, that doesn’t exclude separate off-screen buttons, either capacitive or physical.

More options are better.  In fact I’d like Microsoft to take this to its logical extension and ensure that there are on-screen equivalents for all the physical buttons.  This would let a phone manufacturer build a phone with no buttons (ok, maybe a power button).

The other benefit to on-screen buttons is that it makes it easier and cheaper for OEM’s to use existing Android hardware for Windows Phone.  I love my Nokia 925 and all, but what if you could have a Galaxy S4 or an HTC One running Windows Phone?

Timeline

The Verge brought use quite a bit of information, including the fact that 8.1 details would be covered at Build in April.  Microsoft is beta testing the code now internally.

Server sites have suggested that they may announce at Mobile World Congress in February, which is traditionally a strong show for Nokia.

With the Nokia deal completing shortly, Microsoft can’t say much until it officially closes but waiting until Build seems like a long time.

Traditionally Microsoft has announced early, then done the developers details a few months later with final availability coming a few months after that.

Most are ignoring CES, which happens Jan. 7-10.  CES is traditionally a strong show for Microsoft.

The Microsoft-Nokia deal seems to have passed all of the regulatory hurdles, so if they could get it officially closed by CES we could see something there.

Here’s my guess at it:

• Make the official announcement at CES/MWC.  This will be a user feature announcement, highlighting new features of the OS.
• Make the developers announcement at Build.  This would be the release of the SDK (maybe beta) as well as early access for developers to the images to install on devices.
• Final release would be in June/July, with the first phones from Nokia available at launch.

New Features

The Verge article also details some new features.  Another tweet from @evleaks (via wpcentral.com) also details a dual SIM phone under development from Nokia.  And a third tweet from @evleaks (via wpcentral.com) provides a screen shot of the dual SIM phone.

So to sum up:

• Dual SIM support
• Notification Center
• Cortana Personal assistant
• Quick settings
• Separate volume controls for media and system sounds
• Bing Smart Search results
• VPN Support
• More integration options for the People hub for social networks

More interestingly is the fact that Microsoft is looking to remove some of the built-in features and make them applications instead.  This seems probable as Xbox Music and Video have been released separately to the Store and keeping them in the core seems unlikely.

I can’t stress enough how good of an idea this is.  Keeping these separate allows Microsoft to quickly iterate these apps without having to go through the carriers testing and release schedules each time they want to make a change to them.

Overall the update list is pretty much what has been expected for new features for quite a while, may question is where’s the big *WOW* feature that will make appeal to consumers.

I would also expect to see even more kernel changes to bring Windows Phone closer to Windows RT.  I doubt we’ll see a merge kernel in 8.1, but I would expect it with 9.0.  Perhaps even a completely merged OS.

Upgrades

Something no one has talked about yet is the upgrade path to 8.1.  Upgrades from 7 to 8 were a big issue when 8.0 came out.  It left a lot of people at a dead-end.

I don’t expect the same to happen here.  The point upgrade should be workable on any of the existing Windows Phone 8.0 hardware.  Perhaps the lowest end of the 8.0 hardware might not be supported, but even that seems unlikely.

Of course that is dependent on the OEM’s supporting the upgrade, I’m sure there will be some bugs/incompatibilities with 8.1 that will have to be taken care of.  I would expect MS/Nokia to fully support it, but HTC and Samsung may be less willing to invest the time and effort to bring it to their older hardware.

[sc:mobile-category ]Cell phone usage when roaming has always been a bone of contention with me.  Bell and the other service providers reap huge profits for doing nothing and users had no recourse.

Things began to change a while ago as some smaller players started to discount their roaming packages and the CRTC started to look at the huge bills some Canadians were receiving.

On December 1st, new regulations came in to effect that limited service providers to charging a maximum $100 in roaming fees without alerting the user.  A good idea and Bell updated their roaming packages at the same time.

This is the background going in to my trip to the US on November 30.  I called Bell on November 24th to purchase the travel package that was available at the time, which was as follows (this is from memory, as it is no longer displayed on Bell’s site):

• 100 minutes of voice
• 100 text messages
• 50 meg of data

Which was fine for me at was priced at $25.  A reasonable amount if still not great.

I started roaming on the 30th and everything was fine.

Until December 1st of course 😉

At 9:26 PST I received a notification from Bell that I had used $25 of roaming data.

I thought this odd and called in to Bell to see what was up.  I was told by the support rep that nothing was wrong, he could see my roaming plan, I hadn’t exceeded my limit and that it was likely a false message as they had just introduced a new system.

Things continued fine until 12:16am PST on December 5 when I received my second alert from Bell saying I had used $100 in roaming data and that data was now disabled.

A second call in re-confirmed that I had the travel plan, I hadn’t exceeded my limit and they didn’t know why I had received the message or why my data was disabled.  He recommended I reboot my phone and see if that resolved the issue.  Of course I was using my phone to call in so I had to hang up.

The reboot didn’t resolve the issue so once more I called Bell.

The support person once again confirmed everything look fine on their end and after I confirmed I had rebooted the phone he put me on hold to talk to someone else.

After a few minutes he came back and knew what the problem was.  My roaming plan had been terminated on December 1st when the new plans came in to effect.  He had to add two new features on to my service to compensate:

• Voice and Text service (100 minutes and 1000 text messages) for $30
• Data (100 meg) for $20

So now you have to pay twice as much to get a basic roaming package from Bell, though you do get more for it.  Bell has said they will credit me the difference, but even so that’s not really the point.

So a few things:

• Why on earth would they sell be a 30 day travel package that clearly only could be used for 7 days?
• Why didn’t they notify me of the change when I purchased the package?
• Why didn’t they notify me of the change when they changed it?
• Why didn’t they grandfather in existing users?
• Why didn’t their support people know about the change and how it would affect users?
• Whey did I have to call in 3 times to get it fixed?
• If the new roaming limits are designed to reduce costs, why is the basic package now twice as expensive?

Overall it’s just another example of why I really should have dumped Bell when my contract came up last year.

[sc:mobile-category ] Having purchased my Nokia 925 from overseas has had one downside to it… getting accessories is a real pain in the butt.

I haven’t actually switched over to the 925 as my primary phone yet as I want to add the wireless charging to it in case I break something and the phone becomes unusable.  However that means I need a wireless charging shell.

The problem is that the 925 hasn’t come to Canada yet so no one has any of the accessories.  Of course in this day and age that shouldn’t be much of a problem, after all that’s what the internet if for 🙂

I found a couple of the accessories I wanted on Expansys.ca, placed the order and waited.  The first problem is that it isn’t actually a Canadian site, instead shipping from the US.  This adds significant cost to the items due to duties and taxes.

Then the site indicated 5-10 days for stock to arrive so no problem… a monthly later, stock is still listed at 5-10 days 🙁

At that point I had a friend heading to the US so they stopped in to a T-Mobile store for me, but alas, no luck so I left the order in place.

In the end it took over 2 months for Expansys to get stock.

I received both the wireless charging shell and the charging stand the other day, however there was a minor issue with the charging stand…

That’s the charger plug, which would be fine if I lived in Europe, but doesn’t work very well in Canada 😉

fortunately Expansys did include an adapter 🙂

I guess it will work, but I did expect the North American version of the charger.

Well there’s no way I’m sending it back and waiting for another 2 or more months!

Now on to the hacking the wireless charging in to the phone… an update will follow with the results.

 

 

[sc:mobile-category ]Usually during the day my phone sits on my desk until lunch hour with a few quick checks of the lock screen to see if I’ve received any messages.  This was the case the other day but when I went to lunch and took the phone with me to read up on some news and other items I noticed that my Exchange mailbox wasn’t syncing.

In fact Windows Phone was reporting a 80C805E2error message.

Doing a quick search of the net didn’t turn up anything too specific, instead just some suggestions about turning off txt message backups and deleting the trash folder.

After reboot and a couple of more sync attempts I noticed that one of the folders was being updated.  I receive most of my news and website feeds in to my mailbox with a RSS feed aggregator and the majority of those items all get put in to a single folder called ‘News’.  The folder can get quite big if I leave it for a few hours and in this case it was at about 110 messages.  This has never been a problem before but I used OWA to read and delete all the messages and suddenly syncing started again.

My guess is that there was a corrupt message in the folder and the Windows Phone ActiveSync client was choking on it.

Weird but an easy fix at least.

[sc:mobile-category ]I just received an HTC update on my phone from Bell, I assume this go along with GDR3 if I hadn’t already installed it through the developers early access program.  Nice to know Bell is still supporting the phone though. 🙂