Achievement Unlocked – Red Lumia 1520

“Red enough for yah?”

One of my New Year Resolutions will probably be to not buy as many gadgets. But the new year starts tomorrow... Which is just as well, as today I took delivery of a totally shiny red Lumia 1520 phone. I’m going to have to sell a few bits and bobs to pay for it but on first impressions it is worth it.

I got the phone off eBay, not something for the faint of heart, but the price was good and I really, really, wanted a red one. It is an O2 model which has been unlocked for all networks, and with one caveat (see later) it works fine with my EE sim.

When Windows Phone first came out the phone I really wanted was an HTC HD7. This had a huge (4.3 inch) screen and oodles of internal memory. Unfortunately, thanks to the antics of a couple of enterprising students, who managed to pop up town and bag the only two launch devices in Hull, I was denied this device and settled for a Samsung that served me very well. Then I moved into Nokia territory and I’ve been there ever since.

The Lumia 1520 makes the HD7 look tiny. It has a huge 6 inch screen that is quite frankly the awesomest I’ve ever seen. However, it is nice and slim and I find it quite pocketable, although until I get a case for it (coming soon) I of course won’t be putting it in any pockets.

It has a socket for an SD card I’ve managed to put 64G of music and videos (including the whole first seasons of “Freaks and Geeks” and “Veronica Mars”) on there. The battery seems to go on for ever and so I can now properly contemplate watching (and enjoying) proper programs on the device. It’s been a long time since I could put all my music and some films on my phone, and I love it. It always struck me as silly that the flagship Nokia devices were the ones that didn’t tend to have sockets for memory cards.

There are a few niggles. The principle one is with the touch interface, which has a habit of interpreting slide actions as taps every now and then. (if you get this you could try turning off the “double tap to wake up” touch option – which seemed to improve things for me). Apparently this is a known issue and Nokia are working on it.

I had to get new nano-sim to replace the micro-sim that I was using before. This cost me ten pounds at the EE store, but they did throw in a sim adapter which means that I can use the new nano-sim in older devices. There are instructions on the interwebs for converting a micro-sim into the nano size, but these scared me a bit as they involve sanding down the card to make it thinner. And of course if I got that bit wrong I could have wrecked the sim and probably got it stuck in the new phone.

Each time the phone is powered on it presents me with an Access Point choice screen which I don’t really need, but this is probably to do with the fact that I’m using an unlocked phone on the “wrong” network.

If it worked with a Bluetooth keyboard (which at the moment fails to pair) it would be completely awesome as a portable productivity device. I really hope that becomes available at some point in the future.

As of now I love the device. Having the extra column of tiles on the start screen means that I can get to pretty much any of my applications without scrolling. I’ve not found the size a problem yet, although I’ve not carried it around too much as I’m still waiting on that case…..

Getting Windows Phone App Reviews

One thing that will encourage potential users of your application is good reviews. However, users are not that inclined to give good reviews to programs, even when they got them for free and have used them many times.

Lee Stott did a great little blog post a while back that shows how to add a review facility to your application. It is very sensibly designed, in that it only nags once, after ten uses of the program, so it doesn’t become a pain for the user.

You could also use the same technique to add timed release behaviours to your application, so that it could suggest new things to do over time.

Morning Light

You get some lovely colours during the sunrise at this time of year..

I took these with the Lumia 1020 phone. I’m needing to get my camera out less and less these days.

Free Windows Phone 8 Book

I’m very pleased to be able to report that my Windows Phone 8 Book (the Blue Book that is a companion to the Yellow Book) is now available for free download from Microsoft Faculty Connection. There are around 250 pages of developer goodness spread over 15 chapters, along with a over 50 demos.

This is the button that you use to download the content. Click on the word Download. You don’t need to be a member of the Faculty Connection to get the content, it should just arrive as one large zip archive with the Blue Book document and all the demos.

Here’s a quick overview:

• Getting Started with Windows Phone
  • The Windows Phone Platform
  • The Windows Phone Ecosystem
  • Windows Phone Program Execution
  • Windows Phone Application Development
• Making a User Interface with XAML
  • Program Design with XAML
  • Understanding XAML
  • Putting Program Code into an Application
• Visual Studio Solution Management
  • Getting Started with Projects and Solutions
  • Debugging Programs
  • Performance Tuning
• Constructing a Program with XAML
  • Improving the User Experience
  • Working with XAML text
  • Using the TextChanged Event
  • Managing Application Page Layout
• Advanced Application Development
  • Data Binding
  • Displaying Lists of Data
  • Pages and Navigation
  • Using ViewModel classes
• Isolated Storage on Windows Phone
  • Storing Data on Windows Phone
  • Copying Files into Isolated Storage
• Using Databases on Windows Phone
  • An Overview of Database Storage
  • Creating Data Relationships with LINQ
• Networking with Windows Phone
  • Windows Phone Network Support
  • Networking Overview
  • Addresses and Networks
  • Creating a User Datagram Protocol (UDP) Connection
  • Creating a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) Connection
  • Reading a Web Page
  • Using LINQ to Read from an XML Stream
• XNA Game Development
  • XNA in Context
  • Making an XNA 4.0 Program
  • Player Interaction in Games
  • Adding Sound to a Game
  • Managing Screen Dimensions and Orientation
  • Using MonoGame
  • Making a MonoGame XNA program
• Using Speech in Applications
  • Speech Synthesis
  • Controlling Applications using Speech
  • Simple speech input
  • Using grammars
• Maps and Location
  • Determining the geoposition of the phone
  • Using the Map component
• Using Bluetooth and Near Field Communications
  • Using Bluetooth
  • The Intercom Program
  • Using Near Field Communications
• How Applications Run
  • Background Processing
  • Adding a Live Tile to an Application
  • File Transfer Tasks
  • Scheduled Notifications
• Marketing Windows Phone Applications
  • The Windows Phone Icons and Splash Screens
  • Preparing an Application for Sale
  • Windows Phone Store
  • Making your Application Stand Out

Enjoy.

Time Travel with Windows Phone

Apparently there are people who will believe that a software upgrade will make your phone waterproof. The “Preview for Developers” application for Windows Phone doesn’t actually turn your phone into a Tardis, but it does allow it download future versions of the Windows Phone operating system for testing. That way you can make your applications work with the latest versions of Windows Phone before they are released to the general public. It also means that you can use upcoming new features like Drive mode and application management.

You can now terminate applications from the the App-Management screen (hold down the Back key to open this). Although why anyone would want to terminate the wonderful VoiceMusic application is a mystery to me.