All hail the gadget show readers .....

http://fwd.channel5.com/adv/king-of-smartphones

Got mine yesterday (for free off Nokia, becuase I entered in a competition on Facebook. ) and I've enjoyed my first day with it.
Still playing with the different features, and putting a few apps on it (and there IS a Sky Sports News app in the marketplace). I never thought I'd see the day when I'd give up my N8, but the Lumia is in a different league to the N8.
I wanted to use my N8 standard message tone on the Lumia, but you can't use your own message tones, you just have to make do with the pre-installed ones. Which are a bit rubbish if I'm to be honest. I can't tell if I've got a message sometimes. Which is annoying.
I'm sure there's loads of stuff I've got to discover, but I'm going to spend this weekend being jolly ('tis the season and all that )
Merry Christmas!

Windows Phone users (as supporters of an underdog platform) are generally a friendly and helpful bunch.

Feel free to ask question here or on other websites

If you like football the ESPN Goals app is free this season, it cost about 30 quid last year.

I don't know what happened but 2 days later it was working fine! Popped the micro-sim in and it actually picked up the network! It now works with T-Mobile, Orange and Virgin micro-sim cards even though the phone's from T-Mobile.

My first WP7 app just got certified So if you want to have a look, it's here:

http://windowsphone.com/s?appid=44cf...a-bf04d29371af

It's just a silly little app, I call it a shopping list, because that's how I use it, but it's more like a postit. You pin it to start, write something in a textbox and it appears on a tile. And it's for free. I felt it would be an audacity to charge any money for it It says in description it uses data services, which is not true, everything is local.

Oh, and I got the Lumia, too. I love the look of it. I hope Nokia will be successful with it. That's what I find missing with other manufacturers of other WP7 phones, there's nothing exciting about them. Maybe Titan, it has size and looks rather nice compared to the generic HTC look, but other than that, the phones are boring.

I find the Lumia too small personally, the 4.3" HD7 was perfect size for me. I got the second update on 18th Jan and massive improvement in battery life but still. The phone has never been bug-free from day one for me. The HD7 was mostly bug-free, only got that Zune freezing bug post-Mango.

I got it just recently and all is fine so far. No updates, I am not sure, they might have been already included. The phone lasts ~2 days for one charging, it was 3 with Samsung Omnia. I think the size is just fine for me. I was playing with HD7 for a while, I thought the screen was too big. But that's a matter of personal taste, I think. I like the design, I think that WP7 UI and the design of the phone work together nicely. There's Lumia 900 coming with 4.3'' display so that may suit you better.

Can any of you guys tell me if the Lumia has a wi fi hotspot feature. I use this on my desire HD on three a lot. But would like to move to the lumia.
Any ideas?

I don't see it on mine. It should have a hardware for it, they just need to update the drivers.

It`s supposed to be in settings in the application list and then internet sharing, when it's updated, I think.
I was just hoping to find a model that worked for this out of the box, and didn`t need to wait for an update.

It will be in Settings->System once it's available. I saw it in the shop on HTC Titan. I found an official response from Nokia people that the update with it should come this year. Apparently it wasn't a priority. I don't think it's in the update just released this week. With my data plan it's not something I would miss, but I'd like to have the functionality complete. I never got that on my previous phone, Samsung Omnia 7. They updated the drivers, but no Internet sharing. I heard about HTC adding it, but there were problems with some HD7 devices that refused to connect to some wi-fi networks after the update

I have Internet Sharing on my Omnia 7. The Internet Sharing feature depends on whether your phone ROM is tied to a carrier or not. Mine was a T-Mobile ROM and it worked fine.

I had it on my HD7, worked fine with no problems. No Nokia Lumias anywhere in the world have it right now but it is just a software update issue.

If it's essential to get it, pretty much all other OEMs have implemented the feature. I bet it's there in the european variant of the Lumia 900 though.

Depends on the overlay I suppose.

That's just bizarre way to handle it Why not always show it and only enable the page when mobile operator enables it. The same with display languages, Mango added quite a few, but if you were upgrading from the previous version, only languages enabled by the network were installed. Yeah, as if choosing some other UI language had anything to do with the operator Utterly stupid.

What was the submission process like with the windows app store? I signed up for a WP7 developer account last year but haven't gotten around to submitting any apps to the store yet.

Rather simple, but it's a very simple app. They check a few things, like behaviour with a Back button, if neutral language is set, if localized to more languages if it is done properly, if only allowed APIs are used. Then it is tested for crashes, if it interferes with receiving calls and text messages, etc. I had to prepare a couple of PNG files for the marketplace and fill in some info, including short descriptions in English and German (my choice). It took them a couple of days and then I got an email it was certified and published.

Sounds easier than submitting to the apple app store. I have a few ideas for apps and have written a couple of wp7 apps for my own use so I might try submitting them somewhen.

My motivation was that should I not renew the account I still want to be able to use that app. Now my phone is dev-unlocked, but that may change after the expiration.

I'm thinking of getting this phone on an Orange Upgrade from CPW. I'm currently on a Dolphin 35 24 month contract which is almost up soon. Will I have to pay upfront towards the cost of the phone? I was thinking of changing my plan to something a bit cheaper, as I currently pay £35 per month but with £10 credit back each month (£10 less VAT that is), so my monthly bill is around £30. Also, is it worth taking out a monthly conver on this phone? And does anyone know how much the monthly cover is from CPW, or if you can pay upfront for the cover? Thanks.

dduk

One thing that caused a friend of mine to go nuts was the fact that when they setup Facebook on their phone they allowed it to populate their contacts. So far so good it imported all their 'friends' (900 or so) into the contacts as expected and no major problems. However a fair few of them, say 80%, were Facebook only friends and they didn't want them in the contacts as they had no actual contact details, so they tried to delete them. This was when they discovered that you can't do that, you can hide them but not delete, so every time they did a search it looked through all 900. So back to the CPW they went with it and talked to the geek squad in store to ask how you delete them.

Geek they spoke to said you have to unfriend them on Facebook and then add them again as a friend to solve this. The phone went back there and then as they'd had it less than 24hrs and they went with something else instead. Now I have a young-ish relative who is in the market for a new phone and I'm being asked for advice on the choice between the different OS. This 'feature' is still listed on the Windows website as being there:


http://www.microsoft.com/windowsphon...phone-faq.aspx

The extent of their gaming is Angry Birds, it will mainly be Facebook and Calls/SMS/Emails that the phone gets used for. As Facebook is therefore a major consideration, I don't want to say yes get a WP7 one and then have them come back and say that they now have this problem and why didn't I tell them this exists.

So I was wondering if anyone who has the phone can tell me if they have done anything about this feature yet?

if they were getting annoyed searching the contact list to get to the entries for those friends that they text \ call \ etc most frequently then they should set up a Group called Mates (or similar), put their closest contacts in there, then pin the group to the home screen so that its easy to get to. Then they just have to tap the group on the home page and their mates are right there. They wouldn't be able to search the group, but i don't think they would need to as there would probably be no more than 10-15 people there and they'd be able to pick who they want quite easily by looking for their name and profile pic.

That's a good idea with the group. Luckily I do not use Facebook or Twitter on WP7, so i was saved the troubles

How easy is it to develop for Windows Phone? Are you guys programmers who've done it before? What language(s) & tool(s) are used?

I've dabbled in programming a bit an also have a few ideas for apps.