I've simplified the title slightly, of course. The Lumia 950 wasn't a 'Nokia' product, but a Microsoft branded one by the ex-Nokia engineers. Still... the last one, the Nokia 9, is named accurately, though it's the 'new' Nokia under HMD's management. Everything's 'bought in', with the imaging here licensed from Light, though HMD is keen to apply the old 'PureView' brand. Ensuring that yours truly resurrects the PureView classics of old to carry out a detailed camera (stills, video may come after) comparison. Let the PureView battle commence!
Twitter is a fascinating IT case study - started as a fully open social network focussed on very short status updates, it was destined to be 'the dial tone of the Internet', the way every person can contact and follow every other, with minimum bandwidth. But its openness meant that most activity was accomplished by third party clients and at some point Twitter woke up and wondered how it was going to make money, in order to survive. At which point its APIs started to contract - in 2019, the vast majority of Twitter access is via first party clients and the Web, meaning that it's in control of ads and sponsored posts and the like. But what of accessing Twitter from a Windows 10 Mobile phone after the API clampdown last summer?
For the last six months (at least) the Wileyfox Pro (WFP, for short!) has been the only Windows 10 Mobile smartphone that's still available to buy 'new' in an official capacity. It's still available today, in March 2019, amazingly, with a dozen or so kept in stock at any given time by Wileyfox, it seems. I was impressed by quite a few aspects of the WFP when I reviewed it, despite the budget specs - but the big question is how well does it perform with a year of Windows 10 Mobile branch and Microsoft core UWP application updates under its belt? I investigate...
My initial analysis of photo samples from the new Nokia 9 PureView and the classic Lumia 950 received a mountain of comments, not least because of the terrible performance of the '9' in very low light, at night. A common objection was 'Well, who would shoot photos at night?' and, leaving aside that many people do, for arty reasons(!), AAWP collaborator Mark Swidler and I have done another short photo set, this time with more common light levels: sunny and then dusk. So no complaints about bias against the newcomer this time, please.
It's no secret that phone imaging features online (not least at AAS and AAWP) are hugely popular. And for good reason, we all take loads of photos on our phones and we want them to be the best that they can be. But just how far do we take our definitions of 'best' here? And when we start involving manual/Pro settings adjustment, tripods, RAW files and Adobe Lightroom, haven't we gone a bit too far? Between casual snaps for Instagram and "just take a DSLR instead" there has to be a happy prosumer medium, surely?
The Nokia 9 PureView launched a few weeks back and I've written optimistically about it in my feature 'The importance of zoom, and continuing the PureView brand'. It's not PureView in the traditional sense though, and heck, it's not the same Nokia that launched the original 808 and 1020, so maybe I was getting my imaging hopes up too much? AAWP regular and Nokia/Lumia old-hand Mark Swidler has leapt in with photo samples and comparisons against the trusty 2015 Lumia 950 PureView.
Last week, I showed how to take an older (pre-2014) Lumia to (almost) the latest Windows 10 Mobile, gaining more working apps and services but hitting some pretty savage caveats, not least the phone's camera being largely inoperative and maps which don't display properly. None of this is too surprising, since these older phones (think Lumia 820, 920 and - yes - even 1020) have never been officially supported under W10M. But, if you did try the newer OS out over the last four years, here are the steps to get back to Windows Phone 8.1 and safety - if not actual current support...
MWC 2019 has wrapped, but not without echoes of MWC 2012, where Nokia took the wraps off something it had been working on for five years, the 808 PureView, much to everyone's astonishment, not least that it ran Symbian, considered 'old' even in 2012. The big reveal was the use of a 41MP sensor, of course - and here I want to reminisce about the aims of 'PureView' and the resurgence of the brand and also the technology. Not necessarily in the same phones!
This may seem a bit niche, but hey, it happened to me. Especially if you have more than one Lumia, you'll almost certainly have played with the Insiders Programme, active from 2014 to 2017, especially in getting an old Windows Phone 8.1 Lumia up to 'Windows 10 Mobile'. Except that the programme is long defunct and the latter may well be stuck on an old and unsupported branch of Windows 10 Mobile. Here's how I fixed it, though note the HUGE caveat at the end!
Back in early 2010 I was part of a panel of people giving feedback on different aspects of phone functions, software and hardware, run on behalf of Nokia. The latter section was about handling a variety of unmarked (non-running) prototypes and saying what we thought about the physicality. Two, in particular, caught my eye, with QWERTY keyboards and slide'n'tilt displays. One went on to become the Nokia E7, running Symbian, the other (larger, which I preferred) went on to become the Nokia N950, running MeeGo. And now, in 2019, inspired directly by these designs, we have a new Communicator, shown off at MWC.
