The world's first Windows Phone 8 hands on – what's it like? It was harder than usual, but not impossible, to get my hands on Nokia's two new Windows 8 phones today. Word has already gone around Twitter that press and analysts were forbidden from handling the devices. This is not true – and on a scale of difficulty it hardly rated alongside reporting from outside Baghdad's Green Zone. So …
Complete opposite for me. I bought the Lumia 710 because of the OS which I liked a lot. I really didn't care much about camera quality or memory so the cheaper one was great for me. I found the OS very responsive and it did everything I cared about. So much so I wasn't planning to upgrade to a WP8 device, though the cheaper one of these new phones looks useful.
I'm going to disagree. Win8 looks like it has a simply awesome UI for a phone/tablet. Better than what Android or iOS currently offer. Obviously Windows comes with baggage that may or may nor float your boat and it's going to be a bit applications light just now, but for ease of use on a touch device I think it's going to be hard to beat.
I'm not going to buy one (I don't want Windows, thank you) but we should not be afraid to acknowledge good design when we see it. We can now expect a response from the Android vendors and the UIs there will improve. Awesome.
Just occasionally. Everyone can be an idiot, stick only to what they are told is the best, buy only what they are used to and make stupid comments about things they have no idea about. For Gods sake I am one of the 10,000 that Elop scrapped because of his stupid ignorant blinkered and incorrect view (the one that has turned the profitable, expensive, market leading company into a loss making, low value - look at the shares, irrelevance) but the phone is worth a look, worth a try, and worth considering. The OS is neither here nor there, what can and does the phone do, does it do that better than the others, is it as a package something that is better value than the next? The answer will be determined person to person, but just to say I won't look because someone has told me that windows is bad is just ignorant and stupid.
I can imagine you in a polling station... oh I must vote for the "bugger the country up and sack everyone" party because I won't even look at what they've done in the past, or what the alternatives might be... just the sort of stupidity that leads to 'safe seats' and crap politics/.
...and down 13% at the close. I expect this is because there was no detail of pricing or availability. Not only that, but it looks like neither the phones or the OS are anywhere near as ready as they'd like them to be - I doubt if they'll be in the shops before the end of October.
Since the iPhone 5 will be announced next week,and will probably be available almost immediately, that's a big problem. It may not have everything that Nokia has added to the Lumia, but doubtless it will have plenty of new 'magic' to get people excited.
Getting the Lumia announced before the iPhone was probably the right thing to do, but every week that goes by without it being available will just mean more lost opportunity and more sales of the S III and iPhone.
But you could say that of all phones - why should Nokia align their releases with Apple's?
The Iphone 4S is almost a year old - every week that goes by is lost sales to Samsung, HTC and Nokia (and the disasterously sliding sales over the last few months prove it - a drop of 10 million in the last quarter alone!).
Meanwhile, there won't be an update to the Galaxy S3 until mid next year.
All companies tend to do yearly upgrade cycles (though some like Samsung stagger releases of their less mainstream models throughout the year). The original Lumia release was at the end of last year, with other models following early this year, so this release looks set to follow that, one year on. What's your source for the release date anyway? The announcement said Q4 in some markets, which could still meet the WP8 launch.
As for share price, who cares. The Daily Fail scaremongered with that in its headlines too - bit sad for the BBC to stoop to that kind of reporting, though given their Apple obsession, it doesn't surprise me.
Well, the thing is, why would anyone buy a Nokia Lumia now? It wasn't bad enough that all current Lumia's wont't get updated to the new version of WinPho, no, now you'd be faced with buying a doubly-obsolete product. For the next two to three months, no one in their right mind is even going to consider buying a Nokia smartphone. Even if they sell ten million of the 920 and 820 in the final quarter (a very tall order), it still won't make up for all the sales lost due to this premature announcement.
Nokia has made a huge mistake by displaying a phone this fas in advance of the actual purchase date. Also, how many companies would be foolish enough to show off a phone whose OS wasn't even ready? I get that they're trying to get the jump on the onslaught of WinPho 8 devices (ahem) coming next month, but the message they're sending right now is: "Here's our new phone, it's big and heavy and yellow, the OS is just for demonstration purposes, and no you can't have one". That may have worked for Eric Cartman, but I doubt it'll work for Elop.
WP7 isn't being completely dropped. Nokia are even bringing out a new WP7 device in parallel with the WP8 ones. You can code for both WP7 and WP8 at the same time. I agree many will hold off from buying a WP7 device in favour of wating a couple more months, but anyone who buys a WP7 device is still going to get something that works well as a phone with a lot of modern features and software being released for it for a long time to come.
> WP7 isn't being completely dropped. Nokia are even bringing out a new WP7 device in parallel with the WP8 ones.
But the same appears to be true of Symbian, and there's lots of apps from the past years, and you aren't at the mercy of the app store plug being pulled, you can load what you like.
> You can code for both WP7 and WP8 at the same time.
But that's true of many different systems. I have a BlackBerry App that looks identical to the Symbian app.
The problem I see is that people kept going on about a third significant ecosystem for smartphones, when there were already at least 4.
So the fix is to try to kill number 3 and replace it with a new ecosystem and then a bit later replace that one with yet another new ecosystem. So instead of one significant ecosystem, you now have two insignificant ones and a 3rd new one on the way from the same manufacturer (Who still have a significant feature phone ecosystem, and a couple more insignificant ecosystems)
Definitely reminds me of Sega pulling the plug on the Saturn and then wondering why its replacement wasn't a huge success (despite being pretty good).
"As for share price, who cares. The Daily Fail scaremongered with that in its headlines too - bit sad for the BBC to stoop to that kind of reporting, though given their Apple obsession, it doesn't surprise me."
At this point, having read the 199 comments to date, the only people mentioning Apple are those complaining about them. These individuals, like Mark, will rant and rave about how the press have a bias towards the fruity company and Mark has gone as far to accuse the Reg of essentially being Apple shills! So I ask you, who exactly has the Apple obsession, Mark . ?
I doubt the iPhone 5 will be anything to get excited about.
What more can they add? better camera, screen, CPU, battery life. Evolution not revolution has been the case for a few years now.
The software is where the big changes can happen and iOS6 doesn't do anything that remarkable that iOS5 couldn't do. If anything the big changes are more about divorcing Google.
I've given up using the stock market as a good way to determine value of a company. Half the time people are manipulating it, the other half people are deliberately shorting it. Look at the way Facebook share price rises just before another slide begins where you can see that some invisible hand (bad joke) has pumped it up so that smaller fish will buy in and the bigger fish can divest themselves of toxic shares at less of a loss. There are big players in the markets and whenever they're confident that a stock is going to start going one way, it's in their interests to begin that process with a slight shift in the other direction so they can get in at a better price point (whether lower, or higher if short selling). It's a bit like someone counter-turning on a motorbike.
Basically, be wary of drawing any conclusions from the stock market unless it's your field of expertise. My area of expertise is technology so I look at that to determine value, and these look like solid products. I think they will sell well.
Yeah, let's not forget that it's these speculators and stock dabblers trading in virtual currencies that have helped put us in our current economic climate. Trusting them is almost as bad as trusting a politician - they'll say anything if they think it will make them a quick buck, and sod whoever's toes they might tread on doing it.
Nokia's lumia phones somehow don't look premium.. just look like cheaply made featureless plastic slabs.
I don't get Nokia these days..
As for Microsoft... I'm perfectly happy that they can't hack it to build a new monopoly...
I love seeing them bleed large amounts of cash on a ~2% market share, when they were unwilling to spend anything for almost a decade to fix widely known issues in Windows Mobile, when they had 36% market share...
Good for them, a just punishment for hanging customers out to dry over and over...
Remember buying Microshuft DRM music? A few years later, they turned off their DRM servers, everybody's purchased music was gone...
Go die in a fire, Microsoft? it'll be fun!
And take Elop with you, before he finishes off whats left of Nokia.
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"Yes they are - Polycarbonate. A "nicer' plastic, but plastic just the same"
They make riot shields out of transparent polycarbonate. Trying to conflate it in people's minds with cheap, commonly used plastics such as PETE and PVC is disingenuous as polycarbonate is several hundred times stronger.
Well, the first comment still stands. PC and PC-ABS and even glass fibre reinforced plastic can be very hard or scratch-proof or have many other discreet characteristics depending on the application. Hell, there's poly-amid plastics that reside inside IC engines used a timing chain runners withstanding both heat and friction.
This however, does not change the fundamental, plastic is plastic is plastic. Is it better than glass or ceramics? Could well be; depending on the application.
Down voting a comment like this really brings into question the value of downvoting at all.
Downvoting seems to be used for two reasons:
a) Allow someone to express a negative emotional response that cannot be supported with a coherent set of words.
b) Astroturfing by shills (of which the MS variety seem to be breeding).
There is no value in down voting and no point taking any notice of any down votes a post elicits.
I don't know what motivates the retards who click the down vote button instead of providing an informative retort to a post that they disagree with but whatever it is, it's not worth the effort of trying to understand.
The upvote can be useful as a substitute for making "me too! " posts but down votes are just lame.
@Charles Manning
Anyone who likes a Microsoft product or service is "a shill".
Will you ever grow up? Do you still type M$?
I know comments areas are like this, especially Engadget or Games Forums - but shouldn't we be more grown up on The Register?
I for one was on Google Apps (paid for BTW) before looking into Googles practices for a client, and Google worry me with what they do with data/privacy, and as Hotmail is now pretty good - I switched back to Hotmail.
I love my 2 Windows phones I've had. (I've had iPhone, Android handsets, and still have a BB)
I also really like the Windows 8 OS I'm using right now. And have moved off of my MacBook by putting my data on Skydrive and like Skydrives simple photo sharing for my family. So I am more and more an MS product and service user as they are really nice to use nothing more. Please don't call me a shill as I happen to like their stuff.
Whatever you feel about Google and Data/Privacy - I would bet the house that Microsoft are doing exactly the same or worse and so are Apple and so are most other Corporations (with the one exception being slurping some unencrypted WiFi traffic as their cars past).
Any companies that can gather BI in any way they can will use it.
If they then sell your data on to the highest bidder it is another thing, however only Facebook seem to engage in this - I've not seen any evidence of many of the others doing it to a large degree.
Hmm, agreed on there being little difference between Microsoft and Google when it comes to privacy, but I think Apple would prefer to protect its premium appearance, and I doubt selling some generalised data to advertises would fit in with that strategy. They would lose more customers because of it.
Its a whole 1.4 mm thicker than an iPhone 4. Is that really that much? Especially when you consider that the original iPhone was 0.9mm thicker than this Nokia, the 3G thicker still at 1.6mm more than the Nokia. Its hardly 80s phone dimensions.
Now, if you were complaining about width and height, then I'd agree with you - but I'd also say the same about every modern phone - I'm still using an ancient, tiny, flipphone which does everything I want from a phone.
When you put your brain in gear perhaps it can let your mouth rather than arse talk?
The only thing I miss these days is a proper keyboard, and that is only because I like to use a phone one handed while taking notes, walking etc etc
Best phone I have had recently has had touch screen and keyboard, a perfectly good combination - if had a flip it would not need a keylock and wouldn't have a scratched screen but thats another story.
So this has the latest Snapdragon S4 quad core CPU in and the most advanced mobile OS microsoft can come up with, and the best it can do is reduce the unusable 7 second delay when switching between tasks to a 3 second one? That's slower than the first gen Android G1.
"What Intel giveth, microsoft taketh away" needs updating.
I recently switched from a Nokia Lumia 800 to a Samsung Galaxy S3.
Yes the "resuming..." of apps on Windows Phone got annoying, and any improvements in the multitasking would be a huge benefit.
But I've seen the S3 fail to respond significantly more times than I ever saw on the Lumia 800.
Bringing up the list of apps and returning to the desktop are prime examples. I don't even have a lot of widgets on the S3 (mostly full screen task / calendar / mail / etc.)
Admittedly there may just be something wrong with my device, it's just an observation.
But my impression from using WP devices (I've also used a HTC Pro 7 in the past) was that the processing power (or lack of) wasn't a huge issue. It's almost like it's been designed to run with that (locked down) spec.
Had a Galaxy Nexus for nearly a year. Much the same as the S3, but the Nexus only has 2 x 1.2GHz cores, and the S3 has 4 x 1.4GHz cores. I've never once even noticed a multitasking delay switch. It just works - I've got 11 windows in the preview at the moment, touch one, and it pops up. Even the pdf doc displays pretty much immediately. I'd find a 3s delay unusable.
The only problem is Vodafone, who are a pile of sh*te.
Sad really, we weren't allowed to get away with anything like that much delay on Symbian... and on a much much slower processor.
Still, obviously Elop is right, he's paid the mega bucks and you can see from the increasing profit (oops), massively increased market share (oops), accurate marketing (oops), and public image (oops again) that he is correct. Certainly the shareholders must think so as they make no attempt to get rid of him... or maybe thats just because the shareholders are our pension funds and the managers in charge are too busy spending their bonuses than looking after our investments.
Anyone experiencing a 7 second delay must be installing some pretty shitty apps, fart generators perhaps??
I have an 800, and I never even see a 2 second delay (I actually rarely see a tombstoned app, tbh)...
Besides, my battery would have drained in full if I had to wait 7 seconds.
Nokia could ship a blow job attachment with their next Lumia and I wouldn't go near it, it's back to Samsung for me - wish I'd never left.
It hurts like hell to be an IT pro and have your wife constantly mocking you about the fact that if she forgets to charge the Omnia 7 (that you lovingly donated/cast off) in an evening, she can still use it for at least one more day before the battery saver gives her a six hour warning. She's most certainly never wanted to drive over it with the car/smash it with a sledgehammer/ram it up Elop's arse etc.
Im still using a blackberry bol from I guess 2 years ago. Single core, even so, app switching on this never seems to take much time (less then a second as far as I can guesstimate.
(i.e. start typing email, need to lookup something so switch to webbrowser, continue typing, switch to endomondo to see how long the ride home took, switch back to email all without lags that are big enough to become annoying.
It's not really clear from the review if the background apps are still being tombstoned in WP8, but I would seriously hope not. (or at least not noticable)
The main issue seems to be that it uses Apple-style multitasking, when applications are put into a suspended state. So yes, it's a reasonable criticism, but no one seems to have this problem with Apple doing it.
Also note that on Android, applications are suspended after a while, and I've seen it take several seconds to resume some apps on my Samsung Galaxy Nexus. To be honest, the only mobile OS I've seen do multitasking properly was Symbian, which was always instant even on my now ancient Nokia 5800.
From what I've seen elsewhere it seems the 920 comes with 32GB of onboard storage but no SD card slot, where as the 820 has 8GB onboard but you can add your own with an SD card.
I think this is a real mistake, 64GB SD cards are now available for around £50. 96GB is going to come very close to holding my whole music collection finally pensioning off my ipod.
The problem, as you've no doubt suspected, is that WP8 -- like Android -- sucks down enormous amounts of power while playing music, thus rendering it a poor replacement for a dedicated music player. To my dismay, only the iPhone seems able to manage power consumption during audio playback reasonably.
Have no problems with battery life when playing on my Samsung Galaxy Nexus. (Though I still keep my separate Sansa because more battery life on a separate device is useful, not that it's particularly bad on the Galaxy; because it's tiny and quicker to pull out to change music; because on the Nexus I don't have a microSD slot, unlike my Sansa.)
"The problem, as you've no doubt suspected, is that WP8 -- like Android -- sucks down enormous amounts of power while playing music, thus rendering it a poor replacement for a dedicated music player."
Hmm... odd, because my Xperia S has been my dedicate work music player for months (and I listen to work for about 6 hours at work, to shut out the distractions while I write software) and it rarely consumes 2% of my entire days usage.
Granted, it's all 320kbps mp3s, not flac or anything, but that's using the standard sony music player on the phone over Android ICS. I had no issue with my Desire doing the same either before this, but that was using an custom AOSP-based rom (not HTCs sense stuff).
Really? I use my S3 as a music player on the daily commute, 2-3 hours each day, with a little light browsing. It lasts a couple of days on a charge, using nothing more fancy than the onboard power saving.
I use Poweramp for the gapless playback, but no tossy EQ options- those will increase the power consumption, as keeps the CPU working harder, and clocked up much higher. The same applies if you use EQ on an iPhone, too.
I wonder... having never bothered with music on a mobile phone (don't really care for music myself - especially not the modern crap that seems to be around) - do the phones keep the screen alive to show you some nasty music video or whirly mess on the screen? If so that probably explains a lot of the power consumption. Equally the habit of illuminating the screen when ever the touch screen is touched in case you want to 'unlock it' is a vast waste of power - especially if you keep the phone in your pocket. Good reasons for some manufacturer to head back towards the old flip phone design.
"Equally the habit of illuminating the screen when ever the touch screen is touched in case you want to 'unlock it' is a vast waste of power - especially if you keep the phone in your pocket"
Every touchscreen phone I've ever seen has a dedicated lock/unlock button at the top or side... THAT enables the screen, THEN you slide/pattern/pin/move to unlock the phone.
"do the phones keep the screen alive to show you some nasty music video or whirly mess on the screen"
I think in the past the screen would stay alive on my old iPhone 3G if it was playing music on the dock (but then it'd be powered, so that makes sense). Otherwise the screen is off. On my sony phone you can turn on visualisations (the wavy music thingies) if you want - but by default it'll lock/turn off the screen as normal with music playing in the background. Most phones work that way. If you click the lock/unlock button the screen will turn on again, with shortcut music controls. That was the same on my HTC, iPhone and Sony phones so I think it is a standard thing.
Dave,
Nope, at least not on iOS or Android, the screen goes off after a few seconds, in line with the power management policy of the phone. It's not uncommon to have some basic controls on the lock screen too, so when you fish the thing out of your pocket, you can change the track without needing to unlock. This is useful if you are (just as an example, entirely plucked out of the air, totally innocent) cheerfully listening to an Orbital album to hear the whiney, grating tones of David bloody Gray on a track*. GRR.
Ahem. Sorry about that, peace and love, calm now.
* Ok, so he is brother in law to one of the Hartnolls, that's still no excuse. Tosser. He sounds like a Rod Steward cover of Coldplay.
"96GB is going to come very close to holding my whole music collection finally pensioning off my ipod."
With a typical song being about 4 minutes in length, encoded in 320Kbps, 96GB is... about 17,000 tracks? Do you have every full length piece of Classical music or something? How can you possibly listen to that much music? Genuine question - not criticising.
Probably less than that. I've filled up a 64Gb Touch with ~4800 'songs', podcasts and apps; not all the 'songs' are 320Kbps either. Personally I'd have preferred more space that that but Apple seem to think that we don't need a lot of storage so cap the amount and don't provide expansion capability
I don't listen to all that at anyone time but I want to have the choice without thinking "OK what do I want to listen to [x period] in the future"
I'll answer this one for you to,
Some of us are in really to music and have an awful lot of it. I've got about 500 12' vinyl dance records. With an average of 3 mixes per record that lot on their own is 1500 tracks.
Then on top of that I also have about 1500 cd's (of which 98% are albums). Each CD probably has on average 10 tracks ((most have more but I'm being conservative) so there's another 10,000 songs. However, at least a 3rd of those albums are double cd (or more) albums so that's at least another 5000 tracks.
So I've got at least 18,000 tracks in my collection and I know I am being conservative with my figures.
Now on the second part of your question. I don't listen to them all at the same time, I chop and change often, some songs / albums go years without being played. But then one day I'll decide I want to listen to one, do so, get back in to it and then decide I want to listen to it when out.
My phone only has 4S only has 32GB of space so I end up having to clear an album on the phone already to fit the one I want on there on. For me it's no great issue as my entire library of music is already ripped (I spent a long time doing it a long time ago), but it would be convenient to be able to fit everything on in one go.
PS, the reason I have an Iphone is simply that I like them, I like the music player on them and for a long time they were apart from sony devices the only devices which would play gapless playback. My library was ripped in apple format years ago when I had an original ipod and I'm not about to spend years changing it.
Dave
Equivalent to about an album a week for 30 years - I reckon there are quite a few bods out there who collect like that. I have a brother who has even more, most of it on vinyl he's been picking up since his teens, though the newer stuff is largely CD (he won't touch downloads).
He listens to each album on the day he buys it.
Keeps the collection upstairs in a spare bedroom in dirty great metal filing cabinets. He's still adding to it despite warnings about overdoing the floor loadings, so no doubt much of it will soon be making it's way through the floor boards.
Windows Phones are designed for the cloud - storing everything in Skydrive and for streaming music - from Nokia, Microsoft Zune, and several other choices. 32GB is more than enough to hold the music you really need for a plane flight, tube journey or anything else where data isnt available.
The specification shows that it's 10.7 mm versus the Lumia 900's 11.5 mm thickness. So yes, it is larger in area and heavier but it's not thicker.
Also, how is that you glossed over NFC, dual-core processing, a much better screen resolution with motion mprovements and more choice in customization(covers, colors, accessories?).
"how is that you glossed over NFC, dual-core processing, a much better screen resolution with motion mprovements and more choice in customization"
If it means anything, this was mentioned in Andrew's previous piece on the new Lumias, published this evening.
No doubt a full review will cover such stuff.
C.
Also, how is that you glossed over NFC..
no doubt Redmond wants to keep some headline-stealers in reserve. We now know the People hub is one of them. Presumably, bonk-to-pay is another – there was not one mention of NFC for mobile payments.
Comprehension fail.
I've had a play with one it wasnt as bad as the old version 6 XDA I had but it certainly wasnt upto the standards of the iphone or an android device. Given that microsoft have a habit of burning the platform they just made why would I want to find myself in the situation where the next version comes out and support for my version basically ends and if I am really unlucky at the end of my contract microsoft have pulled store support for my device?
Iast wp7 device I bought had to returned after discovering applications couldn't read/write files directly to its internal storage. Connecting it to a PC to read/write files entailed installing zune and editing the registry. Also, there was no way to edit/run python on the device... What else... oh yes: The IM client didn't support Google-chat. All of these are a non-issue with the n9 which itself was under-developed... Many of the arguments against using wp variants are perfectly valid.
Hi Andy, since you must be new to the register forums.
ANYTHING made by Microsoft is total rubbish, no need to research it, see it or use it, it just is OK.
Stuff made by apple, well they just stole everything from <insert the first mobile phone you ever owned>
Android & Linux are perfect and anyone who doesn't use these is a retard of the highest order
You're welcome
Good summing up.
Actually you can add that anyone who can't hack the linux kernel to fix its bugs is such a tool they don't deserve to breath far less own a computer. And there is nothing more exhilarating in the world than spending a night cuddled up with your favourite computer hacking away at a command line or bash script to achieve a 'find in files'.... no one really wants to meet a woman, perhaps have sex or drink a pint.... tooo too boring for words
Not sure that a me too Android product is the way to go, there are already a lot of good products in the space you would have to compete with. I mean it is a bit of a hail Mary but if Windows 8 works out for them (and it may) then Nokia might be back in business. The Android hardware business is not as I understand it a great way to make money right now if you are not already a strong participant.
The real question for me is can they make enough money from it to make the share price improve, given where it is now it could be a bargain, to do that they need to figure out who their customers really are and start selling to them. I suspect that Android customers are primarily just that and not <insert hardware manufactures> customers, though I could be wrong.
I can't believe people are trotting this out. The Nokia board approved Elop as a CEO supported by the shareholders, they were already seriously ailing. Were this some sort of conspiracy would Nokia be making serious efforts to produce stand out hardware, or would they still be using Symbian on crappy plasticy underpowered resistive touch-screened crap? My guess is the latter.
Learn to read a balance sheet, then read Nokia's at the time of Elop's appointment up until the "Burning platform" announcement.
"they were already seriously ailing" -- This statement is provably false.
In need of change of direction? Maybe
In need of radical change? Maybe but probably not
In need of a better UI for their phones? Maybe but probably as a marketing point to break into US market
...
Clowns like you repeating crap does not make it true, especially when the numbers are actually available.
It is sad that there are lots of clowns like the guy you replied to spouting hot air with no factual back up. The biggest problem is that many of these clowns are journalists working for the likes of the BBC.and even sometimes putting in an appearance at el reg.
At the time of the burning platform speech it is true to say that Nokia smartphones were seeing a drop in market share in the face of well marketed (but inferior) competition. BUT if you look at the important figures about the NUMBER of phones being shipped they were still increasing.
The Symbian operating system itself is superior in terms of performance and battery life to the iOS and even Android alternatives (and it is well published that the winpho has nothing like the battery capabilities). The S60 layers on top of Symbian (Symbian is the operating system, S60 is what you see) have long been inefficient but on the later phones a good deal of reengineering has been fixing some of these issues though there is room for a many fold improvement in performance.
Further, the development environment may not have been as familiar as the windows phone but is infinitely better and more familiar than 'objective C' and the clunky mess of tools that Apple provided.
To cap it all - as we have seen - the windows phone is just plain not capable of having anything even vaguely like the 808 pureviews camera and camera application - that was created because the Symbian OS was flexible enough to allow the major engineering required to transfer that much data from the camera to storage, and process it to do autofocus, touch autofocus, stabilize the image, find faces, zooming etc.
Elop is a good example of what is utterly rotten in the 'west' economically. The guy FAILED at Microsoft - being just about the only person ever to achieve the accolade of REDUCING sales and REDUCING profit in the Office division - no wonder he wasn't kept there long. How he was appointed by Microsoft having failed and crashed so many companies before remains a mystery. If you look at his performance in Nokia - taking a massive profit making company, losing thousands of highly experienced engineers, failing to lose the more suspect marketing department (they of the faked photos...), losing it its top position, moving its prized quality manufacturing to a cheap and low quality Chinese base, creating some also ran touch slab phones without any variation for those of us who like a real keyboard etc. or other differentiation from the other clones in the phone shops, and turning it into a company bleeding cash at a rate that leaves it with under a year to run before it is bankrupt. How is that guy still in the job? How is he still drawing a salary (the salary hasn't gone down with thee size of the company and the change from profit to loss)? How is he still to get a bonus? How is it that the share holders haven't kicked him out? It is because the share holders own shares with your money - they are the pension funds and banks, it isn't their money, if they've lost it they don't care because they won't be worse off - you will.
Elop is a disaster but only one example of the many that pollute the 'top' jobs in Western industry and the very people that are responsible for the decisions and actions that have lost the West its inventive and productive capability to China and India. Next time you are in a shop look at the products on display, try and find something made in your own home country. You won't it will be made in China. Then think back 20 years when almost nothing was made in China.
He is getting enough money being there. I doubt Bulmer or anyone else wants to buy Nokia now (judging from the share price this is a widely shared view). If you think about it what would Microsoft do with a brand that is now 100% associated with the failure, closure of plants and sackings of people? It WAS a good brand name and it can still produce wonderful devices but the people at the top have no idea what they have or how to manage it. The brand is now crippled and Microsoft won't want it.
Don't forget Elop was the ONLY person who ever actually managed to lower the sales of Microsoft Office. Yes he actually caused a downturn in sales and profits in the short time between being put in charge and being kicked out (erm, sorry, employed by Nokia for his amazing talent).
I was given to understand that the latest update adds 'tethering' support (aka internet sharing?). Cannot confirm this as I have nothing here which needs tethering to my Lumia 800 kit.
http://www.nokia.com/global/support/software-update/lumia/software-update-for-nokia-lumia/
In what way exactly?
(My meego knowledge is limited)
I have to ask as I have been involved in the development of both Windows phone and Symbian (and a few other bits and bobs).
Certainly from a consumer point of view Symbian offered better performance per £ (cheaper processor and less delay), better battery life, better security and many other benefits over Windows. Now the UI might seem dated looking back but then a year 2000 car looks dated looking back.
The UI most people associate with Symbian was actually Nokia's - S60. S60 was a UI built on top of an operating system. UIQ was another and the Japanese created a further one. Symbian was actually much better than most people realise even though the UI layer on top was often not ideal.
Two supposed to be high end phones with measly 8MP cameras, lowly memory and with the top model even lacking SD card? Really Nokia? That's all you could come up with?
I was really excited about the new Lumia phones, but I'm certainly not replacing my Nokia N8 with that, sorry.
I guess Apple most certainly won't lose any sleep over these phones. What a shame.
Nokia managed to put a 41mpix camera into a phone. True it requires a bigger lens and a bulge on the back of the phone to accommodate the sensor, lens focusing etc. The fact is that a large amount of lens problem is corrected by the image processor chip and software behind it on ANY of these small cameras. The lowly camera is not dictated by physical problems of a large camera but by the limitations of the operating system and the graphics processing. Limitations that Symbian just didn't have.
"I guess Apple most certainly won't lose any sleep over these phones."
I don't think Nokia give a damn whether Apple lose any sleep over this. Apple aren't their competition. Apple are only interested in the high-end market and couldn't give a toss about anything else.
Nokia are aiming at Android licensees. HTC, LG, Samsung, etc.
Most Android users are still stuck with the v2.x releases which really do look like a blind man's attempt at copying iOS. The Lumias are different enough to stand out from that "me-too" crowd while still offering good features at a decent price. (And they're big and colourful, which seems to go down well the fairer sex, most of whom have handbags and therefore don't care if it's too big for a pocket.)
Worse still, and despite claims to the contrary, Android doesn't have an ecosystem. The correct term for what Android has is "an unholy mess".
If Microsoft can get their ecosystem working—this time, they'll have Windows 8 and Windows 8 RT to punt, as well as a proper App Store—Android could very well be in big trouble.
My sarcasm detector exploded and then imploded violently. I am currently holding onto the wall until things stop disappearing into the unknown.
I think the "laggy" often disappears with a good old-fashioned nuking of the vendor-supplied stuff.
Similar to how nuking the vendor-supplied Windows install with a completely fresh, unadulterated copy of Windows often yields better results than the factory image. (Often included is a copy of something from Symantec, with the just-as-often removal of which yielding substantial speed boosts).
I think a Verity Stob article on "cruft" explains the situation quite well.
From my experience a high pixel count is no substitute for a good lens.
I have a 4.3 mp camera that takes better pics because of its lens than some of the 14mp ones I have played with.
Its also worth noting that these phones have replaceable covers, so no need for a car to prevent scuffs and scrapes so the fact its a little thicker doesn't really matter, most people go out to get an super thin device and then jam it in 3mm of ugly plastic to protect it anyway!
8MP is actually plenty for most purposes. At that point, image quality is far more influenced by issues such as lens quality than raw MP. Yes, if everything else is the same then more MP is better, but a 15MP camera is far from necessarily better than a 10MP camera without knowing *a lot* of other information. I have a professional quality SLR. Lenses for it can cost £400. It is 18.5MP, less than half that of the Nokia N8 and takes better pictures than any camera phone ever has and, possibly than they ever will.
MP in a camera is a lot like RAM in a computer. If you don't have enough, it's a problem. But once you've gone beyond what you need, adding more and more isn't going to make anything run faster or better.
@h4rm0ny "I have a professional quality SLR. Lenses for it can cost £400.
I have a professional SLR... I wish my lenses were £400. Try adding another zero to the end of that, then if you really want to go to town, double, triple and even quadruple that.
The point you/I are making is simple. Raw MP, Sensor Quality and Optical quality are interwoven.
A high MP, shite sensor, with a shite lense system will give shit images.
A high MP, shite sensor, with a good lense system may give OK images.
An average (say 8mp) MP, quality sensor, with quality optics will give high quality images that are free of chroma and other noise artifacts, will suffer less from difraction, aberration, vignetting and will probably be sharper across the whole CCD/frame. That means you can upscale them and print them on a larger format equivalent to or larger than the poor quality breeds.
That's why there are consumer, prosumer and pro cameras and lenses.
This is exaclty why pro photographers use quality equipment (Especially the lenses).
The troll whining about this has no idea what he/she/it is talking about. And as you rightly point out, a poor quality 18.5mp sensor/optics solution can easily proudce a lesser quality result than an 8mp.
I had a (very old) 10mp point-n-shoot camera that on it's highest quality settings produced worse images than my partners 5mp point-n-shoot canon. It was so bad in fact that I smashed the shit out of it one day when I returned home having taken some "day out" snaps to find they were so badly wriddled with chromatic noise that the images would not print bigger than 6"x4" (to hide the poor quailty). (Yes, I should have taken the SLR but I didn't want to carry it that day!)
Quailty over quantity any day.
Indeed, I've always said I'd be really happy with a really good 3.2MP cam on a phone.
I'm still waiting.
The thing is someone like Apple will stick a 14MP cam in the iPhone and the tech world of lazy ass licker journos will go "Oh this is amazing, so great that Apple (or whomever) finally understands what the smartphone public need!"
They will gleefully take loads of 14MP pics with their new precious....then compress them, run them through Instagram instant pic crappifier filter and post them up on Twitter/Facebook for folks to look at on their 4" screen phones and 14" TN panel Laptops.
But will they see the irony?
Answers on a postcard.
"I have a professional SLR... I wish my lenses were £400. Try adding another zero to the end of that, then if you really want to go to town, double, triple and even quadruple that."
Oh I'm well aware that there are more expensive ones out there. I'm also well aware that I am not a good enough photographer to need them. ;)
I agree with your whole post and I've experienced the same myself.
lens sensors amd megapixels
Yes I have taken lots of lowish megapixel pictures of quite decent quality.
Lens good - well it is for a domestic video camera.
sensor - pretty good again, but low megapixels.
My last video camera was about 1.2MP and the quality was OK even at A4.
Newest does 6MP as it is HD and I have some nice pictures off it.
Well, apparently the 8MP camera is giving much better results then anything else in the phonemarket.
My ``real'' camera is an 8MP panasonic lumix , and quite honestly 8MP is more then enough for me.
99% of the pictures I take with it, I watch on my screen (2048x1152 or 1200x1600 or 1920x1200, all of which are well below the 8MP threshold). 8MP can be printed at 50x30 cm without noticable pixilating.
And quite frankly, Im glad some of my friends dont have 25MP on their phones, as some of them have never gotten the hang of downsizing before emailing.
"Measly" 8MP? Is 3264x2448 too small for your monitor/TV then? My Canon DSLR "only" has a "measly" 8MP sensor and I can get poster-sized prints with that.
More megapixels count for nothing against a good quality sensor and lens, and even those considerations are secondary to the ability of the person behind the lens. If you can't get good photos with 8MP then I'd suggest that the problem isn't the camera.
8mpix is quite a lot BUT if you have more then you can start to do really interesting things - the 41mpix of the 808 uses the excess pixels for one of two things. In 'low' resolution modes (around 8mpix) it is using the extra pixels to allow it to cope better in dark conditions (try using the 808 at an evening pop concert and compare the results to those from an iPhone - the 808 is massively superior - and the sound is better as well). In brighter conditions it allows a zoom so that the 'low' resolution is taken from the very centre of the image and makes it appear you have zoomed in without the losses from normal digital zoom (which gathers 4 or more pixels together and ultimately creates a blocky version of the image). Yes, if you have a real telephoto lens you can zoom in optically but a phone is a phone and while the 808 does have a moving lens (for focus) a telephoto is really out of the question.
Ultimately 8mpx will give you your poster, but a higher resolution will give you more than just a poster.
My compact camera only has 10MP, and it is reviewed as a premium model. If the low light capabilities of these new Nokias are as good as people make out (and comparison shots taken by that Pure View Nokia against the Lumix LX-5 and the Olympus PEN E-1 suggest Nokia might have a trick up their sleeve) then they will be nothing to be sniffed at. People are beginning to stop playing the megapixel game.
Strike me that Nokia/Microsoft engineers must have been on a death march project to hit the timeline ahead of Apple and Google press releases (but just behind Samsung). Any developer will know the pressure you get put under to deliver just enough to make it look complete for the release (but ensuring that minders don't allow proper hands on without lots of management).
Quite surprising given that in theory the core internal hardware should have been an almost off the shelf bit of kit typical of any Android phone developer is churning out these days.
Given that the hardware is still not production ready, they can't give a price (got to be up with S3 or iPhone 5), availability (pre Nov?), the SDK still not finished, and I wonder about battery life, then I question why people would hold off on buying S3 or iPhone 5s (the latter of which will probably be available next week) for these to be available?.
I kinda like the colours though, even if I suspect it is just to make the advertising look good (can't imagine they will sell lots of bright yellow/red in the high end corporate market, other than McDonalds/Coke execs) . Bit sick of monochrome iDevices, but I can't image pulling out a giant bright yellow Tonka toy / phone while sitting in a business meeting with corporates, so I can see the point of having replacement skins from day one.
Normally I wouldn't give these a second glance, but this time...hmmm.
- big screen and HD too
- good camera
- better mult-tasking
- better tiles
This could be in with a shout come xmas, when I'm due for a replacement...and for once all three OS'es are pencilled in:
- Lumina 920 (win 8)
- Galax Note 2 (Android)
- Iphone 5 (ios)
Not bad eh? good time ahead!
Killing of Meltemi will not be regretted. I have an idea that the project has merely been somewhat scaled down and relocated to a subsidiary.
Doesn't really matter anyway - with the rate they are burning cash, the inability of the CEO and the lack of effort by the shareholders to oust him in favour of someone with ability and a brain the company won't exist for long enough to regret the stupid decision.
Whooppeee!
Seriously though, who decides on the sizes of the tiles when displayed?
If it is the app dev then everyone will opt for the biggest possible thus destroying this feature
If it is MS then wht are the rules for deciding what gets the most UI space
No/hardly two people are the same when it comes to what apps they use most often. If the sizing is based upon use then fine but somhow I doubt it.
Not that I'm likely to buy one of these. As I current see it, these phones give me nothing that my current Android does apart from a 'Coo Flashy screen'. Will we see the rise of the WP8 Fanbois who slag off everything Android and Apple?
If there is a really compelling USP for a WP8 device then surely MS would be shouting it from the rooftops.
Then on the otherhand, could the timing of this be an appempt to spoil Apple's party next week with the iPnoe 5 announcement? It wouldn't be the first time that MS has done this?
Looks like people claiming "it has 8MP and my phone has 12MP, therefore my phone is better" is the new way to prove someone is an idiot.
Come on, people, this is supposed to be a techie forum. You should know by now that the quality of the image depends upon WAY more than how many megafroobles the sensor sticks into the final image. My >5 year old EOS SLR with a mere 5MP still produces massively better images than any android phone (12MP or not) because the sensor is bigger, the distance between the sensor and the glass is larger and the glass is simply better. Suck it up.
I'd far rather have image stabilised, noise-free, properly colour corrected images at 8MP than noisy, garish and blurry 12MP ones. Each to their own though, eh?
Got no problem with my Lumia 800. Still as fast and fluid as when I first had it. Got a ton of apps on there.
WindowsPhone 7.5 is a good SOLID OS. No crashes or lockups. I Can't fault it, but, I'm definitely getting the LUMIA 920 as soon as it come out.
Double processing power
Better display (more than 720p) then 'retina' (the Nokia 920 has 332ppi, whereas iPhone4/4S has 326ppi.)
Puremotion HD+ display (use it with gloves on. Ladies can use their nails)
Superb camera
32Gb onboard
NFC
Wireless Charging
Yep.. I'm getting one.
My phone history:
Never liked mobile devices, I didn't see the point in having an iPaq or suchlike without a data connection so I stayed out of the way until the iPaq 6340 came along, it was a brick but it finally rolled data a phone and a handheld computer into one. And so I became trapped in windows mobile, or pocket pc as it was known then.
The user experience was terrible of course, everything had to be done with a stylus as no-one had given much thought to a touch interface beyond replacing a mouse cursor with a pointy stick. Appart from that it was okay, I could telnet from it, even remote desktop if you didn't mind the tiny screen, it was useful.
When it came time to get a new phone I went for a HTC P3600 and flashed it to turn on the GPS so it is probably my own fault that the thing kept cooking lipo batteries. The camera was terrible and Windows was getting ever more annoying, during the life of the handset iphones and android devices started to evolve.
I was presented with a choice, I had decided whatever I got was going to be a Samsung, all the Samsung handsets I had played with had good cameras and build quality. They knew how to build a solid phone, cutting edge gadgetry was no longer my primary concern. I found two models that looked worthy, one was android, on was windows mobile. I opted for the windy phone because I had little homebrew apps I wanted to keep using, little did I realise that the android marketplace would explode so rapidly.
That was my big mistake, from the word go I found the latest windows mobile to have all the annoyances of the old version plus a few more, it was slow, battery hungry and even basic features like text messaging would sometimes completely stop working for no apparent reason. Samsung had tried to polish the turd by adding UI tweaks but every time I wanted to go a little deeper than making a phone call or viewing a webpage, old style pocket pc dialogs would appear forcing me to reach for a stylus.
Towards the end of its life I actually got so annoyed with it that I partitioned the internal storage up and installed android on it.
I've just bought a new device and I didn't even have to think about the operating system, I wanted android. It was designed to be used on smaller, touchscreen devices and more importantly it just works for me, seemlessly. Since using android I've not once had to think "I better reboot it just in case someone is trying to txt me and its stopped receiving messages again." as I did under the malformed offspring of Windows CE.
I don't care how good the camera is, I wouldn't touch this phone because it runs Windows. I don't care if it makes me coffee in the morning and gives me oral sex at night whilst checking my email at the same time, its Windows. It will be slow, unresponsive, badly thought out and given the rise of android and ios there will be absolutely no support from developers.
Now obviously I haven't even played with the handset so you can flame me for making these assumptions but that is EXACTLY the point. From previous experience, these are the assumptions I and everyone else who has ever used a windows phone will make when they see the word Windows.
Its too late for Microsoft, they shot themselves in the foot when they could have got a foot in the door. The only people who will buy this handset are those who don't get a choice or aren't technical enough to know better.
And those poor souls will do exactly the same as I did when they become annoyed by the usual Windows bugs and an inability to play <LATEST HOT GAME> with their friends because the developers didn't do a version for windows.
Give it up MS, the only way people are going to buy your phones in this cloudy age is if you can come up with something really, REALLY special. Something with the trendiness of an iGadget, the application support of a Droid and the reliability of the can opener on my swiss army knife.
I think we all know, they just can't.
I had a 6340 as a replacement for my failed and much missed palm V. I grew to quite like the idea of a phone, PDA, camera, and music player all in one.
The problem was the damn thing didn't work. I had to reboot it several times a day, cold boot it a couple of times a week, and could not depend on it ringing when someone wanted to talk to me, or knowing where my contact list was when I wanted to talk to someone else. Even the idea of syncing with the supplied copy of outlook was beyond it.
So yes. Not ever again. Once bitten twice shy.
mmm, thats like saying you won't buy a new TV because the old one had valves and took a long time to warm up.
Now the current windows phones are battery hungry, but actually so are the iPhones and Androids. If you want decent power performance go for Symbian.
As for the UI, I'm currently using an Android and I have had an iPhone in the past, both have major annoyances. I HATE ALL these bloody touch screen phones, I want to text, dial, use the phone when I am walking, on a bus, a train etc. I can't, whether driven by my imperial sized finger or a stylus they are all - and I repeat ALL bloody useless unless you are sat motionless at a desk - this is crap for a mobile device. Give me proper buttons ANY day - and a phone with a 'flip' that covers the buttons and protects the screen while it is in my pocket - especially one that will 'answer the call' when I open it and hang up again when I close it - no need for strange red and green buttons or 'lock sequences' or 'slide to unlocks' or any of that crud. A proper phone has buttons. Everything else is just crap.
"...while there was an observable lag it was no more than three seconds. Multitasking benefits greatly from this new kernel."
WTF?!? This is 2012! How can you possibly say it's an improvement, when it's still so obviously far behind the 90s technology they ditched to jump on the good ship Redmond?
All this says to me is that they still haven't yet managed to develop an OS suitable to run on a mobile device. And the chances of them figuring it out are 0.
Yeah, until you got to all the java crap that people were punting to run on S60, starting the JVM up on my Communicator 9000 seemed to take an age, and ate like 45m of the meager memory in the process :(
(Native apps were a little better, but still sluggish, and the UI was glacial)
Old versions of EPOC (pre-Symbian, Psion stylee), on the other hand.. Devices that ran that were super-efficient and quick running on damp string and rumours <3
If Nokia had brought out phones with their own OS like this 3 years ago, they'd have a fighting chancing against the benchmarks of smartphones (iPhone/Android Clone). With any lack of gain technologily wise, it's quite an idle release (but to be fair, the design apart from it's thickness is quite an eye catcher over any Android clone). I might reconsider my position to upgrade to the iPhone 5 in March and give WinMo 8 a chance depending on what other handsets around. I've always had a soft spot for Nokia and it's sad to see they're struggling to be what they were in the late 90s early 00s.
Your pictures still look to show the god awful 'landscape in portrait' design, where you can see half images because it requires you to slide it sideways.
Still no background or modifying for the user, still stuck with hubs and tiles or bricks or whatever windows call them nowadays in the "not-metro" world.
I always said I would steer clear of Nokia after the N900 and how they left people high and dry, but winpho 8 doesn't seem like something I should look at. No SD card? Really?
This will be looked back on as the last chance that Nokia got. Microsoft's last big chance too IMO. They had everything to gain by wooing us with must have features and competition stopping must haves. They have lost the plot - both of them and show no signs of doing what they need to do.
They introduced wireless charging and then fitted a huge battery! With wireless chargers in place in your home, car, office, etc, you can use a smaller battery and make a smaller lighter phone!
They have also assumed wrongly that the camera is the killer feature.
Even if they knocked this out for £100 with Android, it still wouldn't be competitive.
"Microsoft's last big chance too IMO. "
I think they make more on a release of Office than the have done with every phone release ever. So, I doubt it.
"They introduced wireless charging and then fitted a huge battery! With wireless chargers in place in your home, car, office, etc, you can use a smaller battery and make a smaller lighter phone!"
Or you can have a phone that you can use as a camera for a weekend away. Which is a win. I like the idea of actually being able to go somewhere on a trip and actually being able to USE my phone for something other than essentials.
"They have also assumed wrongly that the camera is the killer feature."
It is. If you want a good camera. Not everyone has your priorities.
The compact camera market is dead, thanks to smartphones. Yet their cameras are poor. The only reason compact cameras still sell at all is because of their better quality images. This is an attempt to steal that market-section.
"Even if they knocked this out for £100 with Android, it still wouldn't be competitive."
That's just a little ridiculous. I'm a tight-wad, and even I'd *gladly* pay £100 for this toy.
"The compact camera market is dead, thanks to smartphones. Yet their cameras are poor. The only reason compact cameras still sell at all is because of their better quality images. This is an attempt to steal that market-section."
Smartphone cameras are certainly not universally poor - the N8 and the 808 both feature blow your mind cameras - and this is not a megapixel war, the lens, the software corrections, zooming, stabilization (yes no need to fake it with the 808), face recognition, even touch focus on the 808 (you point on the screen to tell the camera what part of the picture should be the focus). In fact the compact cameras rarely have all the feature set you get on the smartphone
Seems that Nokia has one big advantage. If you have an iPhone, chances are you will have a PC, rather than a Mac. If you go android there are, currently, no android computers. So, if you want a phone, tablet and lap/desktop, without having to learn multiple OSs, and working out how to integrate them, Windows seems to be a good way to go!
She was at a Nokia event on September 5 in New York. She said they agreed to literally place the 920 in her palm, providing she did not attempt to touch, flip, fiddle, or otherwise try to get a realistic view of the phone. She was basically able to ascertain its weight, end of story.
Twitter isn't completely making this behavior up. It's the physical equivalent of not releasing the Win8 Phone SDK. Because, then, a developer might SEE A FEATURE of the phone. And then, of course, the universe would implode in on itself.
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