Trouble with Czech Post and a First Look at the Nokia Lumia 710 Smartphone

First, how I got hold of it. On Thursday the post office tried to deliver it, but as soon as my father found out it was yet another phone, he started yelling so much that I gave up on the mail carrier and refused to accept it. The next day, once my father had cooled down a bit, I went to the post office at 10 am, but they told me the package wasn’t there. I repeated the whole thing at 3 pm and got the same answer. Today I was there for the 3rd time, and I even tried giving the name of the company, which I had forgotten to do yesterday, but nothing.

So in the end I showed the lady behind the counter my phone with the code Czech Post had sent me. She looked at it, handed the phone back and asked me to read it out to her. After that she finally found the package. I went to church, but discovered that all my SIM cards were just “ClassicSim” and I needed a MicroSIM. I turned around and went to the O2 store on the square, which turned out to be closed on Saturday. So I headed to the T-Mobile store instead. There were 2 “guests”/groups there – the first was sorting out some 2 calls she had made over the weekend, which were supposed to be free because she had free weekend calling. The second was a guy with a woman who were only buying a micro USB cable, but they talked so much nonsense about it that it seemed to take forever.

Then it was my turn. I asked whether they had any mobile internet plans for prepaid credit and whether they could turn my SIM into a MicroSIM. She quickly flipped to the right page in the catalog, though there was one thing I didn’t understand at the time but do now (namely why the weekly and the daily plan have the same FUP). Then came the conversion to MicroSIM. First I gave her my T-Mobile card to see whether she would do it with that one. Then I also asked her to do my O2 card, which had internet free for 6 months.

Then I finally headed to church to charge the phone, because the battery was already “on fire” and reporting a “critical” battery level. At church I plugged it in behind a chair 😀 and the phone charged, although slowly, but that is probably normal – even the O2 website says this Nokia takes 2 hours to charge, and that’s roughly how long it took. Besides, the fact that it was the first charge may have played a role. The biggest lol and fail was when I pulled out the battery and was surprised that it vibrated for about 4 seconds, because it was still plugged in!

I really am a bit out of it :D. It only dawned on me when my sister came to pick me up, but that was at the very end. At home, when I had internet over Wi-Fi, I looked up online how to get the internet working on the O2 mobile network. I found how to set up the APN and also some guide on how to select a network, but I really didn’t understand that one, partly because what it described didn’t exactly match what was on the phone. So I called *88 and was told that everything was active on that SIM with no blocks and that everything was set up correctly.

In the end she told me to try turning the phone off and on again, so I did, and the internet over 3G started working, literally at MEGA speed. Well, the ping was higher than on our ADSL or on the same SIM in a 3G USB modem, but the speed took my breath away. You see, with that very same SIM, just in the USB modem, I measured the speed here at home at, I think, 220KB/s download and exactly 10KB/s upload. The phone measured, again with the same SIM, a download of 372KB/s (our ADSL connection only has 250KB/s) and an upload of 120KB/s (!), while our ADSL only has 15KB/s!

On using the Nokia: whenever I want to open Windows, I keep pressing the Windows key instead of the on/off button. There’s a logic to it. That button takes you to the Start screen, and I don’t want to go back when there’s no way forward, I want to open the phone and continue where I left off. The WP system is the most amazing, the most beautiful, simply nothing but positives. The negative is battery life. Fortunately, I’ve already turned off these things: 3G, brightness set to the lowest (there are 3 options – low, medium and high). And maybe something else too.

However, this didn’t help and the phone still doesn’t last very long. I’m going to buy a new battery and condition it according to the instructions.

Pros of the phone and OS:

1. The Windows Phone 7.5 operating system, which is really beautiful, clear and simple, and there is strength in simplicity.
2. The fast Internet Explorer 9 browser
3. A truly beautiful and elegant design with a white front and a back in any of the available colors, but that may just be my subjective impression and preference.
4. You can get used to controlling the phone and the OS quickly, even if you have been using Android or an iPhone for years.
5. You can put any picture on the lock screen, even a landscape one, and WP adjusts it automatically.
6. A lot of real thought went into the design, and the phone is beautifully logical. Moreover, every app shares similar main features, so you don’t get lost in an app made by some crazy or inexperienced programmer, as sometimes happened to me on Android, which had no UI guidelines until version 4.0.
7. The apps that are already there, although minimalist and simple, don’t lack any important feature.
8. WP is dynamically and aggressively becoming a strong mobile platform, owned and backed by the largest software company in the world. Some analysts are calling 2012 the year WP will rise to the top.
9. So far the only apps I’m missing are a data meter and a screenshot tool; the other apps are top-notch.
10. Social network integration – everything in one app (hub). Unfortunately, I didn’t notice anywhere to explicitly turn off FB and Twitter syncing, so I removed my FB and Twitter accounts from Windows Live (and therefore from the phone too) and for these services I use their own official apps, which have more settings.
11. Navigation and offline and online maps from Nokia itself, preinstalled on the phone.
12. The phone puts more emphasis on the Facebook social network than on Windows Live.
13. Games and the Xbox Live Hub – even the free games are great.
14. Few apps are reported by the phone as being able to run in the background. Although it only lists the apps I installed myself,
15. The phone can’t be woken by pressing any button other than on/off. Ideally, you could set it to wake simply when something conductive (a finger, etc.) touches the display, given that these are capacitive displays.
16. The number of apps on Windows Phone Marketplace.
17. The MS Office Mobile office suite right on the phone.

Cons of the phone and OS:

1. Microsoft doesn’t want to update WP7 phones to WP8 (Apollo). Well, one programmer at MS says it does, but MS immediately denied those words.
2. You can program only in Silverlight and XAML. With Apollo it will be JavaScript and HTML5 instead. If it were regular .NET libraries, there would be tens of thousands more programs on the Marketplace. Besides, JavaScript is not a good language and I have a feeling that system performance will rather suffer because of it.
3. You can’t set the phone to always be in power-saving mode, where data isn’t downloaded automatically in the background. This is only possible when the battery is critically low, or manually but only until the next charge.
4. A QWERTZ keyboard instead of QWERTY (you can work around it by setting English instead of Czech)
5. Battery life like on an Android smartphone, that is, dismal and utterly pathetic. I wish Apple would finally come out with that new technology that is supposed to extend battery life by a lot). However, even when you aren’t doing anything with the phone, it drains quite a lot; for example, over 4 hours with only Wi-Fi on, it used 4% of my battery.
6. It warns way too early that the battery is “already” critically low – I think it’s at an unbelievable 20% of battery, but maybe it’s less. In any case, even this is good, because discharging below 50% reduces the number of charge cycles.
7. The photos seem noisy to me and not sharp. You can shoot at 5 MP (4:3) or 4 MP (16:9) – but the photos in both resolutions are close in quality.
8. The display can only be woken with the on/off button on top.
9. It doesn’t have a Czech QWERTY keyboard, so if you are really used to QWERTY, you have to set, for example, English (but then you probably won’t be able to type Czech diacritics)
10. There is the Nokia Music app, which at first and every subsequent glance is basically the same as the “Zune” on the phone.
11. Only a global volume setting – the same for headphones, the speaker or key sounds when you type. You can’t turn it off in any way, only set vibration
12. Silly things, such as not being able to set your own MP3 as a ringtone, which people complain about a lot. I haven’t looked at the ringtone settings yet; honestly, I don’t care how the phone rings, as long as it rings.
13. When the phone is off, it doesn’t show that it’s fully charged. (or rather, the battery flashes for about 500 ms, but I can’t tell anything from that) (see the previous article, the paragraph “Procedure for phones with an LED or that report a full battery”
14. Auto-tuning found only about 5 stations, while an MP3 player for 700 CZK picks up 30 (albeit many of them with a poor signal)
15. WP has the highest percentage of paid apps and especially games. Although I understand that when someone invests in a developer account (1,750 CZK) and, heaven forbid, in the full Visual Studio, they want to get their money back.
16. So far I haven’t found any Jabber client that looks decent. I used IM+, but every time I switched to it, it reconnected, even when it wasn’t the first launch. What’s surprising is that there isn’t even a default client for MSN Messenger, but maybe it’s just not a standalone app and is hidden in the People Hub.
17. No hardware keyboard; I will probably never get used to the software one.
18. GPS can apparently be turned off only in the settings; I haven’t found any app/widget that would give it to me directly as a tile.
19. Even with brightness set to “Low” (then there are medium and high), the low setting is very bright, even dazzling, and there is almost no difference between high and low.
20. The ability to develop apps only in Silverlight and XAML.
21. No options to set up or choose profiles; you can only turn the “Airplane mode” profile on and off.
22. I often feel that turning off the display after the set period of inactivity doesn’t work.
23. I only managed to set up the network with the “Network Setup” app, also from Nokia. But I don’t know whether it isn’t a problem with O2, which only texts me that they couldn’t configure my phone via a configuration SMS.
24. And of course the battery life, well. I’ll try a new battery, and if that doesn’t help, then probably an external power source too.

The fact that I wrote more minuses than pluses doesn’t mean the phone is bad – on the contrary – it’s great, except for the battery life, which is more likely my fault than a defect of the device or of Windows. In any case, the phone gets terribly hot; I’d say it almost works as a heater.

Here you can see how it does (not) last when I’m not doing anything with the phone and everything is set to minimal load. (The “23 h” is yellow because I have the battery saver turned on.)