Windows Phone

Aeries – The Twitter app that Windows Phone deserves

Karthikeyan, , Leave a comment

I was lucky to be in the beta and take my word for it. ₹235 is a great price to pay for universal app with instant notifications. Not to mention this is for now a one time fee. For the app’s UI & UX, take my word for it. You don’t need a trial. If you want a Twitter app for Windows, Aeries is the one.

Aeries

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State of my Windows Phone – 03rd Feb 2015

Video KarthikeyanLeave a comment

YouTube:

Vimeo:

Just a look of my phone.

A video showing the apps I have & the tiles layout.

Phone is Nokia Lumia 830 screen captured by Microsoft Expression Recorder & processed by Microsoft Expression Encoder.

Phone is 30fps I guess, 60fps video looks somewhat lag/slow or the other way around.

Annoyances of Windows Phone – Updated

Karthikeyan, , 4 Comments

This is about what i feel that is really lacking and kind of dumb on Windows Phone.

  • Pause and Zoom in:

Pausing a video while shooting it and Zooming in while shooting is a no brainer. This is by far the most stupid thing i have seen in my phone. Yes, i love Windows phone, have 720 and a 520. But that doesn’t mean that i should shut and to not disclose the shortcomings of my platform.  As a YouTuber wannabe who doesn’t have any other camera, but has the talent (i think so, maybe not) and the passion, i thought i can film stuffs once and i got my 720 as soon as i got released back in the April, in India. But only to realise that the pause and zoom is just not their! Off course, iOS just got in-video zooming months back, and Symbian/Android is a whole different level of Open System. But WP, is a sucking jerk in this department. Please someone seeing this tell the guys behind WP to change this ASAP.

I will get a killing urge when i am shooting a great video and at the last moment someone calls me, or some neighbourhood baby (literally babies, not girls.. yes, you guessed it, forever alone 😦 ) screams, or someone calls me for some errands. I mean if i had pause, i will just pause and continue, but now i will either leave the idea of shooting that video or i have to re-shoot it from the start, which you might have guessed it by now, a pain in the rear.

  • Have to manually on the Bluetooth prior initializing the transfer, and NFC is not just tap & send, its go to options, go through multiple taps and then finally send it! And also if you own multiple Windows Phone devices, all their names will be just windows phone.

I mean this is crazy, i should either keep the BT on all the time killing the battery, i mean its BT 4.0 LE, but still… why the heck should i manually activate BT if i want to send something? The way it should be is, if i choose to send something via BT the OS should recognize that i am trying to send a goddamn thing out and should auto activate BT sans any pop-up’s (exception for paring, searching etc, its obvious! The scenario i am saying is when i already got a device paired) and connect, send, and deactivate BT and go do what it was doing prior. And also i am sending a fil from another device and i have my 520 and 720, when i search for my 720 intending to send a file to it, i’ll see two “windows phone” in the search result, and i will have no idea of which is 720 and which is 520, Unless i rename it via PC.

  • Video Calls via Network

Yes, people use Skype and stuffs and the front cam works well enough for that. But, when i have some thing why shouldn’t i  able to use it? Video calls via networks is a thing i need.

  • Ability to adjust the vibration intensity

No explanation needed, i hope.

  • IE probs

You cannot separately delete the history, cookies, cache, saved data and stuffs separately. I don’t need the history, cache and temporary files at all, but need my login’s and site preference and cookies. But if i want to  delete any one, i have to sacrifice all! And the temp files will easily go to 200MB + after a little browsing :/

And the lack on password manager, too.

  • Operator Billing

I seriously wish to pay for the software i use, i wanna help developers for their hard work. But i only have a debit card and many in India don’t even have a card! Nokia Store had operator billing and the base price for the apps was 5 INR. This should happen, i mean the operator billing. I wanna pay from the deep of my heart to NextGen Reader and many many more apps, but i just can’t.

I am fine with toast and tile notifications 🙂 but if i miss the toast and didn’t pin the app to the homescreen, R.I.P that notification, its forever lost.

  • Other storage bug

This picture will tell what i am suffering, freaking other storage bug is killing my poor 8GB internal memory 😦

You see i get the point that giving a file manager will destroy the security of the OS and people will make Windows Phone a Android. But giving a file manager which will only allow viewing, transferring, renaming, deleting etc to the files on the SD card. And for the devices like 920/925 with no expandable storage, why not give users access to all except the C:// drive?

  • Closing an app

Either developers should be able to give this “options -> close/exit” inside their apps or the OS should implement down swipe the app to close like in Windows 8. To experience the annoyance of what i am saying simply use IE for a while and without closing the tab just use back key to exit, or better yet browse for a while in the Facebook for Windows Phone app and then use the back key to exit. You’ll die in frustration.

  • Hiding settings for stuffs deep down under
  • Find, Lock and Ring thing never works, like never.

Enough said

I request you to visit http://ratkutti.blogspot.in/2013/05/Nokia-Lumia-720.html for some pictures 🙂

[P.S: Yes, i know there is operator billing, Amber to solve Other storage bugs, and the notification center has been planned, closing apps in the multitasking view is arriving in GDR3 which is already under testing etc etc… but i wrote the post in context of 9th Spetember 2013! This day, the above things are not yet solved! And yes, i am due to receive Amber!]

The rise of Android, the importance of time and the art of hypnotism

Karthikeyan, , , Leave a comment
Before even i get started go see the comments out here http://j.mp/11KxoxH, the status was public so hopefully you’ll be able to see it. I was having a huge conversation with a friend of mine, and he stood by Android and i stood by Windows Phone 8 and Nokia. The first thing is that Android fans are greater in number than Windows Phone fans, so they speak louder. I mean in the sense, “when you tell a lie over and over again, it will become truth.” [Fans supporting Android is huge in number]

And Samsung owners when their phones surviving 3 or 4 drops and the phone still survives, think that its invincible. They are not aware of the fact that if Samsung can take a single beating, Nokia can take 10. You have to own a Nokia to know and feel about the industrial quality of it, its made to last. They know we screw up with our phones, so they take special care for it to last long. People are having Samsung phones nowadays and automaticaly things that only they’ll withstand the sands of time without even comparing it with other products. HTC and Motorola along with Nokia are know to make quality devices where as Samsung plasti sucks, but people din’t demand quality but adapted there minds that hey plasticy is enough, and plastic is the norm. No! plastic is not the norm, it has become the norm cause Samsung is full of wjite plastic and since its devices are all over, it has become a norm. [People started to accept low quality products]

And let me talk about some industry secrets

  • Android is basically Java, and if you have a little knowledge itself you’ll know java is begin exploited and Oracle is uber busy providing updates for patching it. Android has the most number of active malware and it also has the higher probability and possibility of getting a malware.

The reason behind the large number of apps in Google Play Store is

  • Many knows Java [Initial Developer base]
  • Android at the time of launch had apps from Google itself, and since many knew Java, people started making apps in it. [Google apps]
  • Even more important thing to note is the timing of Androids release, at that time only iOS was the real smart phone, Nokia was late to the party and didn’t realise that it should be quick to act. But Google took the clue and shined. If Windows Phone Mango was released back then, If Nokia Belle was released back then, then it will be the current number one player in the mobile industry and not Android. Cause only Apple was there as rival to fight with, there was a space for one more to come in, and it wsa Android. [Missed Opportunity by the rest and good move by Google]
  • As i said at that time you can only code apps in two platforms, one is iOS and the Android. Apple is a costly and niche market. So developing apps for it was also not so easy, the strict rules of the Apple Store, the need to give a share (guess 30%) to Apple for every app you sell. That is if a app is 100, Apple will get 30 from it and the rest is yours. So due to all these various factors, developers made apps for it. When the time Microsoft came in with the Metro and Nokia realised the fall of Belle, Android already had a lot of apps and users. [Started early]

It is like person ‘A’ started working on January 1st 2013 and person ‘B’ started on Feburary 1st 2013, and the deadline was 28th Feburary 2013. The others started late, they were late to the party. Its not that ‘A’ was an outstanding student, its just that because he started early, he had an edge over ‘B’.


The reason why Samsung is a dominator in the mobile market:
Back in the days, Apple hardware  cannot be owned by every Tom, Dick and Harry (and its still is), in the world of smartphone one has only one option, Apple. All other was feature phones and Nokia ruled in that part. Other manufactures was stuck in Java cause they are not Apple, and they don’t hav access to symbian, remember Symbian at first was not open source as far as i know. So Nokia dominated with market share and Apple dominated inrevenue cause they laboured poor Chiness manufactures in China via foxconn and the price they paid for them is low, but the market price for thier devices was way too high. But still people brought it cause it had Ecosystem & Quality.

And then came Google, they knew that for going numbers, FREE is the way. Human nature is if its free, they’re happy. Android was released, and it was free to use by anyone. If you can manufacture a phone, then you can use Android. You don;t have to pay anything to anyone for using it. Fue to this factor all jumped in and used the ealier versions of Android in their devies because it was simply better than the basic Java powers phones, it had a Ecosystem, the Google Ecosystem.

Apple and Google alone had a ecosystem, this ecosystem is also a important part of Android’s rise. If you use Google search, Gmail, GMaps, when you’re deeply buried into Google’s ecosystem, you simply cannot choose some other mobile OS. And people who had iPod, who has already brought songs from Appple store, just switched to iPhone. Many invested in the ecosystem by buying and using Apple’s products and services and consider this, you have brought apps and songs over a period of time, and if you move on to something else, all that money is going down the drain, see people gets locked in thier own ecosystem, you just have to choose a ecosystem, and once you do it, then its like a path with no return, only forward.

So Android has the user base now, so people started using it, the word of mouth spread the android and its apps and it just got bigger. While Apple had its own set of people using their products who will (read cannot) switch to something else. Now Microsoft comes into the party, but hey the party is already past half way, the house is already full!

Android lags like hell, for it to run smoother, it needed PC level hardware, so Samsung knew and understood it and it started to increase the specs. While Apple and Microsoft stayed within the normal sane requirments of a “mobile os”. As Samsung started the spec race, just for hidding the lag, and that they cannot do much of anything else, there was no room for innovation. And people started to thing 1GB of ram as “LOW” memory devices, they didn’t realise the fact that even Windows 7 a full pc os can run with 1GB of ram, they didn’t question “hey why is this asking for so muh ram?” instead they simply thought “hey look at Samsung, they Innovate” No retards, they are hiding the inability of Android, they cannot excel, create or innovate elsewhere. Don’t fall prey, don’t be a sheep, think, give work to your fucking brian.

While iOS started everything, but it stayed right there. Apple invented an started all this thing, but it stopped with invention, it still din’t innovate. It was Nokia who innovated, but no one was there to withness it.

See one does not become a superior product just because it has quanlity, it has to have quality too. Apple guys knows this! A true Apple fan will rather die than to own a Android device, but people don’t care anymore.

And Windows Metro is something unique, it deserves way more than what it has achieved, its flawless, its beautiful to see (UI) and very simple to use (UX), yes Windows Metro interface is by far the most intuative and simplest OS ever made. But people are more interested in swiping through uncountable slides of icons, confused by various UI skins from a ton of manufactures. Now Microsoft has a great ecosystem, but people just don’t see or realise its beauty. People scold and don’t upgrade to Windows 8, i mean come on stupids, Metro is hard to understand? What are you 2nd grade? But hey one can’t blam you, you said increasing specs is innovation, you said plastic is quality, what else can we expect from you! To hell with you, grow up, wae up. Look around, don’t be a sheep, use your brain, don’t listen to him, you use it, hands on time! You get down and then come to a verdict

If you look at the history, people was always reculant for massive change, even if its for good. That is excatly what it is happening to Windows Metro now. Techie nerds love Windows 8, its the normal, 0 tech knowledgeable people who dislikes it. Say you cannot understand, say you need help, but don’t say a thing is bull crap only because you dunno how to use it. Its like a biker who owns ad rides a 100CC bike, whom dunno to drive, calls a Audi R8 Spider or a Bugati stupid stuffs!

I’m not ranting this not to tell that Android sucks, i’m just saying Windows  rocks. Closed ecosystem is the way to go, realise that Google is tracking you 24×7 to shove up ads in your ass and to make money. Ever though of why Android is free? cause Google wants moe people to use it, so that their ad revenu increases, ad revenue, that is what fuels google, that is what it is. Its giving optical fiber connections and free WifFi’s so that more people will go online and eventually they get money. Get the big picture! Think beyond. Google is not Mother Theresa to help others unconditionaly, there is a fucking catch in it, realise it.

I dunno what else to say, i have poured out all my frustrations like Tom cruise typing a memo in the movie Jerry Maguire. Perhaps, i will update this post if some more points come up in my mind, that’s it for now.

If you can see the above picture which is from a popular & leading Tamil weekly magazine, you’ll know what excatly i’m trying to say. Thoes retards think that iPhone is a phone manufacturing company. And Apple’s iPad run on Android! Peopl are blind when it comes to tech and they are all sheeps who don’t gt the true big picture!

RaT KuttI