Nokia Lumia 925 and Windows Phone 8 trial: Day 2

Wattle blooming near Bunjaree Cottages: click to embiggenI didn’t leave home base today, so I just gave the Nokia Lumia 925’s camera another quick try-out. I continue to be impressed.

It was an overcast winter’s day here at Wentworth Falls, but everything was looking nice and crisp after some early rain. I figured that a few snapshots around Bunjaree Cottages would be in order.

So, for Day 2 of my Nokia Lumia 925 / Windows Phone 8 trial, here’s 24 photos. All of them have been uploaded to Flickr exactly as they came out of the camera.

The image at the top of the post is a good example of the close-up capability — and I’m pleased that Nokia calls it “close-up” and not “macro”. The image certainly holds up when you zoom in and tweak the contrast.

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Nokia Lumia 925 and Windows Phone 8 trial: Day 1

Katoomba railway station: click to embiggenSetting up the Nokia Lumia 925 was straightforward, and I’m impressed with the smartphone itself. But while there’s plenty to like about Windows Phone 8, I was also struck by the lack of key applications and a few rough edges.

These are my bullet-point observations from Day 1 of my Nokia Lumia 925 / Windows Phone 8 trial. You can also follow it live on Twitter, where I’m using the hashtag #LumiaWP8trial.

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Nokia Lumia 925 and Windows Phone 8: the trial begins

Nokia Lumia 925 smartphone pictured against the Reviewers Guide: click to embiggenStarting today, I’m going to try using a Nokia Lumia 925 running Windows Phone 8 as my primary smartphone. I plan to run this trial for a week, through to the end of next Tuesday 6 August 2013. This post explains the why and how of it all.

The why is easy enough. I write about this stuff, and both Nokia and Microsoft are hoping these products will be their saviours. I should therefore take a closer look, and what better way than to actually use them.

The how is easy enough too. As soon as I’ve finished this blog post, I’ll take the SIM from my current smartphone, put it into the Lumia, and go from there, attempting to use it in exactly the same way as I go about my business each day.

While I’m doing the set-up, I’ll be listening to a Patch Monday podcast episode from a year ago, Windows 8: Rectangles for all the things explained. I’ve already read the companion article, Windows 8 interface’s design heritage.

I’ll be tweeting my observations as I go, using the hashtag #LumiaWP8trial, writing up my observations at the end of each day, and recording them for a podcast. There will also be a Flickr set of all the photos.

Finally, here’s some background information on how I work.

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Weekly Wrap 164: A turn-around, with Finnish jelly beans

Glimpse of Sydney Central: click to embiggenMy week Monday 22 to Sunday 28 July 2013 was initially as unproductive as the previous two, but Thursday marked a turning-point. Thank the gods. No details.

Articles

Podcasts

None, but I did plenty of behind-the-scenes work on the Corrupted Nerds website, including settling on Cryout Creations’ Mantra theme for WordPress as the design framework.

This fixed a very, very annoying bug that I’d encountered in some other themes that broke the RSS feeds in Blubrry’s PowerPress Podcasting Plugin for WordPress, and that in turn meant that I couldn’t add the podcasts to Apple’s iTunes store.

Having removed that roadblock, I’ll be able to add more material to Corrupted Nerds very soon — including two new episodes in the coming week.

Media Appearances

None.

Corporate Largesse

The Week Ahead

On Monday I’ll complete a catch-up edition of my ZDNet Australia column, The Full Tilt, with something that’ll probably annoy quite a few people who call themselves geeks, and then spending the afternoon in Katoomba. Somewhere in there I’ll fire up that Nokia Lumia 925.

On Tuesday I’ll write a piece for Technology Spectator, one that’s been on the back burner for a while, and completing a new episode of Corrupted Nerds: Conversations podcast. The forecast is for a rainy day, so that’s perfect.

On Wednesday morning I’ll head into Sydney to attend a media event with Vodafone Australia at 1030, then the rest of the week becomes some what flexible — although I know it include a medical appointment in Sydney, another column for ZDNet Australia and some planning.

The weekend is currently unplanned.

[Photo: Glimpse of Sydney Central, being a view of the clock tower at Sydney’s Central station, taken early one winter morning from the Metro Sydney Central hotel.]

Weekly Wrap 129: Chaos from the past, with added manga

Monday 19 to Sunday 25 November 2012 was just a little too chaotic for my liking. The overall theme, if chaos can be said to have a theme, was “The past is coming back to bite you. Several times.”

Not deep, existential shark bites. More like bee stings, or perhaps spider bites. Plus a couple of dog bites, like the one I got from that goddam collie back in the mid-1980s. The damn thing infected my hand and it took a cocktail of three heavy-duty antibiotics to be rid of it. To this day, my left hand is significantly weaker.

Yes, your past can bite you, and you are then weakened.

The lesson there is to never entrust the proper training of a dog to rent boys, no matter how good their drugs are.

Yeah I think the rest of this story can probably wait until another time.

During my two weeks in (mostly) Singapore and Coffs Harbour, I was too exhausted to mentally process Certain Events. I flew to Singapore before I’d completely killed a throat infection, and I didn’t realise that the antibiotic I was taking was increasing the severity of my insomnia. I arrived on Shopping Mall Container Terminal Island in a run-down state.

Exhaustion goes well with Endless Free Alcohol, does it not?

Fortunately I’d almost-planned this week to contain a little less work. My intention was to start pondering my plans for 2013 and beyond, both professionally and personally. For various reasons I won’t go into today, both are at turning-points. Clarity of thought must be obtained, because decisions must be made.

The Certain Events provided much food for this thought. Two of the more significant Certain Events were re-establishing contact with two people — quite unconnected with each other — who I hadn’t seen in something like 14 or 16 years.

One was a reminder of… well, let’s just say it was a reminder that our lives are full of choices, many of them unconscious. Had our choices been different, then our lives would have unfolded very differently also.

In Singapore I discovered that 16 years ago there was a choice I could have made. Had I been consciously aware of it, I might well have said yes. But that door has long since been closed. My life unfolds as it does. As does his.

The other was a reminder that… well, that 14 or 16 years is a long time, and I’m getting older. That in turn triggered some very deep reflections indeed about many other choices made, large and small, wise and less so. So many of the last.

On Friday a very different piece of the past came back to haunt me. A client decided to dredge out an HTML email template that I’d written for them some time in the Early Neolithic Era, and use it in a campaign that very day. Needless to say, this ancient code didn’t render properly in recent versions of Microsoft Outlook.

Friday suddenly became hectic. But thanks to excellent technical support from Sydney-based email marketing platform Campaign Monitor, and in particular from Stig Morten Myre in Norway, I could skip the whole “re-learn email-client HTML rendering because time plus arseholes equals frustration” bit and just focus on implementing tricks that would, in fact, work. Thank you Stig.

This extra work meant that Saturday became a long working day too. But everything was smooth, if time-consuming. And now here I sit, in the quiet of the eucalypt scrubland near Wentworth Falls. A quiet that is likely to be the calm before a literal storm this evening. Pondering.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 164, “InfoSec in flux, facing fads with FUD”. A conversation with Sourcefire founder and CTO Martin Roesch.

Articles

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

  • On Tuesday night I attended Nokia’s Lumia Lounge event at Kaya Sydney, where we were all provided with rather pleasant food and drink.

The Week Ahead

The week ahead is apparently the start of the Christmas party season. Jesus wept. Added to that, technology companies look like they’re blowing their remaining PR budgets for the quarter on media briefings. So there’ll be plenty of corporate largesse to report next time.

As far as media production goes, I’ve got the Patch Monday podcast to finalise first thing Monday morning, then a story each for CSO Online and Technology Spectator before the end of the week. I want to lock in some more, and I think I’ll be able to pitch something both to ZDNet and Crikey.

Logistically, I plan to head to Sydney on Wednesday morning and stay a few days attending various events.

On Wednesday there’s a Retail Tech Forum lunch organised by Bass PR for some of their clients, and in the evening there’s a party with Securus Global.

On Thursday there’s the lunchtime Sydney media launch for Uber (which is essentially the on-demand ordering of a black town car via smartphone apps, so screw you taxi industry oligopolists!), followed by the Internet Industry Association’s Nautical Policy Party on Sydney Harbour (don’t ask), and then an evening party held jointly by the four boutique PR firms known as “The Indies”.

How the end of the week will play out has yet to be decided, but on Sunday I’ll be transferring myself to Hurstville to house-sit for a friend through until early January.

At least that’s the plan as of now. Stay tuned. Eris is a fickle bitch.

[Photo: Japanese-inspired toilet door signage, at Kaya Sydney. These cartoon characters are all well and good, but when I’m in a hurry to take a slash I don’t need the extra puzzle time of reading highly-stylised gender markers in a dimly-lit corridor.]

Smartphones as sexual display

On one of my recent visits to NSW Parliament House on Macquarie Street the security guard who X-rayed my bag noted that while it contained plenty of Apple kit, such as my MacBook Pro, I carried a Nokia phone rather than an iPhone. “That’s because I haven’t drunk the Kool-Aid,” I replied. “Plus they’re all just tools for a job.”

Many people do seem to choose their devices more through brand identity than practical value. I was going to write more about that, but that renowned bastard Stephen Fry has beaten me to it. It’s all about sexual display.

When two businessmen drop down in neighbouring aeroplane seats and each gets out a smartphone an electricity will crackle between them like that between two sexually heated adolescents whose thighs have accidentally touched in the backseat of the school bus. If one businessman fishes from his shirt pocket a BlackBerry while the other gets out an iPhone a whole range of complex thoughts will begin to boil in the brains of each: resentment, contempt, insecurity and irritation are merely the emotions bubbling closest to the surface: deep down, dark and primal forces stir. We do not possess antlers, horns or tusks, we cannot display fans of feather or manes of fur, the best we can do is express our personality, aspirations, beliefs, outlook, sexual potency, status, right to breed and place in the hierarchy through the choices we make in our possessions: and no possession, here in the early part of the twenty-first century, speaks quite so loudly as our smartphone. Once upon a time it was our motorcar and in the future it may well be a robot, a rocket-pack or a hoverpenis that defines us, but for the moment it is, for good or ill, a smartphone.

Many women reading this will detect that the foregoing is an issue almost entirely for males, who remain the prime sufferers in this kind of tribal status war. My suspicion is that women are, if not immune, far less emotionally bound up in the business than men. I may be wrong and welcome clarification either way on this point.

I do realise that quoting Stephen Fry doesn’t make up for writing an original piece, but at least it means I’m trying to keep up to date with my writing.