The firmware is also notable for enabling support for Nokia's "storage check" Settings app module. This will new module, which provides a partial solution to the "other" data issue will appear in the Settings app when running both the latest firmware and the latest version of Nokia "extras+info" Settings app module.
More details on "storage check" is available in our earlier post:
Storage check, which is specific to Nokia Lumia devices, provides a more detailed breakdown of a phone's internal memory than the existing standard phone storage module. It also allow for users to manually delete temporary files, which should help alleviate the "other" storage issue that sees the the amount of space occupied by "other" files, as shown in the phone storage module, grow over time.
Firmware build process and quality
The speed with which Nokia has moved to fix the connectivity issue is impressive, but the fact it happened at all does raise some questions about the thoroughness of quality control and testing checks on new firmware. Nokia has teams around the world that are responsible for building and delivering firmware for each variant of a device (distinct from the central firmware developments teams). Typically, these firmware building teams will be responsible for all the variants of a device within their own region.
Their job is to cater to local operator configurations, specifications and requirements, which vary more than you might think. For example, there are more than 100 configurations variables that can be tuned in a variant specific firmware. This is one of the reasons that an operator variant, may, in certain circumstances, be "better", in performance terms, than a generic SIM-free variant.
The US AT&T variants have often been the first to receive software updates (e.g. PR 1.1 in December 2012, and firmware 1308 a few weeks ago), but has that come at the price of sacrificing some quality checks? In reality the answer is probably no, but the timing is rather a reflection of the priority Nokia is placing on the US market. Furthermore, some evidence suggest this is a generic 4G connectivity configuration issue and not a variant specific issue. In either case Nokia will definitely want to avoid configuration and/or variant-specific quality issues in future firmware updates.
Availability
The 1314 firmware is now available to all AT&T variants of the Nokia Lumia 920. Once the software update becomes available your device will let you know about any update automatically, but you can also check manually using the phone update module of the Settings app.
The 1314 is very similar to the 1308 update. The key changes are likely to be to the operator and network configuration files, which are usually specific to the device variant. The issue may also be present on other variants (especially those being used on 4G networks, such as EE in the UK), in which case an update for those variants will also be required.