Hot Stuff - Part II

It seems like my fears of taking my broken Nokia Lumia 920 back to the store weren’t unfounded.

As mentioned from my previous article, the phone has been malfunctioning for a while, finally getting dangerously hot on Monday evening. The advice from T-Mobile was to take it back to the store for repair, which I just attempted.

Earlier this morning however, I decided to reset the phone back to factory state before handing it, and all my personal information, over to an unknown person. Unfortunately, on restarting, the phone just hangs at this screen 

I didn’t rush it, leaving the phone for a little over one and a half hours. A soft (or is it hard) reset by pressing the volume down and power buttons at the same time had no effect. Nokia Cares eventually came back to me with the same advice, but by then I had already been to the Stratford EE store…

On arriving at the store an assistant came over to me very promptly. I showed him the phone (still sporting its spinning cogs) and whilst I explained to him how the phone was finding itself in its current state, he barely pretended to listen, but was keen to tell me that they had no loaner phones in the store (OK then, I’ll keep the faulty phone instead then shall I?!!?!?!), which isn’t a problem as I have a few older phones to fall back on.

We removed the SIM card, and he told me he needed the IMEI number, which wasn’t on the SIM tray.

Fair enough.

He went to ask somebody else for a couple of minutes, then returned to tell me there was nothing they could do without the IMEI number, and I should take the phone and box into the Colchester store.

OK, inconvenient, but I convinced him the Stratford store was easier for me (you know, I have this crazy thing called work that tends to take me out of Colchester during the daytime, and would possibly explain why I was wearing a shirt).

Then another member of staff came over, who when questioned, mentioned that because I had bought the phone from that very store, my details would be in the system along with the IMEI number.

Bingo!

But neither my address or name appeared when searching by my postcode, which he was kind enough to show me on the screen. Back to the “nothing we can do without the box” line…

“But you can search under my phone number” I pointed out.

So we did.

I don’t know why I bothered. Results: 0.

What?!!

Guess what, back to the “nothing we can do without the box” line…

No suggestion that we might call the T-mobile service number (150 from a phone) on the off-chance they might have it.

No provision for taking the phone, which they sold me, in for repair (it’s under warranty so would be Nokia’s problem anyway!)

No sir. I have to go back in, wasting another lunch break, and will probably find I need something else they forgot to mention.

Thanks EE. Great service there!

Hot Stuff.

Back towards the mid/latter part of February I upgraded my Nokia Lumia 800 to the (then flagship) Lumia 920, complete with Windows Phone 8. I was very happy with this device and it worked well for several weeks. I’m not going to do a review of the phone hardware or Windows Phone 8 itself as there are plenty of those out there, but here are a very few notable points:

1. I don’t mind the weight of the device. Having upgraded from the smaller Lumia 800, itself no lightweight, the extra weight seemed a fair trade-off for a larger (excellent) screen. It also didn’t feel any heavier than my previous Desire HD, but that had been out of use for almost a year by this point. I suspect that if I had been coming from a similarly sized, but lighter phone, I would have noticed more.
2. The OS takes much longer to boot up than Windows Phone 7.5, which was one of the things I liked most in my older device, especially after the Desire HD got itself into such a state that it would take over seven minutes between turning on to being ready!
3. The new synchronisation software and capabilities were a step back in the new OS. Forget about the Zune name, the actual Zune software used to synchronise Windows Phone 7.x was magnificent and easily better than iTunes. The Desktop and “Modern” versions of the sync software for Windows Phone 8 are embarrassing, even now almost a year after release. Still, at least the phone finally mounted as a normal drive.
4. The OS itself seemed a little buggier. With Windows Phone 7.5 I wouldn’t need to restart for weeks on end, Windows Phone 8 sees me reboot far more frequently; however, this may be explained by the reason I’m writing this post…

My main issue with the phone first transpired when using tethering. On my train journey home I go through several dead-spots where the connection is lost. After a couple of months I noticed the phone would not automatically re-connect to the data connection whist hotspot functionality was enabled. I put this down to a bug in the software, since switching the tethering off or putting the phone into flight mode for a moment (disabling wireless signals) sorted the problem.

Then voice calls would start to drop, eventually refusing to connect at all without “restarting” the radio.

Recently I noticed the phone would fail to connect to 3G signals, and if it was reporting a connection, even a full connection, text messages were not arriving and calls were not being connected. Similarly, data connections for phone apps refused to connect despite the supposed presence of a signal too.

Not good, but things were about to get a little worse.

Quite often, when the phone was apparently working, it would get warm in use, even when doing light browsing. Not always though. And in areas I knew were well covered with a strong signal.

Then in the last week the phone has been getting very hot, to the point where on Monday night it became too hot to hold and I had to turn it off to cool down.

I initially suspected the SIM may need replacing, but yesterday I finally called T-Mobile/EE and walked them through my experience. I was pleasantly surprised when the lady in their help team told me that it sounded like a hardware fault on the phone (normally they make you jump through hoops resetting first) and the overheating issue sounded “dangerous” and advised me to take it into a store to be looked at be the engineers.

So now I need to blank off the phone and probably switch to the old Lumia 800 for a while whilst this is investigated. Hopefully the staff in the store will be as helpful as the advice I was given on the phone and it will get sorted quickly, but I am worried I may be palmed off and told to jump through a bunch of needless hoops.

Hardware faults are going to happen, I understand that and I’m not angry in the slightest. It’s just a shame that I’ve been so worried about the inconvenience of getting this sorted that I’ve delayed doing anything about it for so long.

I’ll let you know how I get on, watch this space.

Oh, and wish me luck!

I Like Chinese…

With all the recent scare stories about the Chinese and others spending untold man hours trying to hack the west (are they scare stories if they are grounded in at least an element of truth), the client I’m currently working for (a large multinational) have recently gone into lockdown mode to prevent themselves becoming victims.

Much of the actions being taken are somewhat sensible; The list of accessible web sites has shrunk (or rather the list of blocked sites has grown), administrator access is being removed from local/desktop machines, USB drives are blocked, only approved software can be installed and used, etc.

All sensible stuff.

Apart from the knee-jerk reaction manner in which it’s being applied is causing serious productivity issues whilst being inconsistent. Let me give you a few examples:

Among the applications being blocked were several tools used by numerous projects to perform development work, for example everything but the latest version of Eclipse, Cygwin, data folders for VM Ware slices, etc.

Then there’s the list of blocked sites, for example Facebook is fine, but MySpace is blocked.

Then there’s the additional issue of locking down the email systems. I’m running Windows Phone, but because they haven’t put it near enough the top of the list for testing (possibly because our user-base is so small) it’s not been certified in time as a secure platform (despite including BitLocker, an AES client, etc.) and so they have introduced the new security, but have to remove my remote access to email, calendars, etc. from the device. Clever.

To be fair, I suppose they are doing me a favour, where in the past I would look at emails and add tasks to my plan outside of work hours, I can no longer do this, so at least I spend less time working for free. Of course the down side is I can no longer refer to my phone to find the details of my next meeting or the phone number of a colleague in an emergency…

I could provide several more examples of how our productivity is being adversely impacted (the on disc encryption has slowed many machines down to a crawl for example, and I can’t view/edit environment variables without an “unlock code” from the helpdesk each time I try), but the issue here isn’t what or why this is being implemented. I can see a need and I agree with most of what is being done, but the implementation has been comically badly done and resulted in hundreds of lost hours.

Essentially the client has done a better job of hacking themselves than most seasoned hackers could have probably hoped for.

God job guys!

At last, a scratch!

I've had a Nokia Lumia 920 since early February, a little over five months, and in that time I've attacked it with all manner of sharp implements to demonstrate the strength of the Gorilla Glass 2 screen. Each and everytime it has come away unscathed.

This morning I decided to wipe the screen with my shirt, in the process catching the cable clip of my Creative Aurvana earphones.

Guess what?

My screen is now sporting a long but incredibly thin scratch. So thin it appears to be totally invisible when the phone is turned on, and you have to struggle to see it with the phone off. But I know it's there...

So it seems that after months of trying I've inadvertently manage to cause some damage by accident, which I guess was always going to happen.

Looks like I'll be needing a phone with a Gorilla Glass 3 screen.

Did somebody say Lumia 1020?

Windows 8 with Windows Home Server 2011

Just a quick one this time…. Hopefully.

After running the "Release Preview" and "Enterprise Trial" versions of Windows 8 over the last several months, I actually managed to get my laptop into a state where I was happy to blank it off and install Windows 8 Pro as its only operating system.

With the caveat that all new Windows installations tend to boot quickly (until you start filling them with… erm… useful applications) I'm impressed with the boot time of the system. This is a two year old laptop with mechanical HDD, yet I can boot to the log-in screen in 19 seconds (of which eleven seconds are taken by the BIOS check). This is fast enough that I'm tending only to sleep the system if I need to keep the desktop state. As a result I'm shutting down now (I used to sleep) in preference - although this is also partly down to the issue that sometimes after waking the machine (from sleep) the cursor tends to be a little erratic.

I'll have more thoughts on Windows 8 over future posts no doubt (but frankly there are enough reviews out there that I'm not going to bother adding to the noise), however in case you were in any doubt: I like the new OS, but I am aware there are issues that need to be resolved, some fairly major.

One thing I am pleased about is the apparent simplicity of adding the Windows 8 laptop to the Windows Home Server backup schedule. This, as you would hope is done exactly the same way as earlier versions of Windows, and seems to be running without issue.

The one thing that has got me puzzled is that I have only managed to connect via remote desktop from the web page once (as in the very first time I tried), after which I get the following error (every time since):

I have no idea why this is happening. I can connect without issue via the remote desktop client. Unfortunately I'm not given an opportunity to fix this issue, and don't know where I should look on the server to make changes. Even Google seems bereft of answers (or indeed questions). No doubt I'll have a poke around, but I'm not feeling confident at this stage.

Other than that annoyance, so far so good. Hopefully my desktop will be converted soon too.

Now to start filling the laptop with crap again!

Close, but no cigar

With the initial underwhelming release of the Microsoft surface (the price is a shade more than I hoped although probably not unreasonable, but with no GPS or NFC I feel there is a missed opportunity), and the general feeling that the next wave of devices should be substantially better, I had convinced myself not to get a tablet for another six to nine months. 

Then Saturday evening I settled down to a little surfing on my more than capable laptop. Five minutes in the screen flickered, then died. 

Bugger. 

Powering off and even removing the battery failed to help, but something odd was happening, the bios and boot loader screens were displaying, but as soon as the OS selection menu should have appeared power to the screen would stop (as seen by that completely black appearance where even the backlight is off). 

This was all very strange and it looked like this would be my third laptop in a row rendered useless by a failing graphics chip. 

So Sunday saw me reluctantly looking over the few details I can find on upcoming convertible tablet/laptop convertibles. 

Nothing I could see grabbed me. Several look good, especially a couple of models from Acer and Lenovo, but nothing without significant compromise from what I have convinced myself I want (not necessarily need). 

I consider myself a power user, and compared to most this is probably true, but I came to a realisation some time ago that for 90% of my usage something way behind the bleeding edge would be perfect. 

I don't play games seriously on my laptop, just the odd puzzler and other simple stuff. In fact the main need I have for a powerful processor is video editing and encoding, along with the ripping of my CD collection, and even most of this can be done adequately on a mid range laptop now. 

I do run many applications concurrently, and being a developer I also need plenty of memory and a decent speed processor, but easily less than I probably think I need. 

What I want is something along the lines of the Asus Transformer line, a mid range Ivy Bridge i5, at least 4 but preferably 8 Gb ram, at least 8 hours real world battery life but the more the better (12 hours or above would make me very happy). But here's the killer - something that docks so I can have the kind of setup that Mike Taulty wrote about. 

It looks like I'm a little too early to get all this in a suitable package. It seems to me that the technology is very close, but not quite there. 

So I started thinking about how I can manage without a proper laptop until something suitable is a reality. I have the Xoom, and whilst this is a marvellous device it doesn't quite tick enough boxes to work all the time, in the same way that a Windows RT device doesn't (think development and video tools). 

All things considered though it looked like the Xoom would need to fill the gap until details of all the release devices were available, possibly longer. 

Then I got to thinking - my laptop actually contains two graphics chips, perhaps one had failed but the other was still working, hence why the initial boot screen displays (although still looking a bit odd that it fails at the OS selection screen). A quick jump to the BIOS revealed I can change the setting for graphics from Switchable to force Discreet, after which I rebooted and everything works fine again, soviet with power/performance being less than optimal now. 

Suddenly, and to more relief than I'd imagined I have a working laptop again, but it has revealed a few things about myself in the process: I've been looking forward to getting a convertible tablet/laptop ever since my last Windows tablet died (from a failing graphics chip) several years ago, and thought I'd rush out and get something as soon as the new devices were released alongside Windows 8. However it appears I'm actually a little more controlled than I gave myself credit for. This is good. 

Or is it just that the devices I've seen so far have just not been particularly compelling? 

Either way, in sure that when a device does eventually come out that meets enough of my criteria, I'll get it. 

But at least now I'll be more sure that the decision wasn't completely rushed

XBox Music - One Month On

As mentioned in my previous post, I've been subscribing to the Zune Music Pass recently, to see how well it suits me and how much use I'll get from it. I have now been subscribing for a little over a month, and as such now seems like a decent time for a quick update on how I'm finding it.


My primary usage has been on my phone. I've been making use of both download and streaming methods of listening. Primarily I will download albums for listening to during my daily commute, but also I've been increasingly streaming music directly rather than downloading.

A nice feature of the Windows Phone client is the ability to save the current track list as a playlist. Doing this doesn't download the tracks, instead it refers directly to the online location of those tracks, which speeds up the entire process should I want to listen again as it avoids the need to search the marketplace first. It only saves a couple of minutes but is very convenient and means I don't have to keep those tracks in my phone memory.

On plugging the phone into my main PC downloaded tracks are copied to the PC library automatically. This isn't quite the behaviour I want but it's not the end of the world. I would guess there is a setting somewhere in the Zune PC software to stop this happening, but it doesn't seem like an unreasonable default. Possibly more of an issue in future will be the fact that this also registers the PC as one of the current download devices, of which you are only allowed a finite amount.

The phone interface is simple enough that it's my go-to device, meaning that so far I have not really made much use of streaming music from the web. I did try this near the start of my subscription and I don't recall it being very impressive. This will be something I'd make more use of if I worked from home, but currently not a high priority.

I encountered an issue a few days ago where the phone seemed to lose track that I am an active subscriber. The effect of this was that every track I tried play only had the option to buy, while streaming resulted in 30 second preview clips. This is exactly the same behaviour you would see if not subscribing. I checked my account status online and everything was active, so it appears to just be a glitch in the system. It's not the end of the world as the problem was sorted the following day, but likewise I believe I have seen this behaviour before, so if it happens too often I'll not be overly impressed.

Saturday also saw me finally renewing my Live gold subscription for the Xbox. I had been sitting on a pre-paid code for this for several months, but not having had the time for online gaming recently I was keeping this until such time as I would make more use of it. The tipping point came when I tried to stream a Zune track from my Windows 8 laptop to the Xbox. Not having an active Live Gold account I suspected playback might be prohibited, but then again for £8.90 a month you'd kind of expect this scenario would be an exception (much like the BBC iPlayer).

Apparently not. What the hell Microsoft?!!!

But with this (not insignificant) downside aside, the interface and playback on the Xbox is great. If available the screen cycles through artist photographs on playing tracks (if not then recent or random album covers from your collection are displayed), and the interface is controllable via Kinect voice and movement. It's all very swish. I've only tried streaming tracks, I don't even recall if there is an option to download locally (see the comments or an update later since I'm writing this on my commute, so can't verify this for sure right now).

Going back to the Kinect integration, this is where the killer feature is also found…. almost.

I can regularly be found barking orders to the Xbox (and amusingly more than once I've heard a call from another room asking "who are you talking to?"), but something I'd never bothered doing is searching Bing via voice. I guess I had nothing to look for in the context of the Xbox. Now I do.

With the Zune app there is an option to voice search Bing for music. Calling something like "Xbox, Bing Squeeze" will then launch the Bing app and perform a search for the aforementioned artist… bringing back a list of results for both music and video. This worked first time for the five or so artists I searched for, but I expect plenty of misheard requests going forward. Either way, this king of thing has been available for some time on the Xbox and other Microsoft technologies like Windows Phone, and is a general reason why I tend not to be overly impressed at Siri. Whilst the Siri integration on iOS is better than much of what Microsoft offers on their various platforms, the Microsoft voice algorithms are some of the best around though.

There are also a couple of clues in that last paragraph that explain why the voice search isn't all it promises to be. It's all very impressive, but the integration is not quite there. When asking Bing to perform a search, you have to (confirm) exit the Zune app, you're then dropped into the separate Bing app that performs the search, then put back into the Zune app to play your final selection. Anyone with experience of switching apps on the Xbox will be painfully aware how slow this process can feel.

It's not the end of the world, but it does take the edge off the user experience. I would like to be able to search and queue up music this way without interrupting playback of the current track. Perhaps this will be improved in the next dashboard update… hopefully.

So looking to the future I see on ZD Net that more details have just been revealed about the Xbox Music service that will be coming to Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and the next Xbox update. Some of the details have left me a little confused at the moment (like exactly what the problem is running the new software on Windows Phone 7, especially when iOS and Android devices will eventually be covered), but I dare say things will be clearer as I read more, so I'll update in a future posting.

For now though I'm pleased to say that I'm making more use of the service day by day, and once the questions of the upcoming changes to the service make sense to me, I can see myself switching to a yearly subscription. I'm also starting to listen to a lot more recent stuff and classic albums I have missed.

Talking of which, right now I need to search for something else interesting to listen to…

Here's a video from Microsoft on the new service.

• Update: It seems the Xbox is getting updated now, with Windows 8 being updated on 26th October and Windows phone soon after release.