Spit Shine and polish

[Winphoner]

Repost (I haven't figured out how to move threads, but this is where I meant the thread to be...)

So finally jumped ship from iOS to WP8 a couple of days ago. Got a new Nokia Lumia 920 from Rogers to replace my still smooth iPhone 4. First impressions are great, I love the lumia, and I'm really enjoying wp8. There are a lot of things that it does better than my old phone, and the hardware looks sexy and runs like butter. But over the past few days, I've been using the phone a lot, and noticing a lot of things that seem to indicate a few rough edges and some missing polish.

• No compass on the Nokia Maps! I mean this is not something that's new. Android and apple have had this for quite some time. When walking around in a new city, this really makes a difference.
• Ringer mute does not do a system mute. When I set the phone on silent, it should mean that I don't want it to make noise, not just that I want notifications to be silent. When I open a game, it's blasts at full volume, which is very distracting.
• When on Bluetooth in my car, calls some in and work just fine. But when I try to use the TellMe feature, the responses from the phone are silent. I'm guessing that this is b/c my car has an older BT, but the old iPhone did this correctly, starting a call as soon as you opened the voice dial (pre-Siri)
• Backing out to force close apps is clumsy and not intuitive at all. When doing this from running games, it's just a complete mess, jumping between play and pause.
• Built in screen shot feature always makes a sound, even if in silent mode(I know this is nitpicking, but hey I'm allowed to!)
• Misc: not orientation lock, can't always check the time/network status from all apps, not letters on the lock screen password numpad...

Like I said before, love the phone, but a few things like the above list really give the impression of an unfinished OS. Here's hoping MS address these things and really bring the OS out of its shell.

 

[paulm187]

• Backing out to force close apps is clumsy and not intuitive at all. When doing this from running games, it's just a complete mess, jumping between play and pause.

Nice summary, however I don't get why many people are hung-up about this. We are so used to micro managing our computers we expect to close apps to conserve resources on our phones (granted this was needed in Windows Mobile). Closing these apps has no effect in windows phone apart from a psychological benefit to the user - sort of a palcebo effect. WP manages resources by putting these apps into a suspended state on the back stack and releasing resources as needed. If you really want to manage resources on WP then you should be looking at the background tasks options within the app and in the Settings-->Applications. You can enable and disable apps here from running background tasks on the phone.

 

[philxor]

Yeah it took me a few days but at this point I don't even bother closing anything. Even for apps which aren't saved in the 8-app stack it still saves the previous state.

I was used to task switching quite a bit in IOS and having to close apps due to having a bunch of them open at one time, but WP8 takes me roughly about the same amount of time to find an app and re-open it as using the task switching in IOS.

 

[Winphoner]

Closing these apps has no effect in windows phone apart from a psychological benefit to the user - sort of a palcebo effect. WP manages resources by putting these apps into a suspended state on the back stack and releasing resources as needed. If you really want to manage resources on WP then you should be looking at the background tasks options within the app and in the Settings-->Applications. You can enable and disable apps here from running background tasks on the phone.

While I agree with you in principle, there are a couple of scenarios where force closing some apps makes sense. For example, I want Nokia Drive to run in the background when I'm driving. I want it to be able to help me navigate regardless of what else I'm doing on the phone, and you know what, I used it, and it worked great! But then I reached my destination, and I just have no need for it to run in the background. So ya, I can turn off backgrounding for it... but that complicates the next use of it... why not just let me fully "end" it now, and re-start it when needed? Maybe for some people, this is not a big deal, and while I agree, I just think that it's not so difficult to add a more obvious way of doing something the phone already does.
Couple that with the fact that some apps are badly written, and have known issues with background memory leaks, and it just seems like.... why not just have a way to kill something while looking at all the things that are running?
Love, love, love my L920... just want to love it more...