Round 2 --- in My Experience Using a Microsoft Windows Phone

I said I want to believe and I do.

Thanks to a great group of people that made time to help me through the process of the Painful Data Suck.

In case you didn’t know or missed some of my rants or as I like to call them pleas for help to resolve the issue:

My Nokia Lumia 900 was sucking down over 1Gb of data every 24 hours. Clearly, something wasn’t right.

That was then. This is now … I am happy to say that it has been up and running for 15 days post fix and it has only consumed a little over 200 Mb.

What Fixed It?
You might chuckle, but it was … The Three Fingered Salute.

Yep. I clicked the Reset Key. It worked!

For those that remember the old Microsoft DOS and Windows 3.x days the Three Finger Salute (The TFS) was the fix for everything. Fortunately, Windows XP and Windows 7 got a lot better at managing memory, apps and everything else and the TFS is mostly a thing of the past.

What’s Working and A Few Cool Apps
The phone was touch and go for a few days. I was afraid to let it run off in the wild with an unlimited data hookup because AT&T was going to charge me $10 per Gb … even if I went over by 1 byte. I was unwilling to let that happen. So, for two weeks I would only let it run in short and monitored bursts. I’m happy to say that it seems to be happy now and only consuming a reasonable amount of data per day. I still have not loaded all of the apps up that were on before. So, I’m not letting this pup run completely loose yet.

A Few Cool Apps

• Re-Installer (thanks to Paul Andrew for this one). This saved me a bit of a headache as I had already paid for a few apps. This tool finds them and allows them to be reloaded.
• Barcode Recognition --- This is a great way to save people time. The barcode on the right is for the ReInstaller app mentioned in the first point.
• Tip: To read the barcode with your Windows Phone
  • Click on the Magnifying Glass on the bottom right of your phone. Then click on the icon that looks like an eye. Then point your camera at the barcode on the right. When the phone decodes it … click on the icon to go to the website and download the app.
  • This is a pretty slick process. (I heard iPhone’s already do this … dang … I thought Windows Phone had a Slick Trick)

A Few Things that (still) Need Help

• Intuition – The Windows Phone has a lot of powerful features. To the people that have been kind enough to show me these features … Thank You.  These are incredible, mind blowing and just plain awesome features. Features I’m sure the developers are very proud of and that they want to see used. However, if these kind souls had never told me about them I would NEVER have guessed they were there or how to use them.
  • To whit – the Multi-Tasking Option by holding the Arrow Key.
• App Store --- Get one. The current Marketplace is quite limited and not very easy to peruse and not very exciting either. Make it fun (see if you can Out Apple, Apple); Make it easy; Make it Intuitive.

For a real world example:

Try to find the Box app … go ahead … I’ll wait.

• Box team --- PLEASE post the bar code link on your website or somewhere for people to find your app.
• App Developers --- PLEASE take this as a best practice. Add barcode (QR Code) links to your download pages.
• Don’t make people wade through the painfully awkward and almost totally useless search options on the Marketplace
• Still Missing
• I’d still like to see some of the same points from my previous post (see What I would still like to learn or see on the Windows Phone? in this post).
  Notably Screen Shot capability and Undo/Redo Typing.
• The other points I mentioned have been resolved … mainly because kind and patient friends (like Arnie Mondloch) took the time to tell me / show me. Thank you Arnie!

My offer still stands for the Microsoft team and for the partners and providers that are working to make the Windows Phone experience the best it possibly can be. I’m willing to test and evaluate your offerings and I will provide candid and timely reports on my experiences and expectations. I'm happy to do this directly and behind the scenes or more publicly with blog posts and other public facing venues.

Thank you again to the people that helped make the connections to get my Windows Phone working. Liana Shanes for the connection to the Windows Phone team; Arnie Mondloch for being patient and showing me the lightness and being of a Windows Phone; and Paul Andrew for the insight to several apps. I truly and literally could not have gotten this phone working without you.

My Updated Score for the Lumia 900 (and for Microsoft and AT&T):
B+ for getting things done (GTD). I continue to be impressed. The testing will continue.

I’m NOT giving up.

I WANT TO BELIEVE.

I think Microsoft as a whole and the Windows Phone experience are bound to get better with the help of their best dogfooders (aka employees) and I stand by my comment from this post that asks “Should Microsoft Employees Fire Themselves” if they are unwilling to test their own products by being the best Dog Fooders on the planet.

 

What do you think?

• What are your experiences with Windows Phones?
• Will you buy a Windows Phone 8?
• What stops you from buying a Microsoft Windows Phone?

Drop me a line here in the comments or on a Social Media Channel. I do want to hear your thoughts.


Jeff Shuey is a veteran in the Enterprise Content Management industry. Over the past 20 years he has worked with customers and partners to design, develop and deploy solutions around the world. Jeff is currently the Director of Strategic Alliances at Winshuttle. He has worked for Microsoft, FileNet, K2, Captaris, Open Text, Kofax and Kodak. He speaks and blogs about ECM and the Intersection between Social, Mobile and Cloud Computing.
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Image Credit: pocket-lint.com