Windows Phone 8: Everything you need to know at a glance There used to be a popular saying in the industry: "Microsoft doesn't get it right until version 3.0." I say used to because you don't hear it very much any more. It was arguably true of Windows, which first hit its stride with version 3.0, but not for much else. The Xbox sold from the first incarnation. Windows CE passed the …
If you want to be patronized like children and told what to do and what not to do with your devices, its still better to buy Apple than Microsoft.
But I think buying either will eventually land us in a corporate landscape where our mobile devices are treated like Sony's playstation: If you install an alternate OS or software on them, you get sued, cause you had to sign a lengthy agreement nobody reads, that forbids you to do anything that would circumvent all the toll booths they are planning to surround you with.
<blockquote>. posting in articles he has no interest in except to slag thing off.
Why not try posting some constructive comments? Or even better just fuck off</blockquote>
Just to be a pedant, you have posted to tell some one they posted to an article they had no interest in yet did the same thing yourself. You then proceeded to do the same by slagging off the poster. You did not mention anything about the article except the article itself.
I will be considering W8 soon, it may get me away from Android for the first time in years as I feel that WP8 has solved a few issues that stopped me getting WP7.
The only reason why they are talking nice about WP is because it locks you even tighter to telco's. You need a cloud account to do ANYTHING on these devices. Apple is a bit less restrictive in even setting up your device. The telco's see money because with everything you do, you need to go online...
The only advantage is that (when going for a Nokia device) that, at least, it doesn't require internet access when using it as a car navigation tool (unlike Google or Apple's offering). Otherwise it would just be the extreme milk-cow device for punters. Ripp off the folks, in the name of the cloud!
Isn't it MS and Apple that get the money, not the telecos? Nokia went through torturous backflips to take into account operators' concerns, originally restricting OTA updates and the shop to the network instead of wifi and their agreements over operator billing.
Apple just drove a steamroller through all that and MS just copied Apple. If anything they bypass the telecos and just use them as a bit pipe when the user doesn't have wifi access.
I, too, have a Lumia 800, but after WP8 has finally launched I feel a lot less grumpy than before. Considering all the secrecy, I had expected something a bit more spectacular than what essentially (to the user) are generally minor improvements. Yes, I know, there's now the unified W8 kernel which is great, but for an user that's as exciting as reading the Android source code. Now WP8 has Opera Mobile-like web traffic compression (I guess the Yanks with their low data caps on their expensive contracts really need that, personally with unlimited data at £15 a month I can't care less), a kid's corner (which still doesn't prevent your new £600 phone from being dropped or physically abused by children), some rooms, limited Bluetooth transfer and Xbox Music (and both BT transfers and XB Music will come to WP 7.5 devices with the WP8 update anyways). We still haven't got a better browser interface with sane tab handling, or the capability to download and save locally any type of file (i.e. iso files). Oh, WP8 also come with a USB Storage mode, but it also got rid of Zune (which at least made Media transfers very easy and comfortable) and replaced it with some uncomfortable and inflexible sync utilities.
WP 8 is also said to be blazingly fast, but on the other side WP 7.5 is already completely fluent (much more than Android or iOS), even with just one core, so I can't see how much better it can be.
I'm sure I will eventually go for a WP 8 device, but not in the near future. There just aren't any compelling reasons to upgrade from my Lumia 800 at the moment. Maybe a year down the line this will be different.
Yeah, well, it's not 1998 any more, and not everyone wants to have to manually fiddle around with folders if applications like Zune can manage TBs of videos and music and sync the titles one wants by the click of a button even if the phone is not connected to the computer (Zune can do sync over WiFi, another thing that got lost in WP8).
It's certainly great to have the option to access folders directly in WP8. It's not great when comfortable functionality has been removed.
Pretty sure the OS Kernel is gonna be the same for a while now so I think you will be all good with upgrades over the next couple of years. WP7.5 is nice, I am still using my samsung focus and still enjoy it's simplicity.
There are a few games/apps I would like every now and again that are not available but all in all I have really not had problems doing everything I wanted to on this phone.
Who knows, maybe MS will have a Surface Phone by the time you upgrade!!
http://www.mobot.net/microsoft-admits-windows-phone-8-notification-centre-finished-time-49730
[QUOTE]One thing Windows Phone 8 early adopters may already be noticing about Microsoft's new operating system is that unlike Android and iOS, there's no notification centre.
Well turns out it's not a deliberate omission. It was meant to have one – Microsoft just didn't get it finished in time.
Let's face it: it's virtually unheard of for any great endeavour – be it Windows Phone 8, the Olympic Stadium or the lifesaving kebab you'll be scarfing down while staggering home later this evening – to arrive ahead of schedule. It's just how these things go.....................................[/QUOTE]
Windows phone 8 looks good and I was looking forward to getting the Nokia 920 to replace my current windows phone.
But it seems like Nokia are not interested in selling many phones.
Locking the 920 to a single network (EE) even if you buy it sim free will surely dent sales.
I for one will not buy it if I have to be locked to a network.
So I will hold off on the purchase of a new windows phone for now.
(Taking the unprecedented step of replying to myself)
Speaking of market share, here we see Android 75%, and iOS on 14.9%, so microsoft are welcome to whatever dregs blackberry etc leave them from the remaining 10%:
http://www.mobile-ent.biz/news/read/android-takes-75-per-cent-smartphone-market-share-in-q3/019760
"Lumia 800 with WP 7.5 is miles ahead of the competition."
No it isn't. Even Nokia's own Symbian is vastly superior on many fronts than this handicapped, dememented monstrosity.
- no proper multitasking
- no full 2-way call recording
- no file manager
- no notifications
It's fast because Microsoft ditched most of their old WM-code. The same reason why Nokia Belle is fast (because nokia removed countless menus and capacities from Symbian e.g. disable theme efects menu or webfolders from filemanager etc...). In fact if cutting bits of productivity is needed to make stuff faster then your incompetent in my book. And in this book both Nokia and Microsoft are incompetent!
It's good that they're together. A match made in heaven destined to fail!
I don't know about Belle FP2 but theme effects are in Belle up to FP1, they're just off by default. It's in a submenu which just has one option (theme effects) buried in theme settings. I suppose that was some obscure hangover from S60 r3.
The removal of webdav support in Belle is annoying though, I can only assume that it was ditched in an effort to push SkyDrive.
The main reason i quit the software business was windows 3. I got sick and tired of being blamed by my customers for application crashes caused by that substandard OS. After the umpteenth time of: Sorry that's an OS error nothing i can do and then getting a mouthful from an irrate customer i had enough.
Sold my business and glad i did.
Would like to take the plunge and try a Lumia 920 but I live in Spain and buying one unlocked is difficult and expensive... I may just save the hassle and get the Nexus 4, it's cheaper, I know that Android is a good OS and more importantly for me I can order online at a low price and get it delivered unlocked straight to my door. I know I'm not the typical contract customer but I am interested in WP8 I think I'm probably just too lazy to go to the hassle of getting hold of one. Please Nokia or Microsoft just open an online store and sell me one directly!
From which part of your body did you pull this statement?:
"although there must be questions over battery life, since WP is like Android in terms of guzzling power."
The battery life on any windows phone outlasts any Android device anytime... Do your homework better next time in making statements like this.
.. is quite simply the competition.
It doesn't actually matter what you like or have (and I'm not going to slag off any platform because it quite simply depends on what anyone considers important), with another player in the field all will have to do their best.
Never a bad thing IMHO.
If you think you have problems with the HTC One X, you haven't seen anything that Microcruft couldn't do in a much more exasperating fashion, with arbitrary restrictions and very simple work flow things that - incredibly - just don't work.
And when you ask on Microsoft's community support forum, you'll find that all Microsoft representatives have been extensively trained to never admit to a mistake, bug or missing feature. They will just divert you like "you could just not do what you want to do, but instead do this other interesting thing"
I have gone from a "Win8 is going to be poo and Linux will replace it" to a "here I quite like this Win 8, where's my credit card for this upgrade". I really quite like the look of Surface too. But both surface and WP8 whilst looking good and making me want to try them don't inspire me with confidence just yet. I think I will be waiting till the next generation of both to decide.
Saying that if RT had been £200-250 I would have bought it just because.
All these pixels Just to show the ugly rectangles for color-blind people?
Oh, wait, I see - Mr Ballmer must have finally learned BASIC's graphics functions!
<tap><tap><tap><tap><tap>
SET BACKGROUND COLOR "green"
...Wow, look at this!
<tap><tap><tap><tap><tap><tap><tap>
SET COLOR "magenta"
BOX AREA 100,300,100,200
...Yippee! Quick! Run it into production! I've made it myself!!! It's gonna be big!!!
And this is the reason I, the rare happy Windows Mobile user, jumped ship to Android.
My Windows Pocket PC 2003 SE iPAQ hw6500 phone can do that.
My Windows Mobile 5.0 HTC Touch HD can do that.
sure they've added a lot of nifty new features, but on some core features they generally seen to have gone a step backwards.
This is an honest question:
Even if Winmo is any good, is it a good idea to give your phone to a convicted monopolist (which is clearly playing nice only because they have no other option right now), when there is a perfectly valid, and much more open platform?
I'm talking about Android, obviously, and running Google apps/services is not mandatory.
When it comes to desktop, as much as I use and like Linux, Microsoft is unavoidable, and they kill everything they touch.
However with phones/tablets we have valid alternatives Android and Apple's iOS, do we want MS to conquer and destroy that market too, so they can have all the computing space and kill competition/innovation?
I for one will never buy an MS product unless there is no possible alternative.
Current Nokia WP7 devices have Nokia Maps, Nokia Drive, Nokia City Lens, Microsoft maps.
The mapping and location based services are well covered, free of charge and of a better quality than anything on iOS.
The Windows Phone OS is optimised for communication and many services are integrated which is better than launching apps all the time. In WP8 Skype is part of the OS, switch it on and you can take Skype calls just like normal calls.
Hmmm. Words like 'optimised', integrated and 'Location based' scare me. I worry that coming up to a complicated junction the map will suddenly change and message will pop up saying. "Aunt Gloria is calling from here (arrow) in Fort Lauderdale, Flo, USA. Do you want to set this as your destination? "
... a picture of a steaming turd would have done.
No amount of embarrassing advertising (anything from MS with 'trendy' music is like watching old Uncle Hector dancing amongst the teenagers) will persuade Joe Public that an MS mobe is cooler than Apple or Android.
Only the seriously uncool middle-aged will give it a chance, everyone else will avoid.
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