Could I Switch? - Upping the Ante

It looks like I'll get this speculation into a higher gear as I now have a high-end Windows Phone device in use. My company-issued phone changed from Lumia 800 to Lumia 925, so now I can actually enjoy all the camera goodies Nokia has to offer.

The device is also equipped with quite a bit larger screen than what I've used so far in phones. Lumia 800 was 3,7", 620 3,8", and the iPhone 5 4", so the 4,5-incher in the 925 is quite a step up. Having used the device for little over a day now, it's already making my Lumia 620 and iPhone 5 feel somewhat cramped. However, despite the increase in screen size the device doesn't feel that bulky in my hands. Kudos to Nokia's design folks for that. The added screen real estate is really welcome since now e.g. the lack of an official Google+ app is much less a problem as using the web version is much more tolerable compared to my previous Windows Phones.

I've been playing around with the camera apps and it seems like I need a little more time for mastering the features available in them, but the overall camera functionality looks quite promising even though the camera is not 1020 grade. It's still quite a decent snapper and the software features provide quite a deal of extra flexibility.

Maybe I'll have to invest in a wireless charging cover and a wireless charger to test out also that feature. It could be useful as currently my desk is a horrible mess of wires. A little less of that wouldn't hurt.

Withdrawal Symptoms

It looks like I'll be without a Windows Phone 8 device for at least a few days as I borrowed my Lumia 620 to my niece while taking her iPhone 4S with shattered screen to be taken into service (there are more and cheaper repair shops where I live). This means I had to pop my work SIM back into the company-issued Lumia 800, and if WP8 feels limited every now and then, just try using a WP7 device after getting used to WP8. There's nothing here! No Here Drive+, just Nokia Drive. 6tag? Not going to happen. Kid's Corner? Nope. And the list goes on and on.

Now the most relevant question is that can I wait to get my 620 back or will I go and buy a better WP8 device before that. Especially the 925 has been quite lucratively priced lately...

Fortunately I have my iPhone, too. I wouldn't tolerate having just a WP7 device as my only phone since that means I'd be locked out of way too many nice apps. The WP8 non-upgrade was a real death blow to many otherwise fine handsets.

Could I Switch? - But Do I Have To?

One of the reasons I started pondering about possibly switching my daily driver phone to a Windows Phone device was the seemingly superior cameras available in the top range Lumias. However, in various tests it has become clear that the camera improvements in the iPhone 5s are rather remarkable, too. So I might be able to gain a clear improvement to my phone's camera just by upgrading my iPhone 5 to iPhone 5s and avoid all app replacement issues I'd have with a Windows Phone.

However, I'd still like a larger screen as well. There are rumours about the iPhone 6 having a larger screen (or at least a larger variant being introduced alongside a device much closer to the current form factor), but even if those rumours turn out to be true, the device is still almost a year away provided that Apple sticks to their typical release schedule. If the iPhone 5s had a larger screen, I think I would've got one already as the camera improvements in the current 5s would be welcome indeed. Sure the megapixel count is not Lumia 1020 grade and there aren't that many manual controls or as extensive options for re-framing and zooming the picture after taking it, but for instance burst mode and dual-LED flash would be welcome alongside one of the areas where the 5s beats Lumia, and that is the speed of actually getting the camera app ready to shoot. However, maybe Nokia or Microsoft improves the startup speed with some future software update. In that case the Lumia 1020 could become rather irresistible.

Tough decisions, especially when you don't quite have the funds for two flagships.

It's Been a Busy Week

Whoa, such a week regarding my points of interest. During the same day (at least when Finland's time zone is considered) we got both Nokia's and Apple's new product releases and especially due to the latter event I've been busy reconfiguring my main desktop computer (Mac mini) as I decided to take the nuke & pave route when Mavericks was introduced. For after all, my system had gone through a couple of OS upgrades with the same base installation and during that time I've installed quite a deal of apps and utilities I no longer use, so resetting the whole thing was not a bad idea and an OS upgrade is a logical point for doing that.

In addition to everything Apple released, I also finally received the Office 365 package I bought at discount from Stockmann's Hullut päivät sales. There were some issues in getting the proper Mac version, though. As I live in Finland, the office.com site assumed I want the Office suite in Finnish. Well, I don't. Now don't get me wrong, I love our beautiful language, but it's just not the preferred language of computing for me especially when something goes wrong. You just get so much more relevant search results when searching with the original English error message compared to whatever localized variant there might be. Unfortunately the office.com site lost all the platform info when I tried to switch my Office for Mac to be downloaded in English instead of the default Finnish and it offered me an exe file instead of a dmg, and I guess most of those who are still reading this blog are perfectly aware of how unlikely exes are to work in OS X. I contacted Microsoft support about the issue and they were polite and helpful and told me that they're aware of this and the website is being fixed. Unfortunately the schedule for the fix seems to be that of a large corporation, so it's still not there. Luckily I found out that Chrome has a kind of a Fiddler equivalent built in at chrome://net-internals/. So I just analyzed my web traffic when downloading the default Finnish Office from office.com, found out what's the actual download URL and switched the language code from fi-FI to en-US. At least now I could get the language I wanted in the first place. However, I'd still prefer Microsoft fixing their site instead of having to do it the hard way.

What comes to Nokia's releases, I'm not that interested in the massive phablets they released (1520 and 1320) as I just don't find the form factor to be practical for my use. Sure, I'd like a larger screen than what I have currently, but 6" is just overkill. The 2520 tablet seems otherwise interesting, but I'm still a bit wary of Windows RT. But you have to give credit to Nokia for including LTE (or any mobile data) support, which is a glaring omission in the Surface 2 and Surface 2 Pro. In fact, the most interesting part of the Nokia announcement for me was the apps that are coming to the Windows Phone platform. For after all, while 6tag is an excellent alternative, there's just something about having the official app, and we're actually getting the official Instragram for Windows Phone in the following weeks. Maybe Dropbox will finally get their app out, too?

Could I Switch? -International Edition

Could I switch? Yep, at least my blog to English. I started this blog in Finnish, but as I've recently connected my Blogger account to Google+, announcements about my blog posts are seen also by the many non-Finns who have me in their circles, so I thought it would be better if also they would have a better grasp of what I'm writing about. I'm also quite confident that all my Finnish readers (yes, both of you) speak good enough English not to care which language I'm writing in. In addition, as my blog has been focusing mainly on Windows Phone lately, I thought it would contribute more to the community if my output were in a little bit more universal language. Assuming that someone cares about what I have to say, that is.

With the formalities out of the way, let's sum up my previous Could I Switch? (Voisinko vaihtaa?) posts. I've had an iPhone as my daily driver ever since it became available in Finland with the launch of iPhone 3G and since the exclusive carrier back then was not the one my employer was using, I couldn't put my company-issued SIM into the iPhone and be done with it, but I've been carrying two phones with me ever since instead. First the company phone was a Symbian device, but we went to Windows Phone when they launched in Finland. I was interested in the fresh Windows Phone 7 platform right from the start (something that can't be said about the old Windows Mobiles), and despite the numerous disappointments (app selection, WP7 non-upgrade to WP8, etc), I actually invested my own money into upgrading my work phone to WP8 in the form of Lumia 620 since my company-issued WP7 Lumia 800 was not yet due for an upgrade. Now that I've seen the WP8 platform slowly evolve and Apple having some quality concerns as of late, I've been toying around with the idea of possibly changing my daily driver phone to be a Windows Phone 8 device. This doesn't mean that I would've decided to ditch the iPhone. As a hobbyist musician there are just way too many music creation apps that aren't and probably won't be available on other platforms anytime soon, so I'll have also iOS devices in my arsenal well into the foreseeable future. However, my everyday smartphone could be something else if a good alternative comes up, and I've been eyeing higher-end Windows Phone 8 devices lately. So this series of blog posts has been about me pondering about the issues related to possible switch.

Currently the major issue blocking the possible switch is apps, but after going through my mostly used apps, it turned out that I'm mainly missing Google apps (such as Google+) and Dropbox. Almost everything else is covered and some areas (irssi via SSH for example) are actually better on WP8. Then there's also the slow delivery for OS updates, which was tackled shortly after the blog post with the Preview for Developers program, so just a couple of weeks after finally getting GDR2, I'm actually running Update 3. Nice. Listening to podcasts in my car via Bluetooth is the only major gripe in addition to apps. At least on my Lumia 620, Bluetooth was completely broken in GDR2, but seems to be much better in Update 3. However, it's not still iPhone reliable, but since the podcasts app (WPodder) was updated in the middle of my tests, the jury's still out on that one.

If anyone reading this has had similar thoughts about switching, I'd like to hear how it turned out for you.

Voisinko vaihtaa? -Bluetoothista taas

Aiemmassa postauksessa haukuin Bluetoothin toimivuuden etenkin GDR2/Amber-päivityksen jälkeen, mutta nyt jo ennakkojakelusta saatu Update 3 (entiseltä nimeltään GDR3) näyttäisi korjanneen yhtä sun toista. Tänään automatkalla testattuna Cara toimi kuten pitääkin myös pysähdyksen kera, joten nyt odotankin jännityksellä, että mitä tapahtuu kun aamulla kytken Caran päälle ja käsken sitä aloittamaan toiston. Voisiko jopa käydä niin, että podcast jatkuu Lumialta kuten iPhonelta konsanaan? Se selviää reilun 8 tunnin kuluttua.

Voisinko vaihtaa? -Lisää käyttöjärjestelmästä

Juuri kun pääsin valittamasta Windows Phonen päivitysten jakelusta, niin Microsoft julkistaa tiedot GDR3:sta, joka tunnetaan nykyään nimellä Update 3. Muiden muutostensa ohella Update 3 tulee nimittäin jo ennakkojakeluun kaikille kehittäjätunnukset omaaville. Minulla on nykyään 19 taalaa maksava kehitystunnus hankittuna, mutta esimerkiksi Paul Thurrottin mukaan myös ilmainen App Studio -tunnus riittää tähän. 

Tämän ennakkojakelun myötä poistuu yksi minua pahiten hiertäneistä ongelmista Windows Phonen kanssa ja toimintoa pitääkin testata mahdollisimman pian, joskin ei ehkä vielä tänään kuitenkaan. Jospa tässä vähitellen nähtäisiin myös niiden puuttuvien sovellusten esiinmarssi. Mukavaa kuitenkin nähdä, että ongelmakohtiin puututaan.