Inside View from Ireland

Free Nokia Lumia Launches in Ireland

NOKIA'S LUMIA IS available from "free" in Vodafone Ireland shops, meaning a 60 euro monthly contract will get you a very capable handset.

Where I work, the monthly contract price is around 20 euro more per month than many legacy Nokia owners currently pay. I consider the extra money is the cost of being connected online while you're mobile. It costs a lot more to push data through 3G masts than it costs to run SMS texting across Ireland. The question for all the network operators is how to make data such a compelling service to attract tens of thousands of Irish to pay for it on monthly contracts. It's a tough sell.

It's also a tough sell to pull a happy iPhone owner back to Nokia. Tens of thousands of Irish who grew up with Nokia now own iPhones. Many of them are happy in an Apple ecosytem and they've paid for dozens of apps they use several times a week. Leaving those paid apps behind will be a big decision because in many cases, those iOS apps enrichen mobile experiences much more than intimate phone calls or conversations by text.

Nokia in Two Years

ONE OF THE FIRST things friends do when I hand them my Nokia Lumia 800 is flick through the phone's apps to see how many familiar icons they see. They often mutter something when handing back the phone.

Nokia have a lot of work to do during the next year if former Nokia users can be prised from their iPhones. Those iPhones were a quantum leap from Symbian for most owners because they did things faster and used an interface that people enjoyed. Nokia had 46% market share of mobile phones in Ireland when the iPhone launched in 2007. A lot has changed in five years, including the way people used their phones. When people started buying iPhones because their friends had iPhones, they often started connecting through apps, not voice or text. Now those apps represent the mobile environment through which people define their worlds. And as a late starter in the touchscreen game, Nokia has an apps deficiency.

Joy in Syncing Multiple Calendars

If you need multiple Google Calendars as well as Exchange Calendaring and perhaps a personal booking system using Windows Live, you’ll be happy to know you can easily sync multiple Google calendars like I do in the colour-coded screenshot.

To add them, just go to m.google.com/sync on your phone. Log into the web page, select your device and toggle the calendars you want to sync. You can sync up to 25 Google calendars onto your Windows Phone. Before leaving the screen, tap and save your settings. I've also bookmarked the page in my Lumia browser.

These newly synced calendars appear whenever your phone syncs with Google’s servers. If you've commanded your phone to save battery power, it's not going to sync your calendars. By default, my Nokia Lumia looks at Google for sync data every half hour. When I set an important appointment on my calendar, I normally sync it before I leave the meeting that set the appointment. 

The Windows Sync team at Google also have enabled the Lumia with an ability to search for Gmail messages that haven’t been downloaded to the phone yet. That's also handy. The option to "search more in Google Mail" is found at the bottom of the results list for a local search. 

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More detailed instructions from Microsoft.

Li Yin -- Sync multiple calendars using advice from the Windows Sync team at Google.

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Changing Smartphone Market Leadership

I HAVE BOUGHT more Nokia handsets than any other manufacturer's and Nokia remains the world’s largest seller of mobile phones by volume. It's declining in terms of market leadership and revenues.

Quick Test BloghuB

MY FIRST TEST of BloghuB failed. This is a follow-on simple text post.

I sent a paragraph from my Nokia Lumia 800 to the Typepad servers earlier while scooting along the M7 in CountyLaois. That upload included an image with some HTML code that I edited. This post is just simple text--but I think I'll modify the post later with something other than the Bloghub logo since I can't do its fav ico justice. 

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App

 

Lumia Voice Recognition Good Enough for Texting

ALTHOUGH IT'S TAKEN me several years to accept the presence of earbuds on pedestrians, I'm often budded to my mobile phone while walking. Now I've discovered I can walk and text without tapping a screen.

Inside the Nokia Lumia 800 is a very clever voice recognition capability. I've used it to respond to text messages while walking around Dublin. I had to tap the screen to activate the "reply" function of the SMS message and then tap the little microphone icon but beyond that, it was simple to walk, talk and text simultaneously. My American accent has resulted in only a few mistakes. When I say "Ruth" (my wife's name) the phone wants to insert the abbreviation "re:" and that just means some of the texts I send home have become more formal when I start them with my wife's name.

I use the micbud when talking to text and that seems to be better than using the phone's on-board mic for voice recognition. That's probably because the micbud cancels out traffic noise and optimises its use for the human voice.

I didn't expect to find this little voice recognition feature on the Nokia Lumia. It's one of those lilttle things that makes the new handset more personable.

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Photo of my Lumia 800 open to the names of 6340 people in the address book.

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How the Lumia Has Changed My Habit Patterns

THE BIGGEST SIDE EFFECT of using a Nokia Lumia 800 in my daily life has been better e-mail management. This is no mean feat.

I have never enjoyed an In-Box Zero State. That's mainly because I maintain four separate e-mail identities. There are valid reasons for keeping separate (and cloaked) accounts while maintaining distinct online identities. But as a result of having to juggle multiple mail servers, I have previously needed to run some of my e-mail existence from a laptop. Not so with the Lumia 800. I am very impressed at how quickly and elegantly the phone is able to listen to my mail queues and to provide me easily viewable and instantly actionable message traffic. Because my e-mail burden is decreasing, I've had the opportunity to download and use a few applications from the Windows Marketplace.

Snagged by an Identity Issue

UPDATE 22 December 2011: My Live Account maps to my Irish identity credentials after Nokia reflashed my Lumia handset to the Republic of Ireland. It had UK credentials on it when I originally wrote this blog post.

LIKE DOZENS OF PEOPLE inside the Windows Marketplace, I'm having problems connecting my credit card to my Windows Live account.

This kind of problem will upset four developers who sell applications inside the Windows Phone Marketplace because I would have spent an average of $1.20 with each of them during the past two days. However, I'm unable to change the country where I maintain my main credit card and I no longer have a credit card in the country where Microsoft previously knew I bought online. The problem is made more complex by the fact that I have four different e-mail addresses for two different Windows Live accounts. My Xbox credentials are listed at an address on another continent and my Zune user name is different than all the other user names. This kind of thing happens based on the non-availability of the same user name across the entire Windows Phone platform.

In my case, even though the Zune network knows me and has my Irish credit card on file, my Lumia 800 handset will not accept the Zune server's credentials.

The Apple Moment with My Lumia 800

I HAD AN APPLE MOMENT when manhandling my Nokia Lumia 800 straight out of the box. I couldn't figure out how to close the little doors on top of the phone.

My office full of Apple purists scoffed at the unclean lines of the phone because I was too blind to see the fingernail slot in the plastic where I needed to apply a little sliding force to close one flapper door under another. Using my glasses helped me figure out what to do. But I don't think there are instructions with the handset to help blind bats to see what to do. So I'm putting up this helpful little shot so new Lumia owners can benefit from my poor vision.

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Snapped by my Sony Xperia Arc just before I loaded the phone with my Facebook contacts. I'm surprised I loaded Facebook before I set up any email account but that's what happened. Then I configured my Exchange, Gmail, Well and Yahoo accounts.

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Nokia Digital Pen Review

I HAVE WATCHED the Nokia Digital Pen write 56 A5 pages and successfully transfer 42 of them through its cradle to my laptop.

Problems with data transfer trace back to failing to press either the start square or the send square at the bottoms of the Esselte pages. My problems were further compounded by using the pen to record dozens of samples of student work--six of 52 pages went missing because the pen didn't know it should record tracings made in the A5 copy book.