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 …
Haha! Funny!
Just because iPhone has many faults (and it does!) doesn't make WP7 good, nor does it make Microsoft's perversion of Nokia's highly innovative N9/Meego into the Lumia do-as-we-tell-you suddenly OK. Let's not t forget that that slick Lumia 900 hardware design is wholesale stolen from the N9.
Will this phone get WP8? Because Nokia say "Ask MS" and MS say "no comment". So, in other words, no it won't. Seriously - why would anyone buy this *very* expensive phone if it cannot be upgraded? If Apple launched a new iPhone and said "we don't know if you're going to get iOS6" they would be _panned_. And rightly so. I think the fact Nokia themselves cannot answer this question is incredibly sad.
This is Nokia's flagship device but it simply cannot compete with phones of the same price from the competition. Not even close on hardware specs in some cases.
I want Nokia to succeed - really - I know good, talented people who work there. But this phone isn't going to save them which begs the question - can they hang on long enough to produce one that can?
Oh, and figures released today show that WP7 is now the _sixth_ most popular smartphone O/S after Android, iOS, Symbian, RIM and Bada. If there isn't a massive turnaround in fortunes for WP7 then MS won't have any hardware partners left to make any bloody hardware.
The WP8 upgrade this is obvious.
WP7 only supports a couple of chipsets, so you can guarantee Microsoft have the ability to upgrade every single WP7 device.
The issue is down to manufacturers and telcos. I'd wager Microsoft have the manufacturers on contract, so every phone will be capable of upgrading to WP8.
The issue was always the telcos. The recent, high selling phones, like the new Nokia's will definitely get WP8. The older, less selling generation 1 devices are a different matter. I bet Microsoft are begging telco's to support W8, and hearing silence.
Its difficult, because Microsoft could provide a list tomorrow, saying all these phone/telco combinations will be updates to W8, but i bet they can't, as its the actual telcos that are their customer, and Microsoft have enough of a struggle with telcos as it is, annoying them, by exposing their laziness will just mean the telco will just show Microsoft the door.
Me, i'd happily pay a small fee (IIRC it was about £10 to upgrade iOS) to upgrade my HTC HD7 to W8. I'd be a bit annoyed if it didn't get W8, but then its 2 years old already, out of contract, and i'm waiting for the W8 hardware before upgrading, as at the moment, theres nothing drasticly different between my 2 year old hardware, and todays flagship devices.
I took the plunge earlier this year to get an Android phone, my E71 being a little too old for good photos and web browsing. My older N95 would have been fine for the former and Opera usually did a good job of the latter.
Now here is what I found in the last week with Google's OS:
Can't make SIP calls on 3g without installing a third-party app.
Can't make a SIP call directly from my contacts unless I first saved an internet number for them - no long press or option menu like my 4 year old phone.
No option at all to make a SIP call from a manually entered phone number.
No ability to directly send DTMF of a contact when already in a call - for using local access number of SIP provider when no 3g or wi-fi was available.
Irrespective of why Android leaves me wondering why I can't do things my old trusty phone could do, can the new WM7 do these things?
> can the new WM7 do these things?
From the comments about lack of multitasking and the silence from the fanboys (WP7 PR agents?) when I raised a similar point earlier, I suspect it can't do SIP in the background at all.
The best thing I can say about NoWin is that it has bought down the second hand price of the e72 to the point where I am prepared to buy one to play with.
I was a Nokia user until an insurance replacement gave be a BlackBerry Bold 9700. But I am getting totally sick of the crashes and freezes and the total failure of BlackBerry Internet services to work on wifi out of the UK (obviously imposed) turned me off the system quite badly.
The BIS deal is no longer looking good enough to put up with all this.
I was seriously considering an N8 until Nokia killed Symbian's future. (I may get a second hand one, when the price is right.)
I guess the future (once the second hand Symbian devices are no longer viable) is android.
(Unless BBX or whatever it is, is a massive turnaround in quality.)
(BB does SIP very poorly with a 3rd party app though it does integrate OK, and there's no skype at all)
(WP7 PR agents?)
If you suspect that people here are paid PR agents, you should report their posts. Don't call it out in the forums because that's against the House Rules and makes you look like Barry Shitpeas, the well-known Sony publicist.
I suspect it can't do SIP in the background at all.
You're both right and wrong, interestingly enough. It can do foreground SIP. It can't leave a SIP process running to poll for calls. However, some solutions are more clever than others. Tango, for example, send a push notification of an incoming VOIP call which initiates the VOIP client. A cunning workaround.
Skype (who aren't SIP but used as an example) aren't bright enough for this, despite being an MS property these days.
To be frank, nothing in the current market does SIP well (Android and iOS bothy stink at it) but there's Nokia's PureUltraPhotoResolution thing which is Symbian and should cope.
Best policy right now is to hold off on upgrading for six months. That'll give you iOS6, Android5 JellyBean (apparently) and WP8, as well as whatever RIM can salvage.
> If you suspect that people here are paid PR agents, you should report their posts.
It never occurred to me that a paid PR agent would be prohibited from posting.
(In fact, why should they be? If someone had posted that a Lumia's charge only lasted an hour, why couldn't they counter that it is more like five and a fix is being developed to give a reasonable life?)
However I don't actually believe they are actual PR agents, a decent PR agent wouldn't appear so troll-like. It did come across, to me, as someone with a vested interest though.
> It can do foreground SIP. It can't leave a SIP process running to poll for calls. However, some solutions are more clever than others. Tango, for example, send a push notification of an incoming VOIP call which initiates the VOIP client. A cunning workaround.
Roughly what I thought, the solution the same as used on the old iPhone messenger clients. (It now makes sense why people are saying 2 years behind, and people are calling it a feature phone rather than a smart phone). I assume WP8 won't be as antiquated.
> To be frank, nothing in the current market does SIP well (Android and iOS bothy stink at it) but there's Nokia's PureUltraPhotoResolution thing which is Symbian and should cope.
I had a quick play with an HTC that seemed OK, didn't have long enough to confirm, though.
The Pure thing would be lovely, but a bit pricey, I think I'd prefer to go on holiday somewhere.
Is the E series completely defunct now?
> Best policy right now is to hold off on upgrading for six months. That'll give you iOS6, Android5 JellyBean (apparently) and WP8, as well as whatever RIM can salvage.
The e72 when it arrives might keep me happy for a couple of years. At least it should answer whether to go for Symbian until the bitter end or keep fighting with The BlackBerry for a bit longer.
(At the very least the e72 should do OK abroad on WiFi.)
I'm reasonably convinced the longer term future is going to be Android. (Unless BB pull a miracle from their hat with the new OS.) iOS isn't in the picture due to the walled garden. WP (even assuming it gets multitasking, and custom tones :) ) is even further out, for the same reasons, plus the fact that I like Symbian on Nokia, and I will hold a grudge for the way it was killed by WP. (I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who thinks this way, too.)
I'm reasonably convinced the longer term future is going to be Android.
I hope you're wrong, but not in the obvious way. I'd like to see all the major systems do well. That way lies competition on price and functionality and maybe even interoperability in the longer term.
I rather hope that Android and WP do better than iOS and RIM though - being stuck in an ecosystem is a bad thing but being tied to a single manufacturer as well is asking for trouble.
Not me, and less so after my sad experiences with an earlier incarnation of Microsoft's small Windows. Can't even remember which name it had at that time. Too bad Microsoft can't get me to forget the rest of it, eh?
In summary, Microsoft sees the OS as a weapon against competitors, and that's why they HAVE to make everything too big. That mentality has actually been useful in their BIG upstream efforts against the spammers, but in most cases it FAILS. Today's important failures are small phones and downstream efforts against smaller spammers.
Hey, when you're accustomed to building trench mortars, it's hard to think about flyswatters. How about another another example? Overly BIG thinking is why the Windows 7 WiFi hostednetwork defaults to 100 devices instead of a more realistic 5 or 10.
It seems Nokia haven't totally killed Symbian yet:
http://www.phonesreview.co.uk/2012/05/09/nokia-808-pureview-uk-release-confusion/
(Or meego for that matter)
Also there seems to be a rumour that WP8 will be better than WP7. (Which is odd, because according to its users WP7 is perfect)
http://www.phonesreview.co.uk/2012/03/26/nokia-apollo-windows-8-phones-better-than-lumia/
I'll stick with my "burning platform" phone with it's 1Gb of RAM and 64Gb of mass memory. I like the little flap over the micro usb, it keeps the crap out of the connector (we don't all live in cleanroom environments like some of you!). And I have a car dock for it - it slides UP into it and stays in place (made by Brodit).
It multi-tasks quite happily with it's puny single core processor, with apps running in the background - not stalled waiting to return to the foreground.
OK the app store isn't very volumous in it's offering, but I already have everything I need on the phone - the ability to make and receive t-e-l-e-p-h-o-n-e calls, to send and receive text and multi-media messages, to send and receive emails, to do a bit of web surfing - watching FLASH as well as HTML5 content. The only thing that peevs me about it is the sync app with the computer - since Elop ordered that it was not to be supported by the great Nokia Suite app, I have to use Nokia Link - which works well, but isn't as good because they have stifled the bluetooth sync from the PC end (it's in the phone).
And I have a game of throwing avian projectiles at swine.
My verdict on the Lumia 900 is "Elop is still Bill Gates' bitch" It still looks like "My First Smartphone" with those crap tiles, and WHY does it need a "home" button, in fact why do you need any more buttons other than the hardware on/off, and volume? It's got a touchscreen FFS, put the controls on that!
You're right, the usual tripe from the softies, accusing anyone who points the inadequacies of WP7 of never having used it is getting very long in the tooth.
I just don't understand why you are amazed with a positive review of a WP featurephone. The reg has always given way more credit to WP7 than the market and the users.
Android only needs 4 cores to run fast because it's so slow and bloated - seriously, we use these devices to check Facebook, not to render the next Toy Story.
Windows Phone is more like a sports motorbike, with Android being a big fat, gas guzzeling 4x4. The bike's engine will be far smaller, but it will no doubt accelerate more quickly, and have a higher top speed than the wagon.
We should be judging devices based on how well they perform, not on the numbers.
Also lack of SD card is a GOOD thing. Users don't want to have to decide where to install apps, or even think about that sort of thing. It adds too much unwanted complexity. Microsoft's motto here, quite rightly is KISS - "Keep it simple, stupid".
The ui problems, not sd cards or cores etc, make these a dog of a phone:
- Inbox - unread emails have a blue subject (or whatever you have chosen as the highlight colour), but open any email and the subject is then always in blue... So you cannot tell if you have read an email or not. A real problem when you use the next back buttons to move through a thread. It's inconsistent and bad design.
- For some reason the onscreen keyboard is not as accurate as an iPhone or Android phone - weird as the keys themselves are the exact same size. I have many more incorrect key preses than on my wife's iPhone.
- Only the top power button wakes the phone even though there are three front buttons. Finding the damn thing is sometimes (holding a fag or coffee) a real pain in the arse. I am left handed which doesn't help.
- Off centre tiles - just to show a small arrow... Stupid, looks ugly
- Unable to reorder app list - The Guardian under T not G ... Irritating
- Terrible spell checker and an even worse editing interface. It's impossible to correct a text without the text swooshing up and down and up and down as you try to position the cursor.
- boring live tiles ... What's the point if they impart so little info and take up so much space. 8 to view!
- telephone numbers too small in the addess book to read out if you need to give someone another persons contact number. I'm 40 and my eyesight's going so 7 point numbers under an 18pt heading 'call mobile' is rotten.
- a back button that has a mind of its own. You have cannot tell if it will take you out of the app or back on a web page, depends on if you have hit home at some point making the browser extremely frustrating.
- too easy to accidentally put on silent
- bing - bollocks. I know you can use Google but the default is double shit. And it gets it's own button... I could go on (as I already have) but for the love of god I feel like a beta tester for MS.
They are all pretty minor irritations but after 3 months of having the phone I go around telling everyone not to go near them. A 24 month contract is a long time to be with a phone that has so many bad points that even more irritatingly could be fixed, but with 8 coming so soon you know will not. Some bits are great, but not enough of them. As 'just a phone' they are ok, but compared to the competition they're 2 years behind and I really can't see them catching up before Nokia goes tits up.
Been on a windows phone for over a year now (HTC HD7) and I've had no problems. Upgraded from an iphone 3gs.
For me, my windows phone feels more like a comunications device with media things included, rather than the other way around for the iphone. That was effectivly an MP3 player with a phone tacked to it. Unless something remarkable happens, I'll be staying with Windows for my next phone
Recently taken another bite of the apple with my first ipad. Lovely screen, but I can't get used to how disorganised it feels. Even after stacking my apps in folders I struggle to find things. Having to resort to search each time is not good.
As well as that, my phone recovered from a trip though the washing machine with no decernable damage after it'd dried off (so obviously WP7 is better ;))
is that they are now flogging the benefits of an OS tightly coupled with the hardware so that they can run an OS with less driver bloat and integration issues than Android.... Now, after they have made a fortune and dominated the PC industry running a hugely bloated desktop OSs with more security flaws, firmware issues and driver mishaps than you can count..... Apple and the Unix server vendors have been talking about the benefits of tightly coupled hardware for a generation and MS could not have been less interested because they had all of the PC hardware manufacturers pushing their OS.... Now that only one, for all intents and purposes, hardware manufacturer took the payola to run WinPho they are talking about tight hardware OS integration like they discovered something new.
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