It's... Google Play Music - on your Windows 10 Mobile phone! Which is an impressive accomplishment, dented only by the fact that I've been tracking this UWP application for over a year now and only now with the latest update has it become stable enough to recommend to others. Streaming music from Google's servers, just in case you'd put your music in that other ecosystem?(!)
A couple of years ago I looked at chess games for Windows Phone, looking specifically at playing against the phone's AI and not human opponents. I promised then that I'd do a follow-up or two looking at playing other people online - and here's the first!*
Gameloft has been a huge culprit in recent years for pushing out freemium tat, but they seem to be gradually reigning it in. War Planet Online: Global Conquest UWP is a full Continuum-compatible Windows 10 game for PC form factors and for Mobile and is both hugely ambitious and, for once, not too greedy with real world currency and in-app purchases.
What if... the whole world was USB Type C and 'traditional' USB Type A ports had been long forgotten? Seems very premature, even in 2017, yet many of us only now have USB Type C phones, so why not go all-in on Type C (as Apple did with the 2016 Macbook Pro)? What about your power bank?
I can't believe it took me this long to find Video X Player Pro in the Windows Store. I blame Microsoft - for making (what is now) 'Films & TV' good enough, and the VideoLAN folks for making VLC temptingly good. But the former has a fatal flaw and the latter is fatally buggy (in my continued testing), leading me to look at this old but still updated video solution for both Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 10 Mobile.
I'm always a bit wary of third party web browsers - they're never as efficient and speedy as the tightly coded native alternative (e.g. Edge), unless they pull tricks like content compression and ad blocking. Coc Coc Browser (I'm omitting the Vietnamese character embellishments) is clean and modern but isn't as fast as Edge, confirming my suspicions. However, it's still noteworthy for its fledgling Extension support - with a first party video downloader ('Savior') the headline advantage.
Steve Heinrich and I have been trying out various cases for the new Alcatel IDOL 4 Pro - it's one heck of a droppable phone, so how best to sheath it? The odd camera button positioning, the stereo speakers, the fingerprint sensor, they've all got to be allowed for... I'll add to this round-up in the coming weeks as new options emerge.
As you may have gathered, it's been a frantic fortnight in terms of Alcatel IDOL 4 Pro coverage. With my review parts 1 (hardware), 2 (imaging), 3 (video and multimedia) complete, plus a comparison with the Lumia 950 XL, it's time for my final review part (for now), summing up the phone's day to day performance and helping you decide whether to actually buy it.
In part 1 of this review, I looked at the IDOL 4 Pro's hardware, in part 2 I looked at still imaging, and in this, part 3, I look at video capture within the phone's camera, along with audio recording quality and multimedia playback. The latter featuring the monster stereo speakers, of course, and amazing headphone output too.
A day or two ago I put up an interactive comparison of imaging on the Lumia 950 XL and the new IDOL 4 Pro - the newcomer did OK, but fell short of the gold standard, of course. To at least partly redress the balance, here's a more in depth look at imaging on the Alcatel IDOL 4 Pro, with some of the best shots I've snapped on it so far and some tips and tricks along the way...
