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iphone money

Nokia Lumia 1020 – Why I kept it

I have a debt to reality that I am very late to pay back.

I kept my Lumia 1020.

WP_20131229_11_18_26_RawWhy? Because it’s love. And when you love a device – you accept its flaws. And the camera over-compensates for many things.

So its email capability, battery life and overall lack of novelty apps suck. But it is just a piece of hardware that you love and enjoy. I will not go at length into everything I love about it, but it’s just different enough, fun enough and great enough in some things that I kept it.

And while I am still out to find a car charger that can charge it faster than it discharges its battery while using the GPS and Bluetooth, while the camera is not fast, and while many things drive me mad – I love it. That’s all. So there. If you used it for a couple of weeks, you too will find it difficult to return.

Debt paid.

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iphone mobile

Nokia Lumia 1020: The Windows Phone experiment and why I am not keeping it

The Lumia 1020 is a great device. I am also going to try and return it.

The camera is awesome. The operating system is really nice. In my opinion Windows Phone is in many areas superior to iOS 6 and probably looks better than iOS 7.  There are a lot of smart features (People app), and on the Lumia 1020 the terrific screen and fantastic camera make it a very compelling, high quality device.

There are unfortunately several things that together make this a device that falls short for my needs.

  1. Email and Calendar – While my micro-business uses Office 365 and I still stick with Outlook on both the Mac and Windows, Windows Phone’s email app is just good. The fact you cannot reply to an email in the quoted section, that you must have meeting attendees in your contacts list – are both mindless and disappointing.
  2. Facetime-equivalent – Skype is a great app. I could not get it to video-conference properly with iOS (which my family uses) and as such, it’s a knock on the phone.
  3. Photo syncing – So you have a terrific camera. There is no way to get the full-resolution files off the camera without a sync to your computer. Yes, 12MB per photo is a lot but WiFi can do that. Furthermore, this would have been easier if the Windows Phone app – on Mac or PC – was better. You can either fully sync the device (bi-directionally, mind you) or pick files. I am fine picking files, but you cannot even pick photos – it’s a file list which you cannot sort by date. Luckily the file names have the date in them but is this 2013 or 1989?
  4. Apps – yes. There are too few of them. While there are great ones – 6tag, the People app (again), and there many apps that were ported to the device, you are not where things are happening. There is no Dropbox (you can use Microsoft Skydrive or a very decent API client like Filebox) or YouTube, or a decent web video player. The new-new is not on Windows Phone.
  5. Too many photo apps – Difficult to knock on the phone with the best camera period but there are too many apps there to make it a seamless experience.
  6. Mobile web – Internet Explorer on Windows Phone is more than perfectly decent. It’s actually pretty good. But again – mobile sites don’t necessarily aim to support mobile IE. They normally gear to support the HTML5 Safari likes, and since this is not Safari, things are a bit subpar.
  7. Windows Phone – Microsoft shows it wants to support Windows Phone by acquiring Nokia. But how long is Windows Phone 8 going to be supported? Is the 1020 going to be upgradable (a la Apple) or is it going to be dumped on an older OS (Lumia 800 anyone)? And now there’s talk Windows RT will make its way to phones. Windows Phone is great, but certainty would have helped and Microsoft, with a new CEO coming and god knows what changes, is not making matters clear.

If I did not need the best email and calendaring possible, have a family with lots of Facetime users and were taking many many more photos than I do now, I would keep it. But right now, I don’t think it is the right companion for the next couple of years. I love you but…

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Analysis ios iphone mobile

Is Apple’s updated Game Center about to nibble at the heels of the XBOX?

One the items that caught my eyes in Apple's WWDC demos was the gaming extension that was layered onto the Apple TV box. Games enabled with Airplay can now mirror and even display separate content on the TV. Think of it as your iPhone and iPad as the controller but also as the gaming machine beaming the game onto your HD TV screen. Demos also showed four iPhone users playing concurrently on the same TV screen, competing with each other. Apple is not making a lot of noise about this yet – as iOS 6 is not out. But the implications can be huge. Graphics and computing power on the iPad and iPhone are respectable to say the least. Kids and adults alike are moving off of Nintendos and Playstation Portables (ok, fewer of those) onto iPod Touch, iPhones, iPads because the games are there and can do more than what they do on the platforms. The Kindle Fire and other Android devices are successful in this domain. But the Android horde lacks the bridge to the big screen that Apple TV brings to the fore with a $100 entry fee (beyond Samsung TV's built-in connectivity). Apple TV Airplay-enabled Game Center will use the iOS device as controller with the accelerometer and also as a second 'private' screen for the player using it. This is like having a Nintendo Dual Screen device where the game screen is 40", 50", 60" big. The local screen, on the iOS device, acts as the private control view. XBOX is built into the Windows Phone platform. But Microsoft did nothing to make it interesting beyond messaging for gamers. There are no mobile, GPS or context-enabled extensions for the XBOX games you love. You cannot use the phone as controller either. Who knows, maybe now the creativity will strike and this will happen. And nobody knows how the next iPhone or Apple TV will take this even further. Fun stuff.

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