Posts by hoverboy 50 posts • joined 29 Aug 2013
I upgraded 14.04 to 16.04. There was a glitch that was widely reported as borking the upgrade; I just did a hard reset, booted back to Ubuntu and got a dconf window, Carried on and everything went perfectly. Apart from this it was the smoothest upgrade I've had in years - I normally always re-install but this time I don't think I'll bother. It's now working perfectly as my workhorse. Couldn't be happier.
I bought a Band 1 because I'm an unashamed MS fanboi and wanted to play with the new tech. I never expected it to be of any use whatsoever. In the end I found it indispensable for two reasons:
(1). unlike all the other wearables it has integrated GPS as well as all the biometric stuff, which meant I could go running or biking without having to carry the phone or wear a chestband HR monitor with my Suunto. It's much more comfortable and the web interface is pretty good too.
(2) the notifications are genuinely convenient. If I'm on my bike, in the tube or at a meeting I get an inaudible buzz on the Band and I can discretely and/or safely check to see if it's something important or not.
I was so impressed that when the, much prettier and slicker, Band 2 came out I upgraded. The Band 1 went to a colleague (Apple fan) who loves it.
I long ago switched back to a mix of MS and Linux when Win7 and Ubuntu 12.04 both offered something that didn't suck too much and the stagnating OS X lost its unassailable lead. Since then it's been amusing to watch Apple's decline but this is truly horrific. Sure they'll keep making money (for a while) but a stylus? Painful to watch and a betrayal of everything Jobs stood for.
I really like the Photosynth app. It let's you take a full spherical view so you can, for example, capture an entire room including ceilings and floors. I don't know if there are apps on iOS or Android that do that but for a Windows Phone app combined with the good Nokia camera, it was pretty sweet. I shall miss it. It seems that you can still use the tech, but you have to take the pictures first then stitch them online. There are more options than just spherical too. https://photosynth.net/preview/help#get-started
This, exactly. On the desktop it's already perfectly useable; it's only the TOS (keylogging) that prevent me from using it for real, paying, work. Even the mobile is useable at the latest build, although I've only got it on my spare phone (925) not _quite_ ready to put it on the daily 930. The rate of improvement has been huge though over the last couple of builds.
No, he was a fat f*ck and than god for everyone's sakes we now have Nadella. If you haven't tried a Windows phone recently you really ought to get out more. Take the US out of the figures and Windows Phone is doing very well. Jobs could maybe face up to Nadella, but Cook? Really??
...and he will tell you that there is only one brand that makes the cut: Tumi. They're expensive and pig-ugly, but after getting through a Samsonite carry-on every year I splashed out on a Tumi at five times the price. It's still good as new after ten years. You can write Tumis into your will.
For me it was always the killer app for the Nokia Windows Phones and I suspect it is why they ended up with (almost) the entire (albeit small) market. It's also now available as an Android app and I used it last weekend with downloaded maps on my Nexus 7. IMO it's better than any other turn by turn, free or paid.
Yes. Exactly this. This was a collosal quality failure by their management chain and it should call into question all of their products. I was weaned back to Wintel from Apple on the back of W7 usability and Lenovo build quality, since when my go-to supplier has been Lenovo. Funnily enough, a technophobe friend was so p*ssed off with her macbook she insisted she wanted a windows laptop. I found her a sweet deal on an i7 Lenovo Yoga2. I didn't have time to do the usual crapware cleanup and lockdown I would do on my own machines and sure enough within a week it was a nightmare of popups; unusable. W8 has a GREAT feature of the easy reinstall without losing data. I did this, did a proper install and she's had no problems since.
I have Cortana on my Windows Phone. At first it was a bit lame compared with 'Google Now' on my Nex7, but it has improved so rapidly it is now more or less 'Orac' (Blake's Seven Reference); it's now a noticable inconvenience to have to physically touch the phone's screen; most things I can now do just by saying 'Hey Cortana' + random command. It's amazing how much it can understand. Speech recognition is near perfect. Scary
The queue was quite short compared with iDevice ones, but I was the first person at the Toronto Microsoft store to NOT get a Surface Pro when they came out. There were plenty of people behind me and there were some very long faces. Thanks to Mr J. Daniels for your comfort at this time ;-)
Because this forum is Worldwide and not just the USA? I know it's an unrepresentative sample but I work in a German aerospace company where people will laugh at you for not having a WP; (stupid) foreigners use Android, (fashion-conscious) 'Marketing' use iPhones, all the engineers use WP...
Sorry to hear of your bad experience. I'm on my fifth winphone, my wife is on her fourth. I'm an early-adopter bleeding edge type, she's a 'more than ten seconds needed to understand then I'm not interested...' type. Everything works fine for both of us. I keep a Nexus 7 for the apps that haven't yet made it to wp and try not to let apple products touch my bare skin...
I have a Pro 2 with 256GB SSD and 8GB RAM it can run a Linux VM in VirtualBox very nicely. Compared with the Yoga devices it works better than they do as a tablet, but not so well as a laptop. All in all, the Yoga would have been a better choice for me but I can't say I regret the purchase. The build quality is extraordinary, even compared with Apple kit.
I think Microsoft are gradually converging on a sensible product line. The Pro 2 is nice but the lower weight and larger screen of the Pro 3 makes it a better machine for doing work. If they release the small form factor ARM 'Mini' device (at a low enough price) then they'll maybe start to see some small success there too, although merging the Phone and RT OSs and extending the 'Phablet' (Lumia 1520) line would make even more sense.
No, Whatsapp is free when you install it. I think after a year you're supposed to pay £1 per year but so far I've not had to. It has been temporarily withdrawn from the store because it does not work correctly with the new notifications. The wisdom is that it will be re-released, patched, in time for the official general release of 8.1. Whatsapp is a pretty sloppily coded app, or at least, badly ported. It took a couple of years for them to stop using a horrible kludge (tricking the OS into thinking it was streaming music) so that it could respond 'real time' to received messages.
"...Windows Phone is too resource-intensive to run on cheap hardware, these sources claim, which is why Nokia is turning to Android for its new, bargain-priced kit..."
Oh REALLY? I suspect it has more to do with licensing than hardware requirements. Windows Phone seems to run pretty sweetly on some very cheap kit but Android needs quad-core monsters and is still laggy.
The biggest problem that MS have is that although all their products share a common-ish theme (The tiles) the codebases are not compatible so they lose a lot of developer support. Their strategy is reportedly to converge on a single code base for all devices. If they can pull this off then it will be worth the while of developers to write more apps for them.
Of the four main consumer product lines, XBox has its niche, full blown X86 Windows will be around for lifetimes yet and the phones are pretty sweet (and starting to take off now, at least outside the US) RT, however is really a bit pointless, especially considering, as others here have pointed out, the affordability of decent Atom-based tablets.
The tiles work well on a phone screen, I have one and I wouldn't go back to an iPhone now. The first part of the convergence will be to merge RT and Phone OSs, with features applied dependent upon screen size. The 'RT' brand will then quietly fade away...
I'm a WinPhone fanboi but this bugs me too. The worst offender is NOKIA, who choose different colours for their various apps depending on function (e.g. all the location apps are blue, the photo apps purple) I keep my start screen organised with 'pure' MS apps at the top so I can keep a nice steel grey theme. Below that multicoloured hell breaks loose! This minor gripe aside, you'd still have to put a gun to my head to make me go back to Android or iPhone (I've had both)
All the people saying Nokia are failing are just not looking at the current facts. They are selling the Lumia phones as fast as they can make them, the uptake of Windows Phone is increasing rapidly in almost all markets and the low-price models are showing up in the best-sellers lists. Even the new Nokia RT tablet may save that OS, once the networks start offering them on subsidized contracts.
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