Nokia Lumia 820 Review - Windows Phone 8 Fail

The Hardware

Call Quality - Excellent (Typical of all Nokia Phones)
The Build Quality - Excellent (Typical of all Nokia Phones)
The screen - Good, vibrant, scratch resistant and repels facial grease, IS NOT GORILLA GLASS and is noticeably more fragile.
Loudspeaker - A little on the soft side

The Software

I have been an avid Windows user since Windows 98, and a Windows Phone user since Windows Phone 7.

Windows over the years has gotten more capable and much faster with time. Windows XP to Vista was a little buggy but it worked. Windows Vista to 7 was just a case of slothering Vista in butter and polishing it up to a fine sheen.

Windows Phone 7 to Windows Phone 8 has been the experience nightmares are made of. It was basically going from Windows 7 to Windows 95.

Windows Phone 7 was an elegant experience for me minus some minor quirks here and there. The most noticeable one was the inability to assign more than one mobile number to any one contact which was rather odd. Others were like not being able to multiselect files or difficulty putting ringtones and audiobooks on the device.

They weren't deal breakers and there were some workarounds. That said, everything else in the OS was fully functional. The phones available has very limited storage, most maxing out at 16gbs. However as many figured out, the 1st generation WP7 devices uses MicroSD cards in place of soldered in onboard memory and with a little trick and the right SD Card, could take a 8gb phone and transform it into a 32gb phone. I did it with no problems on my 8gb Dell Venue Pro. Even better, integration with the Zune Desktop Software (ZDS) made syncing music, pictures, podcasts and videos to a lesser extent, a breeze.

When i got home, I put my phone to charge, it would ping my desktop wirelessly, fire up the ZDS and start syncing my new podcasts and music automatically to my phone. When I left for work the next morning, everything just worked.

Window Phone 8 is nothing like that. With this new OS, expandable storage is natively supported except on my Lumia 820 it doesn't work at all. When i put in my Sandisk 64gb MicroSDXC card, and fired up Windows Media Player to Sync my playlists as I did with my Zune and Windows Phones on the ZDS. (I did this with my old sandisk E250 player back in the PlayForSure days as well)

My first thought, "Wow this is slow!!"

Second thought, "why is song taking to long to transfer?"

10 minutes later "why is the same song still transferring"

30 minutes later "oh *uck it froze"

Then something that never happened on my WP7 Dell Venue Pro happened, my Music and Video app crashed, so did my settings app. On shutting it down, it was permanently frozen on the goodbye screen.

I forced restarted it by removing the battery.

When i powered it up, the SD Card was missing... I turned off the phone, removed the card and put it back in, powered the phone on and it was still missing. I took the card out and put it in a card reader on the PC. The disc check utility detected an inconsistency on the Card and ran but found no errors. Once it was back in the phone, the phone saw it once more. I tried syncing a playlist again, it transferred on playlist and froze in the middle of another.

This happened over and over. Then I quick formatted the card back in exfat on my PC and tried syncing playlists directly to the card without the phone between them. Every song synced perfectly.

Once back in my phone, all the songs turned up but... for some odd reason, some songs would turn up with no artist or album information. If i resynced them, or copied them manually, they would then show with the correct info, but then other songs would start doing the same thing, to no fault of the songs themselves because they all worked fine on my Zunes and DVP.

Using explorer to drag and drop lots of small numerous files, music and pics mainly, always results in some sort of freezing during copying.

In the end I gave up although I was able to do some podcast subscriptions directly on my phone by changing my country to USA so I could have some sort of entertainment on my phone for when I was driving or waiting in line. This is still a problem because when I want to view podcasts on my TV or desktop while I work with my nice sounding speakers... I can't.

Over the last 2 days something else has started happening which is doubly annoying. For some odd reason, my music videos and pictures have started duplicating and triplicating themselves.

If i plug in the phone and navigate to the directory, there is only one physical file even thought the phone sees 2 or 3 of them.

Whats worse is if I delete even one of the duplicates, all of the duplicates including the original are deleted.

The Nokia Lumia 820 is a horrible phone

This is coming from someone who has owned only Nokia phones his whole life aside for a Dell Venue Pro and an Ericsson and has been a massive fan of Microsoft's Zune Software and Hardware devices as well as the Windows Phone 7 line of devices.

NOTHING works like it ought to and despite how much I loved WP7, I cannot recommend this phone to anyone out there.

I cannot even return it for a refund because it was bought in the USA and I live in Trinidad and Tobago.

If other Windows Phone 8 handsets give the same problem as this Lumia 820, I recommend avoiding them until Microsoft and the OEM's get their house in order and fix what was not broken in Windows Phone 7.5 to begin with.

Words of Caution, Experience and Concern

Over the last few days I have had the unfortunate experience of seeing for myself in an unusually concentrated dosage, the incredible callousness and stupidity of various technicians when it comes to repairing computers, in particular, installing the operating system, optimising it and other software.

The Problem

Many of the self proclaimed technicians are just idiots who learned how to boot into an OS install disc and follow a few simple steps to reinstall an operating system. The issue arises on the other side of the progress bar where you need to do the actual work, finding the appropriate drivers, which, as I indicated in a previous post, is required to give you full operational efficiency from the parts in your computer. This is true for any operating system, Windows, Linux and even OSX. Apple by far makes it easiest to get these because they have such limited few parts in their SKUs and they make all their machines, they have them all centrally located.

Linux is one of those platforms that supports drivers going back to the stone age of computing. So if you installed it on an oldish machine, 2 maybe 3 years old, most, if not all the parts would already have had their drivers installed as part of the Linux OS and in a really good situation eliminates the need for any driver hunting... period. That said, you will typically encounter parts where you need to locate drivers and if you don't find them on the first page of a search, that means they are going to be rather hard to find and many companies don't have official linux driver downloads. If they do, installing them is not a double click and run affair. In some cased you need to have some technical knowledge to install it in your machine.

With with Windows being so popular almost all manufacturers supply some sort of Windows compatible driver. Typically its pretty straightforward to find drivers, look at the manufacturer of the part, the model number of the part, and search both with the word "Driver". That will typically result in a link to the driver download page.

If you are dealing with a brand named machine, Dell, HP etc, simply go to the manufacturer's website, find their support section and there will have a page to download drivers. Go there, enter the model of the Machine, HP Pavilion DV####. Download the ones relevant to your operating system and machine and install them and you system will begin to shine.

Particularly when installing an new OS on an older system, say one that came with Windows Vista, and they put Windows 7, there will be the odd part with no driver and these individuals who won't install the easily found drivers and updates don't even bother to research these parts and try to source a solution. It, quite frankly is an unfortunate state of affairs.

My Actions

I recently observed a colleague's Windows 7, AMD based Toshiba laptop, the image on the screen was stretched wide (no display driver), the touchpad had no scrolling function (no input driver) and the WIFI was iffy (no network driver). When i investigated, the system had no OEM drivers installed... not one!! Adding insult to injury, no Service Pack 1, no IE 9, not one update. The final straw was the so called technician installing a pirated copy of Windows 7 when the system had a legit Win 7 Home Premium Serial on the sticker below. I found this ineptly stupid. In the end I did not have the time to reinstall windows properly for the person, but I got all the drivers installed, put SP1 and IE9 there and hoped that would suffice until I could redo the system properly. With all of that, I did not charge the person any money.

Another individual had an old Compaq Laptop that originally came with Windows Vista Basic. This thing had a pirated copy of Windows 7 that had been WAT exposed and was giving the piracy prompt. No IE9, but it did have SP1 and the activation method was an old one that Microsoft had rendered useless. No drivers, lots of bloatware and the individual in question only needed PowerPoint and Word. Such an unfortunate situation.

In the end both persons ended up with working systems functioning as they should. The thing that really bites me, is that I will take the 6 hours and install windows, drivers and apps properly and then optimise them and update them. I still find it hard to charge my requisite $400 TTD, but I see people doing this rubbish and charging $600 TTD. In the end I have to undo all the previous damage and start from scratch. I also have to take the time to teach my customers a few things about the systems they use and make them safer for it.

Final Words

In the end, I hope those schemers and cheats get whats coming to them, whatever that may be. They deserve all of it. My contention is that all my customers have never returned and I know them all personally and see their systems fairly frequently and they are still running the OS installs I performed. My success is measured in how few systems I see returned to my desk, not how much money I can scam from uneducated PC users.

I hope with the arrival of Windows 8's restore and refresh features we see a better way for performing maintenance and service on PCs in the future.

The less systems we have going into the hands of these Con Men the better.

For those who at the end of this point still cant understand the point, "Find a good decent technician who takes the time to explain things to you and will go out of his way to do a good job and not charge you for every little thing."

Resintalling Windows - Do's and Dont's

 

When reinstalling Windows, there are rules, standards and personal opinions. The first two are simple and easy, the last will require a good bit of self restraint.

 

Preparation:

Backup all your/your customer’s files (if they haven’t). Try not to leave any of yours behind or you will be cursing yourself under your breath for quite some time.

 

Get all the drivers together.

For the noobs, they are what’s required to make the different part work at their full potential or work at all in some cases. The can be found at your computer manufacturer’s website under the support section. If you have a custom built system, open the side panel and look at the individual parts and do a Google search for the model numbers on the parts. You should find a link to the manufacturers site and the link to download the driver should not be too far off.

(While you’re in there you could dust it out with a clean soft brush or can of compressed air, your choice. I do it for my customers, I don’t charge but I do mention it so they get a sense of value for money)

 

Installing Windows:

Install Windows, plain and simple.

For the noobs, insert the Windows install disc, use the boot key and boot into the disc and follow the setup. The boot key on different systems varies. Dells are F12 HP’s are F11. You will need to do research on others. Normally on the boot screen when the computer is now powering up, it’s usually written somewhere on the screen for a few seconds. Be quick :D

If you want to segregate your windows from your personal files on separate partitions or hard drives, there is a program that does that, but requires a few small steps before you start installing drivers and software.

Windows Profile Relocator

After Windows is done installing, install those drivers you downloaded. Make sure you get all of them. You can tell if you missed any by “right clicking” on “My Computer” and hit “manage”. Select “device manager” and there will be a yellow triangle exclamation mark by any hardware that didn’t have its drivers installed.

Next step, install all available Windows updates…. ALL OF THEM. Don’t give the bad guys an opening to blackball you.

Avoid and hide the Windows Activation Technologies update if you are running a pirated copy of windows.

Concerning an antivirus, Microsoft Security Essentials is the go to AV for me. The definitions are updated a few times a day and there are no heuristics but this also means you almost never see false positives like AVG and Avast!. It does deal with rootkits which the other free AVs do not. It’s also ridiculously lightweight and did I mention it’s free? It’s also based off of the engine behind Microsoft’s Forefront enterprise class, near bulletproof security platform.

 

The hard part:

Different technicians like to do installs a little differently but there is one golden rule, LESS IS MORE. Don’t install every ROM you have collected in the last 20 years, don’t install 10 different calculator application. Don’t install 8 different media players.

We have the internet, ROM encyclopaedias are pointless.

You get the idea.

Pick the best of the best and install that.

Two or three web browsers are a good idea in case the others stop working. Java, Flash install them and make sure they are set to auto update.

Media Players are Awesome, but for the average user, Windows Media Player is just fine. Install a basic codec pack like Win7 Codec Pack or Vista Codec Pack (also works on XP) by Shark007 and this will allow every file format know to geekdom to play back in Windows Media Player.

Ask what services the person uses, Yahoo, Windows Live, Google, and install the corresponding suite.

Context menu items, disable as many of them where they don’t make sense. The Nvidia ATI and Intel graphics managers, put the icon in the system tray and disable the context menu entries to launch them. This keeps context menus clear and helps them appear faster. Use a program like “Shell Extension Viewer x86/x64” to do it for programs that don’t give an in program option to disable context menu entries. I recommend you do this especially for apps like Winzip and 7-Zip that add nearly 10 extra item to the context menu for their one program.

 

What’s in your startup?

Hit the “Start Orb” type “msconfig” right click on the result and choose “run as administrator”. Go to the “startup” tab and deselect any programs that you don’t want to run on startup. If you don’t know what it does, Google the file name and you should find out. Some of these are necessary for windows to run so don’t disable them willy nilly. This should reduce the time it takes for Windows to go from the Welcome Screen to being usable.

There are one or two other apps you can install for the user’s benefit such as Paint.NET, a good simple free video encoder like Freemake Video Encoder. A simple DVD/CD burning program like Nero Burnlite Free. Install a pdf reader that doesn't have all the hooks for the PDF format to mitigate the chance of a malformed PDF exploiting the PC. Sumatra, Foxit are good ones among some others. If you know that your customer is interested in certain things, like say video gaming, install Steam and teach them about it. If they like video editing, sit for 5 mins and show them how to use Windows Live Movie Maker (an excellent piece of video editing software)

As a technician, there are things you need to do for your customers that will keep them coming back to you for all their computer needs.

I have to Rename all of that; WTF?

The Problem

So you just went on that vacation, and you just got carried away taking lots of gorgeous and not so gorgeous photos. You went through them and sorted them out, all you have left to do is rename them. Hold on, don't you have 600 photos from that vacation left?

The Solution

Well an easy solution to that problem is a tiny yet powerful program called A.F.5 Rename. This little wonder can let you rename however you want. Start with a “string” such as [My vacation photos] and end with a “counter” that will number all the photos. Simple and easy.

Hey you know that anime series with 500 episodes that you downloaded from 12 different fan-sub groups, each with its own style of naming the files, this program can also rename those files and make them presentable and organised.

Cheers    ^_^

Video Conversion… SUCH A PAIN!!!!! The basics

Alrighty, its been a while since my last post. However I’m going to delve into the world of video encoding/transcoding. This is a pretty lengthy and complicated topic so I’ll try and make it as digestible as possible.

To start with, everyone has noticed that at the end of video files are extensions like .AVI .MP4 .MKV .MOV .WMV. However these are not really the actual video formats. These are just containers that hold the actual video file along with an accompanying audio file and in some cases additional files besides audio and video. These two or more files are held in the container file. So inside the .AVI file one should find a video and audio file. The files were muxed together by a program into the .AVI container file.

.AVI is one of the oldest containers, having originally been developed my Microsoft, its full name is actually the “AUDIO VIDEO INTERCHANGE”. Within this container the video file and audio files can actually be a multitude of formats. The audio can be anything form .AAC to .MP3/.MP4/.OGG/.FLAC. The same goes for video which can be .MPG/.MPEG/.DIVX/.XVID etc.

With the .AVI container being as old as it is, it actually has some limitations to it. For instance, it can only hold two items in it, a video and audio. Say you wanted to have a video and 2 audio files, each in a different language, it would be impossible, and more so, if you wanted to add a subtitle file your out of luck. With .AVI it is also incompatible with some of the newest video formats such as H.264/X.264. As such its loosing its relevance slowly but surely.

To deal with the situation, there are newer containers such as .MP4 and .MKV to the rescue. .MP4 is fully compatible with H.264/X.264 and .MKV having the ability to have multiple video files, audio files and subtitle files on one container!!!!! Basically more than two at a time.

.MKV created by the Matroska Foundation is a technological marvel and is completely open source (which means it was developed for free and is available to use for free) However the number of devices and programs that support it is near zero. However with the latest news from the format front saying that DIVX has chosen .MKV as the new container standard for their wildly popular video format due to it greater abilities, more devices will emerge with support for it.

Devices such as the PS3 and XBOX 360 that are fully DIVX certified will have to update their firmware to support the new DIVX standards and stay fully DIVX certified. So with time there will come support for .MKV on more devices, but for the moment all DIVX devices are only able to see DIVX video if it’s encoded in a .AVI container.

So in all there are way to many video formats and standards to cover in any one post. However I will cover the most useful and popular ones that are of the most benefit and the best programs to do the Video Encoding Job!!!

Linux, the future? (Updated 16/01/2010)

Alright, so we’ve all heard about Linux, its the great free operating system that charges you nothing and can perform miracles. Well that may be overstating it a bit, but the truth to the matter is its actually quite useable. I’ve been going into 2 main operating systems; Ubuntu 9.10 and Linux Mint 8 for some time now and I have been playing around with them. To be honest both are fantastic. The KDE4 desktop environment in Mint is really good, and it feels a lot like Windows in a very good way Gnome looks a bit homely. Gnome in Ubuntu is really customisable and it works really well espically after I tweaked it how you want.

Off the bat, Mint has more codec's than you can shake a mentos filled bottle of soda at. Even X.264 video can be played natively in the operating system and even preview thumbnail are generated. (I managed to do this without a video driver installed by the way) After i installed the restricted extras on Ubuntu, everything worked pretty well. Open office and some other apps are included along with an array of descent well featured programs.

So i got my new desktop and i put Linux, specifically Ubuntu 9.10 on my Vostro 1500. I was really surprised at how quickly files copied because on Windows Vista/7, files copied to my USB Memory Stick at 10mb/s, but on Ubuntu it was 25mb/s .I got rid of it after a week. But the real reason was beacuse, not that the system performed badly or was lacking, but the bundled apps like open office and the media player, were if anything functional, but not very good. They are not really well refined or interesting and Open Office seriously corrupted the Indents and bullet points in all my .docx files when i edited them. I find the fact that the Open Ofiice team is busy tring to emulate the ribbon UI of MS Office 2007 when they cant even get the interoperability of MSO O7 and OO as seamless as possible.

The OS is fine for the most part but Its when the drivers can’t install or a program gives trouble, what do all the help sites say? go to the TERMINAL. Nothing against the terminal, but who wants to use the command line in this day and age? In windows most problems do not require you to use the command prompt, however there are the rare few occasions where you would need to. For the most part, the Linux community is too confusing. At this point they should all get behind one interface and one platform and stay there. As it gains ground then branch off and introduce users to the different flavours. At this point the Linux community needs to create a eye-catching tasteful interface that will draw the user in. Both OS10 and Vista/7 have achieved that, now only Linux is left. PS why is right click drag and drop absent?

Its not that Linux is bad but more like its still lacking and needs work. I tried finding at least one app on Linux to replace each app i use on Windows….not happening. No apps were must have apps and usability and functionality are somewhere between Windows 2000 and Windows XP. It needs work and i hope things with the next release of Ubuntu.

Biggest thing, there needs to be a singular standardised way to install applications and drivers and it must be easy to run the setup with root/admin privileges without going into the terminal.

Peace Out

WTF Winamp?

I remember the first computer i ever got, it was a Windows 98 machine running some odd AMD CPU with an awesome 56mbs of RAM and a whole 8 gig hdd. It even has a 52x CROM!!!

The first thing the happened was my uncle, the family tech guru came over and installed a tonne of software. One of the applications he installed was this odd application that had 3 parts and one of the parts was an equalizer like the one in my dad’s car.

AWESOME!!!!!

What made it even better was that we had a 2.1 speaker system with the computer so it kicked quite a bit. Winamp was a slick app; quick to start up and ready to blast tunes and let me turn the bass up wayyyy toooo loud.

WTF happened to it?

Now its this bloated app with adds from AOL and excessive features that don’t really work well if at all. All the features seem almost like they were designed without Winamp in mind and were slapped on just to say they’re there. Interestingly enough after all this time it still doesn’t differentiate between videos with a .mp4 extension and audio with a .mp4 extension; freakin c'mon!!! Video playback still seems like an after thought even though its been there since Winamp 2. Windows Media Player, you remember that lil ole’ box from windows 95? Yeah that, is actually a better Media Player than Winamp now. While Winamp continued to slap on garbage, WMP focused on the main thing, allowing the user to effectively manage media on their PC. Now look at it, a major media player in the market. Right now Microsoft is refining the formula and making Windows Media Player 12 for Windows 7 which is shaping up to be a potentially lethal contender in the Media Player Market.

Some of the great things about Winamp revolved around 2 things, the plug-ins and the skins. The skins weren’t all that but some skins really made Winamp feel like a brand new application, MMD3 for instance,  Multi Pass and EMP/EMP2 were just amazing to use. The new Bento Skin just makes me want to rip my hair out. For heaven’s sake does everything from the last iteration need to fit into one interface? BLOODY HELL. One of the things that made the original Winamp popular was the flexibility of the interface and the free form factor. At this point i would tell Nullsoft that they should strip Winamp down to a core player leave it as is and develop Winamp 4/6/7 from scratch without any obligations to the previous player or accessories. Hell… why don’t the Nullsoft guys build a new Winamp on the WPF, like Blu did? Not only would they be able to do something unlike anything on the market, they could even return as the innovator and the market leader.

Another big factor was the plug-ins. Every kind of visualization and DSP program you could imagine was there. Sadly now, after windows XP, a lot of them got broke. Iconic plug-ins like DEE and a few others just couldn’t run onthe new OS’. Now we have to use DFX (yuck) and rarely does anyone do anything innovative any more. Yeah there are some equally, if not better plug-ins left; but still, i want the oldies i know and love to work. Maybe, just maybe they should have a hall of fame for plug-ins and the null soft guys should make sure all these oldie Goldie's work on the newest platforms? (Just a random thought)

Honestly, WTF Winamp? Once you were the cool kid setting trends and you were the Media Player everyone wanted to be. Even the haterz loved you. Now you’re fat and old, chugging ice cream on your couch in your middle age all saggy and sad.