Having decided a year or two ago that we can talk about unreleased products on AAWP, provided that there's enough evidence to support them, and with a wave of confirmations about an imminent Lumia 950 and 950 XL (note the next-gen renaming, signifying a generational jump from the current x40 devices), along with most of the specifications, it's time to look at what the new devices will bring to the table, over and above the existing Lumia 930 (the '2014 flagship', if you will) - which itself will get Windows 10 Mobile within a couple of months.
One subject that we've never covered here on AAWP is the 'quiet hours' feature that debuted with Windows Phone 8.1 - something I realised when sitting in a car park after midnight waiting for my daughter's train to arrive and not realising that she'd been trying to call me for 15 minutes but my Lumia had muted her because it was past 00:00 and so 'quiet hours' was in place (to help me sleep!) Determined to fix things, I did so - and noted in the process that, on the new Windows 10 Mobile, the 'quiet hours' settings are slightly hidden. Making a beginners tutorial all the more appropriate.
The titular question was from an extended family member on Saturday and followed an afternoon of similar enquiries and expressions. You see, it was the school summer fayre, the sun was beating down, photo opportunities were everywhere and yet tricky at the same time, and somehow I managed, thanks to the unique hardware in the Nokia Lumia 1020. We. Need. A. New. Imaging. Flagship. A real one. With Xenon. And all the trimmings.
It's an aspect of Windows Phone that has never been fully clear, and not helped by the fact that behaviour seems to change slightly with each new OS release, hopefully in a positive direction, with the goal being that you can drop and smash your smartphone (by accident!) and simply buy a replacement, sign in to your Microsoft account and have everything restored automatically without you having to lift a finger in terms of seeking out applications, settings and passwords. Although not approaching iPhone-levels of perfection, Windows Phone has been getting much better, but the question remains: how much actually is being backed up on your phone - wouldn't it be nice to have a statistic that you could look at? Turns out that there is!
Yesterday, I looked at the performance of Windows 10 Mobile (at least, at the current build) in terms of RAM, and concluded that, web browsing aside, the user experience on devices with 'only' 512MB (of RAM) was going to be absolutely fine. Perhaps more serious is the situation with respect to the chipsets used under the hood, with so much of Windows Phone 8.1 and beyond optimised for the Snapdragon x00 series - just how slow are the 'S4 Plus' series (Lumia 520 right up to the 1020) going to get with Windows 10 Mobile and how much of a problem will it be?
With Windows 10 Mobile coming to virtually all Windows Phones over the next few months as an over-the-air update, seemingly independent of RAM and specs, it does beg the question of how much will be sacrificed in terms of day to day experience on the lower end phones. With this in mind, I've been benchmarking the top end Lumia 1520 (2GB RAM, Snapdragon 800) and the budget Lumia 630 (512MB RAM, Snapdragon 400) for various common operations, both with the latest (pretty stable) W10M build.
There are, of course, lots of ways to upload photos, lots of places to share them from - but one which has stood the test of time, in terms of users and support, has been Flickr, now online for more than a decade. Even better, the 'groups' facility means that, in addition to simply searching Flickr for a particular phone name, you can also browse through, or be part of, a particular community for a specific camera phone. With the emphasis for many Lumia Windows Phones on imaging, this provides a great way to see what others are doing with the same hardware as you, and to share yourself and find out what others think of your Lumia-shot photos.
Now, this isn't that common, but it happened to me - my OneDrive client, even on my recently reset Lumia 930, started playing up on Windows Phone 8.1. Essentially it had stopped showing any photos after a certain date, even after restarting the phone, trying to sync by adding new images, and so on. It was well and truly stuck. Happily, I also subsequently hit upon the solution, of which you might like to make a mental note.
Having lost count of the number of people saying how much they were looking forward to putting Windows 10 Mobile on their Lumia 1020 - and then seen equally as many people say they were dreading it, I thought a FAQ was in order. What will you, and won't you gain from the the step change in the OS, in terms of experience and - crucially - in terms of imaging, this being the 1020s core speciality.
Playing with Windows 10 Mobile as my primary smartphone platform, I'm struck by how 'grown up' it feels. Partly this is because I'm using the Lumia 1520 with its 6" 1080p screen, but partly it's because this is, at heart, a desktop-class OS. Below, I list some of the more impressive aspects of Windows 10 Mobile, as at build 10149, reported on here. Is the OS ready for the mass market yet? Absolutely not. Is it ready for use by someone who knows how to work around the odd glitch? Definitely. Plus there's a real sense of community to how the Feedback and Insiders programmes are being handled, each of us really can have our say.
