Tesmond's Useful Design

After Updating my Lumia 1020 to Windows Phone Developer Preview version 8.1 I felt the new features were great. However, I encountered what I consider a terrible bug, approximately every few hours my phone would not respond, it could not be opened and would require a soft reset every time in order to gain access. I believe I have tracked this down to the password lock. After removing the password lock I am no longer experiencing this issue. Clearly no-one at Microsoft tried putting a password on their phone, developer preview or not this is a bug that really should have been high priority and not made through any reasonable QA process. Still feature wise WP 8.1 is great and if Chrome comes to the platform then I doubt I would leave.

Well the original HTC One got T3's phone of the year . Not a bad choice, certainly a very good all-round choice. The ultra-pixel camera managed some mixed reviews, general considered acceptable, but behind most of its immediate rivals like the S4 in the majority of comparisons. Not everyone agreed it was the smart phone of the year with some like Engadget  pointing to the Motorola Moto X. The Moto X pipped the HTC with a few features such as always on voice and glance notifications as well as a more pleasant shape to hold. HTC did however get so much right with there phone their new M8 has the potential to rule the roost. Unlike most phones it has front mounted speakers, HTC Sense is a genuinely pleasant UI with all of the basics that a user can want well covered, and it is also one of the prettiest phones. Obviously there were some minor flaws, the relatively small battery size, which is not removable and the lack of an SD card slot means there was some room for improvement. S...

I have been using an Android phone since the Samsung Galaxy S was launched in the UK. It has grown from an OS which was only slightly better than Symbian and perhaps a little worse than iOS to the best selling OS in the world and with 4.4.1 arguably more polished, functional and usable than any other OS. However, I have been curious about Windows Phone for a while. In terms of a mobile phone my requirements go in the following order 1. Phone calls 2. Camera 3. Web browser 4. Deezer 5. Email 6. Whatsapp 7. PDF reading 8. BBC iplayer 9. Youtube Now Nokia has been releasing phones which are perhaps the best in terms of the first 2 criteria. With IE11 Microsoft have arguably one of the best browsers available so I was hopeful the browser would be good enough quality. Also due to the lack of popularity of WP the prices drop very quickly. I picked up a Lumia 1020 and here is what I can report: 1. Phone call quality - definitely better than my last Samsung phone, probably th...