Updated Lync 2013 Client for Windows Phone

I was somewhat (pleasantly) surprised to see on my Windows Phone that there was an updated Lync 2013 client. The client does not change much, but there are two nice new features added. One nice new feature is the ability to view a PowerPoint presentation during a Lync meeting. The update also enables you to use your voice to control Lync 2012 client.

For me, the ability to see a PowerPoint presentation on my phone is of pretty minimal value. That’s mainly for two reasons: first my phone (I have a Nokia 820) is just too small to do much more than listen to the audio. I’d rather be somewhere that I can watch the presentation on a decent screen (i.e. my laptop or desktop). But having said that, it would make great sense on a larger form factor device (phablet’s here we come). So while I won’t be using this feature much, I am sure glad I can!

Technorati Tags: Lync Phone client,Lync 2013,Windows Phone

Moving to a Windows Phone–Part 4 –A month On

Some time ago, I got an incentive to get a new Windows Phone – I’ve written a few articles about this ( here, here, here and here). The long and short of it is that I got enough clicks to earn me a new phone so long as I used it solely for 3 months.

It’s now been over a month since I moved over from my older iPhone to a new Lumia 820 Windows Phone (with WP8). It’s taken time to get used to a new device, a new device OS and a new device/OS ecosystem. I’m sure it’s no surprised that one’s reaction to a new phone is a mixture of one’s reactions to all three of these!

The Phone

The phone itself, the Lumia 820 is a step down in quality from the iPhone. It’s nice enough, but the screen resolution is not as good. Having said that, the phone in bright sunlight (like we had today!) is pretty good – better than the iPhone. The phone has a plastic back cover just feels rather like, well, plastic. The Lumia feels ok in the hand while the iPhone, on the other hand, felt great.

The telephone functions (SMS text and PSTN calling) works great so far. As we know, it sucks at home a bit, but that’s O2’s fault as the reception here is sub-optimal. The reception across northern Europe has been good.

The device as a smartphone is excellent. I can do mail, surf the web, play on twitter fairly easily. The wireless aspect is pretty smooth – connection seems easier than in the iPhone across the many Wi-Fi sites I access in my travels.

The phone’s controls are on the side and I find I often turn off the screen when holding it. I am kind of getting used to it though – but I prefer the controls on the top of the phone.

The phone’s back is a hard plastic shell. The Lumia has several striking colours on offer and mine was white. It looked awesome, at first, but the whiteness is fading a bit. It, and the plastic controls, make the phone feel cheap.

The worst aspect of the phone is the screen resolution. It’s just not as good as the iPhone. And that would keep me from buying or recommending the phone.

The OS

The WP8 OS has been quite interesting to get used to – and I quite like it. It’s very different to the IOS/Android. With WP8 there are, in effect just two screens: the first is the start screen with tiles etc. and the second, a full alphabetical list of all the apps on the phone. The former lets you organise how you view all the goodness on your phone while the latter helps you find it all.

This new paradigm has taken me some time to get used to.  But as I use the device more, I am slowly honing in on tiles I need for the 80-90% case and leaving everything the else to the flickable a-z list. It works, but it takes a lot of work to get it all setup. I found the time to get all the applications up and running was longer than for both iPhone and Android.

The Applications

The application ecosystem lags far behind the iPhone and Android.  There are just far fewer applications and applications that exist are often not as good than for the iPhone of Android. There’s no native app for my bank (First Direct)-and although I can use the web site, I really like the iPhone app. There’s also no Drop box application, no decent BBC or Iplayer application either. Sure I can, like my bank use the main web sites for some of these, it’s not as convenient.

Summary

The Nokia 820 is an OK phone, with a pretty good OS and a poor application ecosystem. The 820 suffers compared to it’s bigger brother (the 925) particularly in terms of resolution. The WP8 OS works well enough to not be a hindrance but the application ecosystem needs a great deal of improving.

If I had to buy a new phone today, I’d not buy this particular model, but would consider a 925 mainly due to the better screen resolution. The OS is not an issue – if there was a great phone, having WP8 on it would not be an issue.

So thanks to Microsoft for letting me have the phone. If it’s OK by them, I’ll keep it a little while longer (beyond the three months I originally agreed!).

Technorati Tags: WIndows Phone,Nokia Lumia 820

Moving to a Windows Phone–Part 3–The Move Over

As many of you will know, I engaged in a contest to get you all to click, click, and click. If enough of you clicked, the story was that Microsoft would give me a new Windows Phone. I accepted that challenge and promised that in return for the phone, I’d cease using my iPhone and use this new Windows phone for 3 months. I love my iPhone, and was somewhat nervous over the deal – but I’m willing to try it.

Well, the first part of the challenge was a success, and I duly headed over to Microsoft to pick up the new phone. It’s a Nokia Lumia 820. I arrived at Microsoft and was given the phone by Claire Smyth, our most excellent MVP Lead. We had a nice chat and I was quite excited to open the box.

First Impressions

As I opened it, the packaging was nice and very Apple like with a nicely designed box. The phone it self felt good in my hand and felt heavy enough to be real – and the battery even had nearly a full charge! Some of the newer phones I’ve held recently felt cheap and plasticy (Is that a word – all plastic like), in other words cheap and cheerful (maybe). By comparison, it was heavy enough to feel good, and could pretty instantly be used.

First impressions, thus, were good. The phone looked good, the white plastic back looked cool. It was stylish, but practical. So far so good.

Getting into the new phone

Back home, I immediately started playing. The phone booted smoothly and I was immediately able to get wireless connectivity going. My first task was to get mail working and this was surprisingly easy. I just typed in my credentials and the Exchange Server name and away it went. The Email client, at first sight looks OK, compared to the iPhone.

Getting the phone to work as a phone was also snap – I just had to find the iPhone tool to retrieve my SIM and pop it into the phone. As someone with non-existent finger nails, I did find getting into the new phone was quite difficult. As I’m not likely to have to get into the innards very often, this is probably no bad thing, but in the end, I had to get my wife, with her longer nails, to help. But once I popped the old SIM into the new phone, immediately it worked! The overall phone quality from home is sucky, but that’s O2’s issue, not the phone. But I could make calls in the UK. I’ve yet to try calls when abroad but I’ll post any issues or success that arises.

I also started playing around with the Windows Phone 8 UI – the new version Windows 8 with it’s tile based front end. And I also started searching for apps. As I posted, I have a bunch of apps I wanted and needed on the new phone so time was spent in the Store. In my last article on this topic, I set out what my needs and expectations were with regard to apps. While I knew that, at least, some the apps in a given category might be different (like they are between Android and iPhone). I can live with that to a degree.

Good stuff

Moving over to the phone for all my KEY needs has been pretty painless. Email was up in a snap, wireless and mobile data were a breeze to setup. Props to the Phone OS – when I went to setup the wireless data, rather than having to call O2 to find out the password etc., the Lumia displayed an option to just use the O2 settings and hey presto. Sweet! Mail is quick, the phone works in the local area and some of the key apps are up and working.

The Windows 8 tiles seem pretty cool. At first sight. It took me a month or two on both my last Android and iPhone to get a layout that worked and this is certainly going to be true for the Windows phone. The tiles are easy to access, easy to move around and easy to re-size. The application the tile represents can change the display – and this I find better than the iPhone’s method of displaying pushed changes.

Adding storage via a MicroSD chip is trivial and not very expensive. It was trivial to buy off the net, and a breeze to install (with the proviso that getting the back of the phone off so I could insert the chip was not easy). But after inserting it, replacing the cover and rebooting the phone - it just worked! Of course, filling it is not be a problem! I wish the iPhone had had the ability to use a MicroSD chip. Lack of on-phone memory was for me a limiting factor to the iPhone – so well done Nokia. Any chance of adding in a 2nd or 3rd slot next time – I have a lot of Grateful Deal to move onto the phone! Trying to take my 3.5TB worth of shows and fit into a mere 64GB is not easy – but that’s my problem to deal with.

Issues Arising So Far

While the initial honeymoon period was nice, it wasn’t perfect and there are a few issues I’ve noted. The first issue is the resolution of the screen. When I open an Email message, the resolution of the text is just not as crisp or as clear as on the iPhone. The iPhone is much better despite 2 year older technology. That said, I can live with it – but it feels cheap. This is a Nokia fault, really, not Windows.

The second issue, which is really quite a mild one, is the difficulty of getting into the phone’s innards. As I mentioned earlier, I don’t have adequate finger nails to pry off the cover. I suppose this is a good-news/bad-news thing – it’s difficult to get the cover off, meaning the cover won’t come off easily. And as I hopefully won’t need to pop the cover off very often, this is a minor thing.

The third issue is apps, or should I say lack thereof. After a week, I’ve not managed to duplicate the full richness of my previous iPhone environment. The Windows shop reminds me of visiting East Berlin and the USSR in the early 1980’s and going into a shop there. I’ll report more on my quest for apps in the next article.

Summary after a Week

Overall, it’s a nice phone. The display quality is somewhat disappointing – I expected iPhone 4 quality and better. The OS is solid, and the core apps I’m using so far all work OK. But several apps are still unfound and some don’t yet work for me. I’ll return in a week or two with further commentary.

Technorati Tags: replacing an iPhone,Nokia,Lumia 820

Moving to a Windows Phone–Part 2

As I recently posted, I’ve won a Nokia Lumia 820 from our good friends at Microsoft – now I have to use it (for at least 3 months). As I flew back home yesterday from a training gig, I pondered on what I actually needed in a phone. I’d had the iPhone for a couple of years and about the only weaknesses are the inevitable scratches, the slowly diminishing battery life and the reality that I needed more storage on the device. Otherwise, I really like the iPhone – it does what I want, I can have some fun (I will probably never conquer Plants v Zombies), listen to an extensive collection of Grateful Dead shows – plus it makes phone calls.

So what does the phone need to do for me? What features are really important – and a literally deal breakers, which were nice to have and which were things I’d not miss. Having thought about it, here’s my key features.

• It’s got to have decent radios – it’s got to be a decent world usable telephone and must do wireless. Sort of a no-brainer, but it has to get/receive calls and SMS via my carrier (O2). O2 reception in my home office is poor, but is fine everywhere else. A new phone must be as good, and preferably better. It’s also got to do all the various phone standards and has to do wireless.
• It’s got to do email – I need to have my main mailbox (hosted in the cloud) so I need active sync to sync my mail to the phone.
• It’s got to be secure. That means login screen, a remote wipe ability and a ‘find my phone’ feature.
• It’s got to do decent music. I have a good pair of headphones and want to hear music at the same quality as on the iPhone. This includes a good on-device Player and a good desktop tool to manage the content. To some degree, I’d be happy with just files/folders and manage the device’s data via Explorer on the desktop, but a better app would be nice. The old Zune app would be OK. Anything better than the current version of our fruity themed company’s offering - which I think is suboptimal.
• It’s got to get RSS Podcasts that I can listen to. I subscribe to The Deadpod (http://deadshow.blogspot.co.uk/) and want to continue to listen to it. On the iPhone, I subscribe and it just automatically downloads via the apple desktop app.
• It’s got to be expandable at a reasonable price. I have a lot of music that I like to play and the 16GB limit on the iPhone is too small for me! So I want more and preferably removable.
• It’s got to have decent Linked-In and Twitter applications. I spend time on these two social networks and want to carry on doing so. I also want other apps but these two are MUST haves.
• It has to have a decent web browser that is as industry standard as possible. Via mail and SM as well as by Search Engine - I get a lot of links to look at and I want a good browser. I’d like to have Firefox's Ad Block feature – to know out the flashing and obnoxious ads (and reduce my bandwidth usage).
• It’s GOT to have Google maps. I’ve used others – and I know what I want.
• It’s got to have a reasonable camera. I have taken a lot of pictures with the iPhone and it’s good enough – but I’d like better. I’d also like to be able to remove/replace the lens easily. My current lens got scratched during a recent trip and the pictures now are fuzzy as a result.
• It should have a Skype and Lync client. I like using these for the obvious reasons, but on the road I can tolerate using the phone – or using those apps via my laptop.
• I’d like some decent games. I currently enjoy Solitaire, lane splitter and Plants v Zombies. All are somewhat addictive.
• It should have as many apps as possible to communicate with various on-line entities. This includes apps for: O2 (myO2), BBC News, BBC iPlayer, Tweet Deck, Google+, The Register, Kindle, First Direct (bank), Stock tracker, Tech Eye, the Register, Pluralsight, Amazon shopping, Pedometer, LogMeIn. YouTube, GPSForTHeSoul, Angry Birds, Paper Toss, would be nice too. And FilmonTV would be awesome. I’d prefer all these to be free, but I’d be willing to pay a bit for some of the games, and for good productivity apps.
• It really should have non-proprietary charging cables (e.g. micro USB). I’m really tired of apple’s walled garden here. A docking station and a Bose-like docking station would be nice.
• I’d like a replaceable battery. Given how much music I listen too, and how active I can be on email and social media, I need a decent battery life from the get go, but I am realistic about the technology in today’s batteries. EVERY phone I’ve ever owned has had the batteries die off over time and I’m not expecting any change. The ability to replace the battery rather than needing a whole new phone is sort of important.

Well – that’s my list. At least for now – I’ll give this more thought and reserve the right to change this list at any time!

My next post will cover first impressions of the new phone.

Technorati Tags: Windows Phone