Nokia Lumia 900 WinPho 7 smartphone So you’re trying to revive the fortunes of what was, until a few weeks ago, the biggest mobile phone manufacturer on the planet. You’ve launched a handset or two with a new operating system and they’ve gone down quite well. So what next? How about taking one of those handsets and releasing a near-identical one, different only in …
I still think multi-core is a necessity these days if you want multi-tasking. And with a sufficiently robust ramping algorithm, it shouldn't suck that much more than a single core. If I have browser session with flash running (ok we're talking android here), and backgrounded, I should still be able to run my new foreground app without stuttering.
1080p video - There is a point to be made about storage, yes. With a fixed 16gb internal storage, you won't get a lot of video in there at 1080p. However, the resolution is pretty common in Nokia's competitors these days, and people want to view their movies at the native resolution of their HD panels. Is the quality of 1080p better than 720p, given the poor/cheap sensors in these phones? No probably not. But people *still want" 1080p.
@Silverburn. Multi-tasking doesn't need multi-core, a matter of fact not opinion in a multi-tasking multi-threaded operating system. A 2GHz core can do as much work as two 1GHz cores and will be more responsive executing bottleneck code that has not been optimised for multicore. Often apps benefit more from unloading work onto GPU for most effective multitasking (why iPad 3 boosted GPU while leaving dual core CPU virtually unchanged). If performance is the goal, memory cache, floating point performance and so on can be more relevant than core count or GHz.
The trend towards dual then quad core on phones is about power usage and manufacturabilty, not performance per se. Certainly WP multicore support is overdue as we look forward to future processing demanding applications on phones (higher resolutions, image processing, games etc.) not viable on most current phone models.
The fact that WP7 competes so well on single CPU core compared with Android 4 multi-core is connected with the way multitasking is done. I expect Android 5 and WP8 will both do better, will be interesting to see how that pans out.
The only reason to want 1080p video recording on a phone is so you can boast your phone has 1080p video recording. Holding the phone above your head at a gig is going to look crap regardless.
Considering how popular 16Gb iPhones with no SD support are, marking those as failures seems a bit pointless.
Multicore presumably is coming in the next version, anyone know... but note how this phone has strong battery life. Upping the CPU power only reduces that.
I'll bear that in mind when I listen to the 60Gb of FLAC encoded music files on the excellent 'Poweramp' app on my 16Gb Samsung Galaxy Note via my 64Gb Sandisk MicroSD card. It's by VERY far the best portable music player I've ever experienced and the audio quality is superb. Try doing that in a paltry and pathetic 16Gb internal phone.
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Sorry, but the charging on the top means:
1) No car dock - unless you want to either turn the phone upside down, or have some weird "Slide it UP into the dock, then lock in place" design.
2) No desk dock, no "bedside charging stand/use it as a clock" (which is sad, because OLED means the display could dim enough to not be annoying, unlike a backlight LCD, which if dim enough to not be disturbing is dim enough to be unreadable)
3) If plugged in and you want to take a call, the cable is looping over your hand. Look at your old wired telephone handset - does the wire come out the top or the bottom?
As for "no 1080p video" - the one thing nice about being able to play back 1080p video is that you can then have one video file for both your phone and for your TV - rather than having to transcode a file for your phone had adding 25% to your video storage needs.
(of course, since most of my 1080 video is ATSC and thus MPEG2, I still have to transcode it so all my devices can use hardware acceleration since no phones or tablets seem to have HW MPEG2, but at least if I do transcode it to H.264, my TV will still play it - maybe. If I hold my tongue just right during the encode. Frackin DLNA - Doesn't Like Nearly Anything.)
I love the look of this phone, the WinPhone OS looks great with those live tiles.
But WinPhone is missing some critical features that MS should have had from the beginning, but certainly in the 7.5 update
- support for VPN (many business users, and virtually all techies I should think)
- built in support for Messenger (or whatever they call it these days). This is widely used, i can even use it on the Xbox with Kinnect to talk to family overseas, but not on a WinPhone without some (apparently rather poor) additional app by a third party.
And why does MS not permit SD cards? I don't understand that... I imagine Apple does it to up-sell because they have 16/32/64 models... but MS only produces the O/S, so why not let the phone makers decide whether they want to have SD support? As it is, Nokia only has 16gb models, so no chance of cheap SD cards cannibalizing their 'bigger' phones.
" support for VPN (many business users, and virtually all techies I should think)
- built in support for Messenger (or whatever they call it these days). This is widely used, i can even use it on the Xbox with Kinnect to talk to family overseas, but not on a WinPhone without some (apparently rather poor) additional app by a third party."
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Support for a VPN? You have seen the adverts for the Lumia right? This is not a business phone this is not a business OS. This OS is designed for the generation that watches The Only way is Essex and can't remember any more than 160 characters.
What phone suitable for business would think it a good idea to merge facebook contacts into your phone book?
As for built in support for messenger that'll be coming but replace messenger with skype
SD Cards are a well documented issue. And its not all MS's fault.
I think its the Samsung Focus that has a hidden SD card slot, that is "upgradable".
The OS uses all memory for the phone, and therefore the performance of the SD card is critical. Annoyingly its really easy to get the throughput figures for an SD Card, but theres never any mention of the random access times, and with the vast majority of SD Cards, its attrocious, and putting it in a WP7 absolutely kills performance.
Microsoft could insist on SD Cards in every phone tomorrow, but it would be the same situation as the USB Flash drive support for Xbox. Everyone just buys the cheapest one they can find, rather than checking supported lists, then bitches about the performance problems that follow.
"This screen is gorgeous: bright and colourful as you’d expect from an OLED screen – or Clear Black Display as Nokia calls it.".
A very important consideration when you waste a quarter of those precious pixels with a dead bar running down the home screen, making it look all unbalanced and amateur. Well, if these wasted pixels are to be black, of course you'd want them to be "Clear Black" on an OLED screen, wouldn't you?
I went the opposite direction and got a Lumia 710 for about £160. It's the same O/S and the performance is snappy. All that's missing is the better camera, some memory and a bit better battery life. I only care about the last one and it's still good enough, so I basically saved myself three hundred quid as far as I'm concerned.
Did you break the port cover on the Lumia 800?
It has a magnetic catch which doesn't wear out, and it's almost impossible to open by accident.
I am one of those people that constantly fiddles with any movable part on my phone. The cover on the Lumia 800 is particularly satisfying to flick off it's magnetic catch and annoy people with the clicking noise :P
Curious because after owning the phone for a fair while now, I am always surprised that the port cover is always singled out as a weak point. In my experience, the phone has several weak points, but the port cover ain't one of them.
Erm, I can't imagine what ICS would be like running on this hardware, except dreadful. The point is that WP7 doesn't need the most recent hardware to run smoothly. It was the same with Symbian. I guess this was probably a driving factor behind Nokia's dramatic WP move (like it or not). Most consumers won't be buying a phone on the specification, they'll be buying based on eye-candy and what it can do for them.
It's funny to think that Microsoft, who used to be the driving force behind the need to constantly built more powerful PCs to cope with the latest version of Windows, are now producing a mobile OS which is able to work really well on two year old hardware specs.
I was livid when Nokia dropped Maemo and disgusted again when Elop shot Symbian in the back. Lately I'm becoming less hostile towards the Nokia/WP thing as it does seem to be starting to turn into something new and refreshing.
I am not going to buy an old 100Mhz computer, not even if it has a turbo button.
Does your laptop have a low-power chip in it? Do you own any ARM-powered devices? I ask since low-power also means "reduced performance" and ARM is by definition considerably less powerful than x86/x64. Your statement is the equivalent of "I would never buy a DVD player to watch my DVDs on when a £3000 gaming rig can do that job and is more powerful".
In other words, it's drivel. You're just criticizing for the sake of it.
Dogged, this applies to you : http://xkcd.com/386/
"Does your laptop have a low-power chip in it? Do you own any ARM-powered devices? I ask since low-power also means "reduced performance" and ARM is by definition considerably less powerful than x86/x64. Your statement is the equivalent of "I would never buy a DVD player to watch my DVDs on when a £3000 gaming rig can do that job and is more powerful"."
Stop trying to "interpret" my logic. There is no point in creating new analogies to explain my analogies, I'm sure readers of this site are capable of interpreting my analogies without your help. If it's simply the last word you want, step up.
I don't give a shit about the last word. I want to know WHY you always do this.
I know you think Windows Phone is ugly, you said so before. de gustibus non est disputandum so that's valid but then again, it also means you can't go around saying "everyone! don't buy this, it's ugly!". So instead we get this "underpowered" nonsense. Which is madness, because if Android could run on less than half the resources that WP needs, the Android fans would never shut up about it. But because it's Microsoft, it's a fault.
What I really don't get is why so many people here actively want this to fail. Would a successful (say, 30% of market) WP prevent you from buying an Android phone? Or an iPhone? No. Would it drive down the prices and drive up the quality of Android phones and iPhones? Probably, since that is a feature of competition.
But no, they want it to fail. Which implies that they want to pay more for less. And they tell pretty outrageous lies about it in the process, which is worse.
I wish I understood it. Is it some sort of religious thing?
PS.
I don't go around telling everyone that Android phones are shit, laggy, ugly and smell like donkey-fart on every Android phone article. Check for yourself if you don't believe me. So it's not a classic fanboy thing. The One X is pretty nice, although it shares the WP flaw of not having a MicroSD slot.
"I wish I understood it. Is it some sort of religious thing?"
I think it must be something of that mindset. WP7 came up in another discussion and I chipped in with a correction to what was posted (I own a Lumia 710). And along came the downvotes on a short and purely factual post. I was even polite.
Other than that it is obvious that the Lumia series currently is a holding action by Nokia. If by Q4 we do not see a genuine flagship phone running WP8 then the Finns won't have any excuses. I hope they will, Nokia at their best are fully capable of building superb phones. Unless MS in some very clear way frakk up with WP8 then Nokia will have the elbow room to do the necessary. If, however, they fail to do so then I fear that it will be looking very bleak for them indeed.
"...Still, Nokia’s not to blame here." They absolutely are to blame for any and all shortcomings of the phones they produce. It was Nokia's choice to employ an ex-Microsoftie. It was his (highly predictable) choice to decide to use Microsoft's phone OS for all future Nokia smart-phones. Being subject to Microsoft's demands are a consequence of these choices which they made themselves.
It's not exactly Android yet, but it looks as if phones are selling.
Unless Reuters isn't a good enough source to be taken seriously. And yeah, three years late, etc etc etc. I think it'll get there, assuming Microsoft don't make WP8 an ugly static grid of icons like Bob Vistakin's beloved WIndows 3.1. Or iOS and Android, for that matter.
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