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But the Gnex has a big bezel. I agree that the Gnex is easier to hold than a 920. I don’t think the absolute thickness was the main problem though. I think it was edges, which were also thick, that made it difficult to hold. The 8X is a pretty thick phone at its thickest point but the heavily tapered edges make it fit great in your hand.

3 days ago on Nokia's aluminum Lumia 925 is the best Windows Phone yet, but that's not enough (hands-on) 1 reply 1 recommend

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“You sound like a nerd with sweaty palms or someone who hasn’t actually held a +4.7in phone before.”

Which 4.7 inch device has no bottom bezel?

I’m talking about how uncomfortable it would be to use a device with no bezel. Take any 4.7 phone and hold it in a way that you can comfortably tap the bottom edge of the phone. Unless you’re contorting your thumb you’ll at best only have your index and middle finger on the device. It isn’t until you get your ring finger on it that it starts to feel secure. I was playing with my friends HTC One yesterday and the bottom bezel felt great. I could almost get all four finger on it while still being in a comfortable typing position.

3 days ago on Nokia's aluminum Lumia 925 is the best Windows Phone yet, but that's not enough (hands-on)

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If you also don’t use twitter (like me) then you’re a spy and a terrorist.

3 days ago on Capture of alleged US spy reveals the difficulties of being a CIA officer on Facebook 1 reply 4 recommends

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It isn’t the same at all. A typical person is comfortable holding their thumb at a given angle. The lower the screen goes (ie the less bottom bezel the phone has) the further down you need to angle your thumb. This quickly becomes cumbersome and it’s more comfortable to simply hold your phone with a lower grip. At some point, the grip moves so low that the phone is only being gripped by your index finger and palm. This makes the phone extremely unstable and most people dislike holding it in this manner.

3 days ago on Nokia's aluminum Lumia 925 is the best Windows Phone yet, but that's not enough (hands-on) 1 reply

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I’ve rarely seen a phone in store not running in some kind of demo mode. Inside the MS store they also tackle the problem you laid out by simply switching to the light theme (ie white background).

As for design limitations, Samsung has made a clone of their Galaxy S phones for the several generations (focus – GS, Focus S – GS2, Ativ S – GS3). They’ve also used the same 2 capacitive 1 physical button layout that their Galaxy S phones have. Here is a pic of an Ativ S beside its GS3 cousin; http://wmpoweruser.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/159201.jpg

3 days ago on Nokia's aluminum Lumia 925 is the best Windows Phone yet, but that's not enough (hands-on)

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Pretty much. Releasing it at their big even caused enough o a splash that it actually got a mention on my local evening news. I’m pretty sure they’re not going to do a follow up blurb when the SMS integration feature is added.

3 days ago on Google says SMS integration and outgoing calls 'coming soon' to Hangouts 1 reply 2 recommends

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So what is the Nexus industrial design? The past 3 Nexus devices were pretty much clones of existing phones from the respective OEM. The Galaxy Nexus was probably the most unique, but the Nexus S was basically a Galaxy S and the Nexus 4 is basically an Optimus G.

4 days ago on This is the new Nexus: a first look at Samsung's Galaxy S4 with stock Android 2 recommends

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Try this. Hold your with one hand in a way that you can easily and comfortably tap both bottom corners with your thumb. If you’re like most people the phone will be so far up in your palm that it will be virtually impossible to hold it securely. Then slowly slide it back down your palm little by little and see how much more secure it feels.

5 days ago on Nokia's aluminum Lumia 925 is the best Windows Phone yet, but that's not enough (hands-on) 2 replies 3 recommends

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“Because you don’t use apps is why apps don’t matter?”

No, that wasn’t my point at all. Basically what I was saying is that WP8 has two major issues, the lack of apps and the lack of core OS features. One of those issues (the lack of apps) is difficult to address because it mostly relies on third parties. The other issue can be fixed internally and would also make the OS viable to the subset of people who are fine with WP’s current app catalog. There is an added benefit to fixing the second issue in that it will increase the user base and help to address the first issue.

6 days ago on Nokia's aluminum Lumia 925 is the best Windows Phone yet, but that's not enough (hands-on) 7 recommends

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“You can still restore an iOS device using iTunes even with a password or even if the phone is marked as lost.”

Are you 100% sure of that? A few months back I had to swap my phone with my wife’s because I had to take her phone to the apple store. I did the typical full backup, then restore as the other device. I’m pretty sure I remember iTunes telling me the phone (my wife’s) needed to be unlocked before I could restore my backup onto it. But it was I while ago so I might just be remembering it wrong.

6 days ago on New York requests help from Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Samsung to stop smartphone thefts 1 reply

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In what ways is it not as restrictive as iOS? I would argue that it’s just as restrictive in all the ways that matter (replacing default apps, having certain content open in certain apps).

If WP8 truly was the best OS I’d be the primary candidate for it. I don’t use facebook, instagram, twitter, banking apps, airline apps or many of the other ‘must have’ apps. I don’t have any games that I need to be able to play or any messaging/voip services that I need access to.

I think it’s a cop out when people try to blame the apps. WP8 is deficient in many areas. The music syncing situation is a mess compared to WP7 or iOS. There is no notifications center. Multitasking is poor. Core apps like Calendar are deficient, and replacement apps aren’t really a good option because they can’t integrate into the OS the way an Android app could. There is no task/profile automation, on Android this is a whole class of apps and on platforms where they don’t give that much control to apps (eg iOS) they at least have some rudimentary built in options.

People try to make the app situation seem like this chicken and egg thing where they need apps to get the users but they need the userbase to get the apps. It’s admittedly a tough nut to crack, but they could start by making sure they have feature parity with android so they can at least add people like me (who don’t care about apps) to their user base.

6 days ago on Nokia's aluminum Lumia 925 is the best Windows Phone yet, but that's not enough (hands-on) 1 reply 9 recommends

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Some companies understand usability and some only understand checkmarks on a spec sheet. Do you really think it would be comfortable to type with one hand on a phone with no bottom bezel.

6 days ago on Nokia's aluminum Lumia 925 is the best Windows Phone yet, but that's not enough (hands-on) 3 replies 21 recommends

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No, you’re not the only one. This other guy, JulianoRossi, also doesn’t want metal. So that makes 2 of you.

6 days ago on Nokia's Lumia 925 slims down with an aluminum body, available June worldwide, T-Mobile exclusive in US

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I think you’re in the minority. Most people are perfectly fine with a solid day of battery life and would likely opt for better features rather than a larger battery if the phone was able to hit that one day mark.

I plug my phone in every night before I go to sleep and it’s fully charged in the morning. I’d rather have a better camera than the ability to only have to plug the phone in every other day.

6 days ago on Nokia's Lumia 925 slims down with an aluminum body, available June worldwide, T-Mobile exclusive in US 1 reply

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In what ways is the iOS system worse? A PIN locked iPhone will obviously stop you from logging in and wiping the device but I’m pretty sure it also restricts your ability to wipe the device by restoring it from a different backup.

6 days ago on New York requests help from Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Samsung to stop smartphone thefts 2 replies

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But you’ve only addressed a fraction of the issues. There were more problems I brought up in earlier comments. Can an RT app use proprietary USB syncing protocols (like iTunes<>iPhone do). Can an RT app use it’s own media decoders? So many of itunes features use m4a & m4v chaptering (eg podcasts, iTune U), would apple be able to use their own decoders or media handlers to deal with the metadata.

And even of the things that could be done (re-write the iTunes store to make it’s HTML not webkit dependent, rewrite the bonjour based network services they have spent years developing) would take a significant amount of effort. You try and pass them off as if they’re nothing.

7 days ago on Microsoft wants an iTunes app for Windows 8, but it's not coming 'any time soon'

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It’s true that they could theoretically use any rendering engine to display it. My point was that for such a specific use case (HTML which will be displayed only within the webkit view of iTunes) it’s safe to assume that their code is highly dependent on webkit and is using several non standard experimental features. Re-creating the app on platforms which don’t support webkit could potential necessitate re-writing the pages that make up the store and possibly even a feature regressions in the store itself (as some of the store features may rely on experimental webkit features). I’m just saying that it’s potentially another roadblock in their creation of a WinRT version of iTunes.

7 days ago on Microsoft wants an iTunes app for Windows 8, but it's not coming 'any time soon'

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My android phone plays m4a files and my WP7 and WP8 devices both played them as well. What they didn’t do is implement support for reading/navigating chapters. iTunes is not the only software which does this, VLC and many other decent desktop media player apps support m4a & m4v chapters.

I use m4v to distribute digitally downloadable instructional DVD’s. I started using m4v because handbrake (an open source ripping/encoding app) supported the creation of chaptered m4a’s (and made the process really easy by directly mimicking the dvd’s chapter structure. It has nothing to do DRM as nether my DVDs nor my digital files have any copy protection on them. I probably had a few other options (I’m pretty sure MKV supports chapters) but I needed to make the choice that will be the easiest on mostly non tech savvy users.

7 days ago on Microsoft wants an iTunes app for Windows 8, but it's not coming 'any time soon'

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1) You know the things you see when you’re browsing the store within the iTunes app are HTML pages rendered by an embedded webkit webview right?

2) Most podcasts use chaptered m4a’s. I know for a fact Windows Phone 8 nor the default Metro music player are able to see the chapter metadata.

3) Can you supply some evidence that the RT environment has iPhone drivers already implemented? They have always been visible to the OS because they present their photo/video libraries through an MTP interface the way a standard camera would. This doesn’t mean the OS has access to the rest of the device.

10 days ago on Microsoft wants an iTunes app for Windows 8, but it's not coming 'any time soon' 1 reply 2 recommends

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I never said the world revolves around webkit. But do you really think that Apple coded iTunes to be cross browser knowing that the only place those pages would be displayed would be in a webview within the iTunes application? Again, knowing that the page would only be displayed within a webview within iTunes, do you not think they made liberal use of experimental features like 3d CSS transitions? It’s one thing for a website to be developed specifically for webkit. It’s a totally different thing for pages that are only meant to be displayed within the webview of a specific application.

As for syncing, Windows Phone 8 uses MTP for music syncing. Like I said, I’m sure RT provides APIs for dealing with MTP and USB Mass Storage devices, but dealing with proprietary sync protocols is a completely different thing.

10 days ago on Microsoft wants an iTunes app for Windows 8, but it's not coming 'any time soon' 6 recommends

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You don’t have to pay anything.

A full device backup is typically going to be less than 1.5Gb. My most recent one is about 850mb.

This won’t cover your pictures and videos but those can be transferred to your computer without itunes since iOS devices still show up as cameras in Windows so the same tools used for importing pictures and videos (eg Picasa, the default windows picture importer) work on the iPhone. I actually prefer using the default Windows importer because it maintains consistency in terms of folder naming between my multiple cameras.

10 days ago on Microsoft wants an iTunes app for Windows 8, but it's not coming 'any time soon' 1 recommend

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iOS does OTA updates. I actually prefer this method despite the fact that I plug my phone in every night because going through iTunes downloads the entire image vs doing an OTA update which is usually a fraction of the size.

iOS does system backups to iCloud.

iOS can use iCloud as well as other cloud services (eg dropbox) for file syncing.

10 days ago on Microsoft wants an iTunes app for Windows 8, but it's not coming 'any time soon' 4 recommends

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Good point. Look at Xbox Music + Windows Phone 8 to see how a proper syncing solution works. /s

10 days ago on Microsoft wants an iTunes app for Windows 8, but it's not coming 'any time soon' 1 reply 1 recommend

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I think he’s referring to currently available devices.

10 days ago on Microsoft wants an iTunes app for Windows 8, but it's not coming 'any time soon'

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Here are a few things off the top of my head that I think iTunes would need;

- ability to use webkit to render the store. Can a RT app use a rendering engine which isn’t trident?
- ability to use various codecs to render video/music. Is this possible in RT?
- ability to sync an iPhone. Does RT allow apps/devices to communicate on that level? I’m sure there are APIs for dealing with MTP and generic USB storage, but what about the proprietary protocol the iPhone uses.

Can RT facilitate all these?

10 days ago on Microsoft wants an iTunes app for Windows 8, but it's not coming 'any time soon' 5 replies 4 recommends