Inside View

Not All Batteries Are Made the Same

Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | Knock-off battery from China.

I LIKE HAVING a replaceable battery in my phone and that's one reason I opted for a Lumia 820. However, I've discovered that all batteries aren't built the same.

In my case, an inexpensive 8 euro battery won't give me eight hours of hard use. However, the 1500 mAh rating on the Li-ion replacement is less than the 1650 mAh of the original Nokia BP-5T Li-polymer so I reckon I'm getting what I paid for.

Batteries and microtechnology intrigue me. I'm worried about all the evil residue I'm leaving behind for future generations because of my disposable batteries so I try to buy the (much more expensive) rechargeable batteries for kids' toys and consumer electronic gear. I've also noticed a relationship between how long it takes to recharge a battery and how long that battery's duty cycle actually extends. And I'm seeing evidence of major leaps in microtechnology that might boost our expectations of battery power.

Battery technology deserves to observe a breakthrough. Researchers at the University of Illinois might have just what we need--powerful microbatteries so strong that you might use one to jump start your car's flat battery. These lithium ion microbatteries are only a few millimeters in size. You could recharge your smartphone in less than a second with these microbatteries.

Hands-on Windows Phone 8 in Ireland

Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | My photo of Lumia 820.

I STARTED USING a Windows Phone 8 just after St Patrick's Day 2013. I like the phone, its range of apps and its handling of multiple email accounts.

The only snag I have with the phone relates to my Microsoft account. Microsoft thinks I'm in the UK and won't let me change my credentials. But that doesn't stop the Store from processing my transactions.

Friends in the WP ecosystem tell me to get my ass over to the XBox world and to start leveraging SkyDrive. I have noted their points and plan to deep dive into both places because I need the phone backed up better than I kept my original Nokia Lumia.

There are several things about the Lumia 820 that make iOS 6 look lame.

• The Windows Phone Store cuts me slack when my credit card fails to pay on the first go. Try that with the Apple Store.
• In-app Old Skool games like Tapitude keep our back seat driver occupied for half of the battery's life.
• The People Hub tells me if one of my Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn friends are awake or in-country.
• All my photos and videos automatically upload to SkyDrive.
• Because of Nokia Music, our five year old has bought more singles in a month than I did in any teenaged year.
• I can pin so many useful things anywhere on the Start screen and many of those things are Live Tiles that show fresh information incrementally.

I've made a few other observations and recommendations during the past fortnight while poking around with the phone--one I got for free when Nokia Care opted not to repair my broken Nokia E7.

Reverting Two Mobile Generations Back

Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | Photo of reliable E90.

BECAUSE I CRASHED my Lumia 800 so hard that nothing would reset it, I pulled my Nokia E90 out of its drawer for my main phone. Amazingly, it started up right away before demanding a recharge.

I had forgotten what it was like to go three days between recharging a handset. If I don't use the phone to talk and if I run my email only occasionally, I easily get 24 hours between recharging the handset. But that battery savings comes at a cost--this is a rock-solid Symbian S60 phone without all the apps I regularly use on my handsets.

I miss flicking through the Lumia's People Hub. I miss getting snappy newsfeeds. I miss easy, dependable calendar synching with Google Calendar. But I remember ploughing through a lot of productive days with the Nokia E90 several years ago and I believe the phone's limited usefulness with Twitter and Facebook is actually freeing up a whole hour of time throughout a normal day. 

That's a telling lesson in productivity and suggests I will make big gains in my output if I confine my social grazing to occasional forays with the Xoom tablet and iTouch instead of the always-on connectivity (and distraction) the Nokia Lumia afforded me.

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Bernie Goldbach is trying a rigorous GTD routine.

 

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Nokia Marked Down Big Time

Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | Irisheyes photo of my Lumia

I HAVE A LOT OF RESPECT for Nokia and the two main handsets in the house are Nokia products. I hope to continue buying quality mobile phones from that proud Finnish company.

The marketplace has not been kind to Nokia since the iPhone established its dominance in the marketplace. Current numbers make difficult reading for anyone associated with the brand that once was synonymous with the most advanced smartphones on the planet.

Bobbie Johnson shares data from iSuppli that shows "the Finnish shipped 83 million mobile phones around the world in the last three months — nine million fewer than Samsung, which managed to ship 92 million units."

The devil is in the detail "because Samsung is doing particularly well — although it’s making a ton of profit, in fact, worldwide shipments from the Korean company were down 13 percent in the last three months. The crown was passed along because Nokia is doing significantly worse than everybody else — dropping 27 percent from the last quarter of 2011."

I read and listen to the roadmap of Nokia but I also know the cold reality of the market. Nokia's share price is low enough now that it's an acquisition target. Nokia's cash pile will run out before the end of 2014. And its market assessment is continuously marked down by funds managers after several profit warnings.

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Bernie Goldbach has curated links to Nokia, many in place after listening to All About Symbian for years.

Geocaching with a 4yo

Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | 388 words

WE REBOOTED OUR ENTHUSIASM for geocaching, led by our four-year-old daughter who proved her sleuthing skills by discovering two local geocaches within an hour of walking out the front door.

I tried basic geocaching for part of a weekend in early 2002 shortly after we had the house set up in Kilkenny but the scavenging wasn't very lively unless I bumped into a fellow geocacher. Today, there's wonderful geocaching energy online with smartphones. I use the excellent Geocaching Live on my Nokia Lumia where I can see "there are 1,717,029 active geocaches and over 5 million geocachers worldwide." Two international geocachers were in Cashel today. I know because we visited the same local caches and spotted their notes today. We became part of the buzz, adding our two log entries to the 7,415,544 new logs already submitted during the past 30 days. You can watch the video below.

Geocaching with Young Ones

 

16 Hours Between Charges

Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | 133 words

MONTHS OF DAILY USE of my Nokia Lumia 800 have resulted in 16 hours between recharging the phone, thanks largely to a combination of the pre-installed Battery Saver, the clever functioning of several paid apps and controlled usage of email.

I toggle the Battery Saver "on" during most of the day because I want to prevent the phone from making 3G or wifi data connections automatically. Since I've four email services on my Nokia Lumia, they reduce the phone's battery capacity by at least one hour every work day, in my experience.

I don't run ad-supported apps during my work day because they poll a lot of data traffic and run those advertisements inside the apps. Instead, I've bought nearly every app on the Lumia, reducing battery drain due to advertising traffic.

I also have configured as many screens as possible to black backgrounds, another technique that reduces the power required to display the main screen.

With these considerations on board, I can better extend the daily life of my phone and handle voice calls, video recording and YouTube playbacks. The only way I've minimised the power requirement for those three tasks is to remain stationary in a strong area of reception.

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Related article

• AAWP Insight #19: April 8th, Lumia 800C launch, Lumia 800 firmware (allaboutwindowsphone.com)

The Fastest Phone I've Ever Owned

Bernie Goldbach in Cashel | 155 words

AFTER FIVE MONTHS of daily usage, I can declare my Nokia Lumia 800 (in photo) as the fastest phone I've ever owned. Its battery life, email synchronisation, and front screen live tiles are welcome features.

Nokia made a video of the Lumia 900 (see below) and it effectively captures how I use my own phone. I can trust the phone's alarms to work in the morning, the call quality/noise cancelling is good enough for live radio interviews, and the Marketplace (more than 80,000 apps) has the business applications I've needed to get things done.

I'm watching my Zune updates for an update that gives me a USB tethering method with my Lumia 800. The phone's antenna is stronger than both the Sony Ericsson and iPhone 4 handsets that we use in the weak area of connectivity where we live.

There are a lot of reasons to value the Nokia Lumia 800 as a reliable, consistent mobile handset. Discovering it's also faster than any other handset I've owned is a welcome result.

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Related info:

Luke Johnson -- "Nokia shifts 1m Lumia 800 handsets in Q4 2011" on the T3 blog,  January 13, 2012.

Eric Savitz -- "Nokia: The Recovery Begins" in Forbes, March 30, 2012.

YouTube: 24 Hours Hands on with the Nokia Lumia 900

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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.

Lumia