Lumia GDR2 preview

[DavidinCT]

What happened to the early adopter program ? I wish we could get this now...

I hate the fact that I have to take out my spare phone (HTC Trophy) to listen to FM radio (baseball games) when getting work done in the yard. I just want this update to have FM radio again... and I want it before baseball season is over....Come on Microsoft !!!

and that Flip to silence is a HTC thing....(HTC users Settings>Attentive phone> Flip to mute ringer), So HTC users are getting Nokia features and Nokia users are getting HTC features...

 

[Vb2012]

What happened to the early adopter program ? I wish we could get this now...

I hate the fact that I have to take out my spare phone (HTC Trophy) to listen to FM radio (baseball games) when getting work done in the yard. I just want this update to have FM radio again... and I want it before baseball season is over....Come on Microsoft !!!

and that Flip to silence is a HTC thing....(HTC users Settings>Attentive phone> Flip to mute ringer), So HTC users are getting Nokia features and Nokia users are getting HTC features...

flip to silence sounds more Nokia to me bro

 

[Chand Darling]

Not a major update, Not excited with this update!

We need File manager and a notification center asap!

 

[Vb2012]

Not a major update, Not excited with this update!

We need File manager and a notification center asap!

yes file manager would be cool and toast history notifications this is not Android bru want a real notification go for IOS n android

 

[MikeSo]

OT:

We seriously did not need a kids hub. If you are a parent and can afford to hand your device to a child then you can afford to buy them their own.

Huh? That makes no sense.
What I think they did wrong with Kids Corner was the fact that they designed it as a "lend it to my kid" feature. It would've been much better as a "Guest user" feature. There are lots of times when people want to hand over their phone for someone else to use temporarily (like in a store when scanning Groupons, etc) but don't want that user to have access to the whole enchilada, so to speak. THAT would have been a much cooler feature to advertise - and it would work great for the kids as well.

 

[Arsynic]

Well WP8 OS doesn't do a lot of things that the other OS's do. That's another discussion by itself. There are things that WP8 should have had from the outset but are missing which would have made it a game changer but they failed to realize the potential. The really weird thing I find with WP8 is it almost feels like they didn't investigate what was already out there and just did what they thought was the 'right way' of doing things. Nothing wrong with that of course but I think you should have some idea of features that people want.

This is more MS marketing wanting to include "sexy" features that look good in commercials rather than increased functionality. Kid's Corner looks better in ads than alert profiles.

But I like to give MS the benefit of the doubt. We often forget the growing pains we suffered with when we jumped from Blackberry to Android and iPhone. I moved from webOS to iOS and the "multitasking" in iOS bugged the hell out of me. Then after a while I learned to live with it. I'm having the same shock moving from iOS to WP8. But I'm making due. Having to manually silence my phone at night due to lack of DND is a tough one.

 

[Arsynic]

Not a major update, Not excited with this update!

We need File manager and a notification center asap!

Speak for yourself. I don't want to do file management from my phone. This isn't a tablet. I don't want to deal with files on a phone. This was the most annoying part of Windows Mobile that I'm glad never made it into Windows Phone. Smartphones aren't mini PCs and that's why I can't stand the Android philosophy.

 

[Choco_Lab]

Just give me orientation lock... Please...

 

[theefman]

Nokia as usual bringing the heat, GDR2 by itself isnt as exciting as Nokia's update, lots of new features in Amber, cant wait for that.

 

[androidtoWM]

meh. A notification center and a rotation lock would be nice.

 

[Technoloay]

I got a question for you guys;
The FM Tuner isn't for all the Lumias out there right? (read: Lumia 620)?

 

[Tomanband]

I got a question for you guys;
The FM Tuner isn't for all the Lumias out there right? (read: Lumia 620)?

for all WP8 Lumias except the L620, yes

 

[edoug]

OT:

Huh? That makes no sense.
What I think they did wrong with Kids Corner was the fact that they designed it as a "lend it to my kid" feature. It would've been much better as a "Guest user" feature. There are lots of times when people want to hand over their phone for someone else to use temporarily (like in a store when scanning Groupons, etc) but don't want that user to have access to the whole enchilada, so to speak. THAT would have been a much cooler feature to advertise - and it would work great for the kids as well.

I think what they did wrong here was not putting a data partition here. In Kids corner if I give Facebook or Twitter its MY Facebook and Twitter they see!

 

[N_LaRUE]

Speak for yourself. I don't want to do file management from my phone. This isn't a tablet. I don't want to deal with files on a phone. This was the most annoying part of Windows Mobile that I'm glad never made it into Windows Phone. Smartphones aren't mini PCs and that's why I can't stand the Android philosophy.

I'm not going to go into the whole file manager thing here, there's a thread going if you want to read it.

Let's clear something up. The idea of the smartphone derived from the combination of the 'Palm Pilot' (or similar) and mobile phone. The whole basis was portable computing and all of Nokia's original smartphones were made with that idea in mind. So to suggest that a 'smartphone is not a mini computer' is ludicrous in the extreme. Why have Office on there if it isn't? Also a file manager (or whatever you want to call) is a handy thing to have, just because you don't need it doesn't mean others don't. It also doesn't have to be 'like Android' to be useful.

 

[pankaj981]

^^ Since you are pro file manager, can you tell how are you going to use it use it?

 

[Ultimateone]

Not a major update, Not excited with this update!

We need File manager and a notification center asap!

This was never supposed to be a "big" update, I don't understand why anyone would be so excited over a few small things.

 

[N_LaRUE]

^^ Since you are pro file manager, can you tell how are you going to use it use it?

First let me clarify one thing. I came from Symbian not Android.

The idea of a file manager (or whatever you wish to call it) has several functions and integrates in many ways into the OS. It's not purely about having 'file storage'. In essence I would be using it for a storing files not normally used by the OS. This could be rar, zip or exe files or whatever files the OS doesn't like to use. I would be able to access this file area to email those files to other people, tap to send or bluetooth. I would be able to download from IE into this file area as well while on the move. I would be able to move files around and access them like I would in Windows Explorer. I would also have access to them via USB when the phone is connected. Along with this would be apps I can use with this file area too.

Now there are those who have different ideas and different levels of what they want out of a 'file manager' but I would be happy with this.

All of this I was able to do on Symbian. (except for the tap to send)

 

[MikeSo]

First let me clarify one thing. I came from Symbian not Android.

The idea of a file manager (or whatever you wish to call it) has several functions and integrates in many ways into the OS. It's not purely about having 'file storage'. In essence I would be using it for a storing files not normally used by the OS. This could be rar, zip or exe files or whatever files the OS doesn't like to use. I would be able to access this file area to email those files to other people, tap to send or bluetooth. I would be able to download from IE into this file area as well while on the move. I would be able to move files around and access them like I would in Windows Explorer. I would also have access to them via USB when the phone is connected. Along with this would be apps I can use with this file area too.

Now there are those who have different ideas and different levels of what they want out of a 'file manager' but I would be happy with this.

All of this I was able to do on Symbian. (except for the tap to send)

I'm with you on this. It doesn't need to be (shouldn't be, actually) an Explorer style file manager where you can access the system files and everything on the drive.
But it should be a simple file manager where it would let you create folders and store media/document files. That's really all most of us are asking, I think. When you get an email with a PDF document in it, let us save it to the phone, and allow us to attach it to a new email. Etc. Not complicated, and lots of cheap dumb phones have had this for years.

MS has en extreme fear of security breaches, and I appreciate their efforts to keep the OS safe, since I have a lot of information on there, or it allows access to such information. But there must be a way to expose a partitioned off area of the phone to the users for saving files. That really can't be that hard!

GDR2 is obviously not an update that will even begin to address this though.

 

[N_LaRUE]

I'm with you on this. It doesn't need to be (shouldn't be, actually) an Explorer style file manager where you can access the system files and everything on the drive.
But it should be a simple file manager where it would let you create folders and store media/document files. That's really all most of us are asking, I think. When you get an email with a PDF document in it, let us save it to the phone, and allow us to attach it to a new email. Etc. Not complicated, and lots of cheap dumb phones have had this for years.

MS has en extreme fear of security breaches, and I appreciate their efforts to keep the OS safe, since I have a lot of information on there, or it allows access to such information. But there must be a way to expose a partitioned off area of the phone to the users for saving files. That really can't be that hard!

GDR2 is obviously not an update that will even begin to address this though.

Here's a general run down of Windows Phone security if you're interested. https://www.msec.be/mobcom/ws2013/presentations/david_hernie.pdf

It's possible that the security model in place might not allow for any type of 'file manager'.

Maybe GDR3 or Blue may address this or it may never be addressed. In any case it's one of those things that seems to bring up a lot of conversation and could become a big deal breaker for many. There is also a solution that exists on iOS that may be feasible as well.

I look forward to what the updates bring. It can only get better from here.

 

[anon(123856)]

I REALLY want data sense for AT&T. Both mine and my wife's phone (Lumia 920s) have been using up more data doing the same things that we did on our old Palm Pixi phones. With my palm I never went above 100mb of my 200mb plan. this past month i hit 165mb! I'd like to know what is using the data, as well as being able to kill it when i get near my plan limit so i don't go over!!

There have been a couple of threads on this. Are you syncing your camera photos (meaning pictures taken with your phone) to SkyDrive? I have this feature turned off and my data consumption isn't radically different that it was with my Android phone, about the same as yours.