Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Illuminating the Lumia -- The Nokia Lumia 900
Posted by Don Tolson in "Nokia Windows Phones" @ 08:00 AM
Windows Phone 7
The Lumia 900 comes standard with the Mango (build 8107) version of WP7 installed. The new patch for the disappearing keyboard and data connection problems with the Nokias arrived last week. It didn't change the level of the O/S in the Rogers implementation (the AT&T versions went up to 8112), but upgraded the firmware and radios.
Software Included
As with most manufacturers in the WP7 space, Nokia provides their own app collection in the Marketplace.
I was gratified to see that Nokia Drive, the turn-by-turn on-board navigation system had already been installed. All that was left to do was to download the maps for the areas I wanted to travel in.
Figure 18: The top level of applications available from the Nokia Collection
Figure 19: ...And here's the rest. Not a lot of selection here, but the apps provided really do provide functionality.
The apps work very well. Some of them aren't well populated for the part of the world I live in (such as Nokia Transit and Nokia Maps), but maybe that will come in later releases/updates. Apparently, Nokia provides a 'Network Profile' application which would set up the various SMS, voice mail, MMS parameters for each network provider, but I can't see it in my collection. Perhaps it's been blocked here in Canada.
Nokia also has an undocumented diagnostic tool available, which you can access by going to the phone and dialing in ##634#. Once this is completed, the application will be downloaded and installed to the phone and will show up in the app list as 'Diagnostics'. Much easier to run than the Samsung version, the tool will run tests on various parts of the phone's hardware.
I did notice an oddity with Internet Explorer on some sites with this version of the O/S. The symptoms are (for me) mainly visible on m.yahoo.com/news. On the Focus S, everything works just fine. On the L900 however, the fonts are different, some links don't grey out to show they've been activated (but they work anyway) and links from headers to stories don't work at all unless you tap and hold them, then select 'open in a new tab'. This may be due to a setting difference, but I don't normally play with the IE settings on my phones, except to force selection in 'mobile' mode. Maybe there was a new version of IE going from 7720 to 8107?
