920 issues - need a li'l help please

[Nick_1020]

Hi...

I'm new to the forum and also new to WP devices.

I used Symbian for many moons and generally enjoyed how customizable things were as well as having access to some amazing features out of the box. Alas, it was time to move on. I own the Nokia 808 which I think is a hugely impressive phone on the whole, but so few apps and games are being developed and as my phone contract was up for renewal, I decided to go for the 920.

Let me start by saying, that I do like the phone....it's very good but I keep finding little annoyances with it. I'm not sure if I'm expecting too much by comparing certain aspects to Symbian but I think WP8 comes up short in a few areas.

I know I have been spoilt by the amazing camera technology on the 808 with it's oversampling in pureview mode and quite simply breathtaking attention to detail in full resolution but I have to say that I'm a little disappointed with the camera on the 920. The OIS is a good feature and seems to work well enough most times but the general image quality doesn't strike me as that good when I look at the images on my computer and I can notice a bit of noise when I view them on the 920 itself. On the plus side, I have been extremely happy with the lenses applications..they are superb. In fact, most apps I have tried have absolutely pissed on anything Symbian has offered.

I'm also a little disappointed with the browser. It was one of the main things (besides the camera) that I was looking forward to using. The latest Symbian browser just about did a job but it used to close unexpectedly and was a bit slow. IE10 seems very stable and is fast as you would expect with 4G but I'm finding the lack of options a little annoying. Am I right in saying that there is no option to remove cookies, temp files, history and passwords individually? It's either remove the lot or nothing? If that is the case, it's a bit naff in that respect. Being a fella, I occasionally browse websites which are NSFW. I was expecting to be able to clear my history and everything would be good to go but even after doing this, the back key would just go back to a page which shouldn't exist anymore and more importantly, is likely to cause embarrassment! I have to minimise IE10, then launch it again in order to disable browsing back again. Also, how do I go about syncing my bookmarks please? I have hundreds of them and I don't plan on adding them one by one.

Whilst on the subject of syncing, are there any other ways to do it that do not require SkyDrive or the very limited Windows Phone App? The transfer my data app worked eventually but only for contacts/sms which is better than nothing but the contact labels were a little messed up afterwards.

Next up is Bluetooth and NFC. I have been able to pair all of my devices to Bluetooth without any problems but every single time I want to send a file between devices, I get a notification where I have to tap accept or ignore. Is there a way to set devices as trusted so they can send without a notification? As for NFC, I have not been able to get it to work at all. My 808 supports NFC and so does my daughters Nexus 7. When I select tap+send on a file for send to my 808, nothing happens. Same the other way as well. When I try with the Nexus 7, a bookmark seems to be sent but cannot be opened on the Nexus. Is NFC on the 920 only supported by other Lumia devices?

The next area where I am having issues is media playback. I think it's reasonable to expect to be able to tap somewhere on the timeline to move the current playback to that time but it has no effect. The only option available is to tap and hold the previous/next button. This isn't really convenient if I want to track and long way forward or back. Also, how can I create playlists for the 920. I don't really want to sync my entire WMP library as the 920 wouldn't hold all the data for a start and there's music in there that I don't want on my phone. I'd rather be able to create a playlist in a text editor and copy that to the phone and away I go. Each time I have tried that in various formats (m3u, wpl, pls etc) the playlist doesn't appear. It may be down to the playlist format or perhaps the path to the music files. I have been using C:\Phone\Music\name_of_file.extension so not sure if that is right or not. The lack of a file manager on the phone makes it impossible to check a playlist that is created on the phone to inspect the contents.

How do I go about closing an app? I know holding the left key opens the task view but the only option is to open the apps. Do I have to select each app and tap back, back, back, back in order to exit it or is there an easier way?

Not too happy with the notifications system either but someone on the Nokia forum advised that a fix for this is coming.

Any help or advice in coming over the above issues would be great.

I have tried a phone reset already though.

Cheers.

 

[David Best]

im not sure how you would go about syncing your bookmarks and im not sure you can.
syncing files on the phone is a little tricky but when you plug the in to your computer via wire, you can view files because the your computer will see the phone as a another drive and not really a phone, plus im sure you can use windows media player sync videos, pictures, and music but not documents.
when you pair the phone to a headset or keyboard it will automatically connect if both of the devices are on but as for that notifications i think that will keep coming up until Microsoft puts out an update to address it.
im not sure about the nfc problems your having as i have only use it with a galaxy note 2 and it worked fine, but with the music im sure you can make a playlist in windows media player and it will sync over but the only way i know how to make one on the phone is by looking through the music you have on your phone and tapping the three dots at the bottom and selecting the songs you want and tap "add to now playing" then go to the now playing screen and hit the dots again and tap "save as playlist" ..
on the wp8 platform you don't really close apps they just stop running....so i would worry about that just let the phone deal with it but you can have up to 8 apps in a suspend.

i may be wrong on some of thing topics i tried to cover but im sure someone else will help fill in the gaps but i hope this helps

 

[Nick_1020]

im not sure how you would go about syncing your bookmarks and im not sure you can.
syncing files on the phone is a little tricky but when you plug the in to your computer via wire, you can view files because the your computer will see the phone as a another drive and not really a phone, plus im sure you can use windows media player sync videos, pictures, and music but not documents.
when you pair the phone to a headset or keyboard it will automatically connect if both of the devices are on but as for that notifications i think that will keep coming up until Microsoft puts out an update to address it.
im not sure about the nfc problems your having as i have only use it with a galaxy note 2 and it worked fine, but with the music im sure you can make a playlist in windows media player and it will sync over but the only way i know how to make one on the phone is by looking through the music you have on your phone and tapping the three dots at the bottom and selecting the songs you want and tap "add to now playing" then go to the now playing screen and hit the dots again and tap "save as playlist" ..
on the wp8 platform you don't really close apps they just stop running....so i would worry about that just let the phone deal with it but you can have up to 8 apps in a suspend.

i may be wrong on some of thing topics i tried to cover but im sure someone else will help fill in the gaps but i hope this helps

Thanks for the reply.

I managed to find a workaround for the bookmarks. I exported my bookmarks to a single html file, then uploaded it to my website and then pointed IE10 to it and saved it as a favourite. Not ideal but I can live with that for now.

I managed to create some playlists on the 920. I painstakingly selected the tunes in the order I wanted them to appear on the playlist but when saving, it just reverted to alphabetical order. I managed to edit the order via usb cable in Windows Explorer. Again, not ideal but it did the trick. Another little annoyance was when selecting other tracks for a playlist then sending to now playing and creating a playlist, the previous tunes from the other playlist were included so I then had to edit it via Windows Explorer to remove them and then sort the order out again. Very inconvenient. I think it would be great if it was possible to create the playlists on the computer with a text editor or another program and just drop them in the playlists folder. Perhaps that will be possible in the future.

I'm also having a problem with a rogue email notification. My lock screen tells me I have 3 new emails and the associated icon is for my hotmail account but for the life of me, I can't see any new emails in the hotmail folder. I've searched other folders and there is no mail. How can I clear the notification please?

Finally, I'm sure that when I first turned the phone on the battery and signal indicators plus things like the Bluetooth icon were at the top of the screen, but now they're only showing in the lock screen. When I unlock the phone, the icons disappear and only the time remains. Was I imagining the icons staying before?

Thanks again for the help.

 

[Nick_1020]

Discovered that I can swipe down to bring the battery/signal/connections notifications back. I can live with that.

 

[vlad0]

Symbian and WP couldn't be further apart in terms of how they function, and what they offer overall.. so the switch is always going to be tricky at first, especially until Microsoft adds more features to WP..

I never understood how Nokia expected their Symbian users to switch to WP.. its a fundamentally different OS, and I can't say that its better in every way.. its just depends on your usage and needs.

I'm a little disappointed with the camera on the 920.

Coming from an 808, no matter what phone you choose, you will always be disappointed with the camera. Just wait for the next camera centric WP, rumor has it that it will be better than the 808

 

[Nick_1020]

Symbian and WP couldn't be further apart in terms of how they function, and what they offer overall.. so the switch is always going to be tricky at first, especially until Microsoft adds more features to WP..

I never understood how Nokia expected their Symbian users to switch to WP.. its a fundamentally different OS, and I can't say that its better in every way.. its just depends on your usage and needs.



Coming from an 808, no matter what phone you choose, you will always be disappointed with the camera. Just wait for the next camera centric WP, rumor has it that it will be better than the 808

Cheers vlad0 (the same one as from DM forums??).

I appreciate the differences between OSs but my main gripe with WP8 is that it's not very user friendly for some things. Some of the things missing are pretty basic in terms of convenience. We have Android (phone and Nexus 7), iOS (iPod Touch), Symbian (N8, 808) and WP8 (920) devices in the house and only the latter is unable to sync bookmarks. Only the latter requires me to 'accept' every single file transfer via bluetooth. Only the latter makes closing running apps awkward. AFAICT, only the latter makes it impossible to track forwards and backwards on a media file by touching the timeline. Even though only 3 devices support NFC, it's just the 920 that doesn't seem to work for for NFC.

I do like the phone, very much in fact, but my enjoyment is sometimes being hindered by inconveniences in certain areas that are kinda basic for mobile devices.

The positives outweigh the negatives though. It's a great phone and the apps and games I have tried are brilliant. WP8 and beyond is exciting but really wish the little things were tidied up before it was released.