Considering how Microsoft are the ones behind the official Facebook for the Windows Phone platform, this would mean official Facebook software developers are unable to keep track of it too well. Well, earlier this morning, the folks over at Facebook could very well have made modifications to unknown bits within the APIs which are used in the Windows Phone 8 Facebook app. Just how did we arrive at this particular conclusion? As the adage goes, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and it seems that the Facebook app for Windows Phone 8 tends to crash consistently whenever one makes an attempt to access either comments or notifications in their Facebook account.
In fact, reviews for the Facebook for Windows Phone 8 app have seen a flood of complaints concerning the app and its tendency to proverbially go down in flames, and since there has been no recent updates introduced to the app itself, it goes without saying that in all probability, the issues lies in the back end side of things. Word has it that only the Windows Phone 8 Facebook app version 4.2.0.0 is affected, as users of the Windows Phone 7.x version 2.7.0.0 runs fine and dandy.
Nokia’s Lumia range is, depending on those you ask, either getting crowded or becoming more flexible, with the new Lumia 720 slotting in-between the 620 and the older 820. With its 4.3-inch screen adding up to a pocket-friendly size, the Lumia 720 makes a strong argument for the Windows Phone midrange. Still, we’ve already praised the Lumia 620 for punching above its station, so does the 720 really carve out enough of a difference to make it worth consideration? Read on for the full review.
Hardware
Nokia’s familial design language is clear in the Lumia 720, and it’s one of the more pleasing handsets to look at and hold in the company’s range. Narrower sides but wider top and bottom bezels make for a phone that’s slimmer but longer than the Lumia 820 it most closely resembles, though the 720 shaves 0.9 mm off the depth (taking it down to 9 mm).
There’s a compromise involved in that, though, which is that while wireless charging is an option, it’s not baked into the Lumia 720 natively. Instead, you have to slot the phone into a secondary skin, which makes contact with a row of pin-connectors running along the lower section of the rear. Then, it’s compatible with any Qi-compliant wireless charger, including Nokia’s own accessories; unfortunately, Nokia didn’t have the adapter shell available for us to test.
Bare, it’s a sturdy unibody with a smooth, matte finish; the red of our review unit is particularly fetching, but Nokia will also offer the 720 in white, cyan, yellow, and black. A Micro SIM-tray on the upper edge means Nokia can keep the back cover fixed – which also means no removable battery – while on the right side there’s the usual volume rocker, power/lock key, and camera shortcut. A microUSB port is on the bottom edge, and finally another pop-out tray on the left for a microSD card slot (to add to the 8GB of internal storage).
Nokia has been pushing two screen technologies of late, Clear Black for better contrast and outdoor usability, and increased sensitivity for the touchscreen meaning it will work even when you’re wearing gloves. Both are present on the Lumia 720′s 4.3-inch panel, a bright and colorful screen let down only by its mediocre resolution. At WVGA, rather than 720p, you miss out on the smoothness we’ve seen on other, more expensive phones. Admittedly, the effect is diluted somewhat by the smaller size overall, but we’d still loved to have seen an HD screen.
Inside, Qualcomm’s 1GHz Snapdragon S4 chip holds court, paired with 512MB of memory. Nokia may have omitted wireless charging, but you still get quadband 21.1Mbps HSDPA, quadband GSM/EDGE, Bluetooth 3.0, WiFi b/g/n, and NFC. Above the display there’s a 1.3-megapixel camera with a wide-angle f/2.4 lens, while a 6.7-megapixel camera with f/1.9 Carl Zeiss optics is on the back, next to an LED flash. The latter will record 720p HD video, though not Full HD.
Software and Performance
Windows Phone 8 hasn’t deviated from what we last saw on a new Nokia, and so it’s all becoming familiar territory for both the firm and its users. The OS is undeniably approachable for first-time smartphone buyers, and while it doesn’t have widgets in the traditional sense, the Live Tiles system – where each of the resizable blocks can cycle through recent updates, media previews, upcoming events, new messages, and other information – can, with a little investment in setup time, be surprisingly rewarding. If you want to fill the homescreen with a grid of contact shortcuts, you can, or alternatively you can replicate an iOS-style layout with simple app buttons.
On top of that, Nokia throws in its own value-add, the growing suite of exclusive apps and services which the Finnish firm hopes will coax you away not only from Android or iPhone, but from other Windows Phone OEMs like HTC. Most notable are HERE Maps, HERE Drive, and Nokia Music, though there are a few tweaks along the way.
HERE Maps, for instance, now gets LiveSight and HERE Transit baked in, integrating the previously standalone City Lens and Nokia Transit technology within the one core app. LiveSight allows you to hold the Lumia 720 up and look “through” it at points of interest overlaid on top of a real-world view from the camera. It’s useful, particularly being able to zoom past buildings and see what’s behind them, if you’re in a new area, and the Nokia’s processor has no issues keeping up as you physically spin around to pan the camera.
HERE Transit, meanwhile, shifts the incredibly useful public transportation guidance into the core HERE Maps app, where it belonged all along. Nokia says it now has timetable data for more than 670 cities in 50 countries worldwide, with the ability to pin specific routes to the Windows Phone homescreen (and see, on a Live Tile, the next upcoming journey time).
What you don’t get is HERE Drive+, with global offline navigation. Instead, those in the UK will get UK and Ireland maps with offline support, but have to pay extra if they want navigation data for elsewhere in the world.
Nokia Music, meanwhile, continues to offer a compelling alternative for those shy of Spotify’s monthly subscription fee. Sign-up free, it offers 100 Mix Radio playlists that Nokia updates weekly, picking from a catalog of 22m tracks, the ability to create your own custom playlists triggered from an original “seed” track, and support for a limited number of offline playlists. The Nokia Music+ subscription service – an in-app upgrade – unlocks unlimited offline playback, as well as higher-quality audio on WiFi connections, and unlimited track-skips.
Last year we criticized Nokia’s Lumia 610 for coming to market with 256MB of RAM when the latest apps were calling for double that. The Lumia 720 makes a similar mistake – less serious initially, but likely to be no less frustrating over the course of a two-year agreement – with its 512MB looking short-sighted when apps demanding at least 1GB are starting to arrive in the Windows Phone Store.
Camera
Nokia’s 6.7-megapixel camera for the Lumia 720 uses a custom sensor and the company’s favorite Carl Zeiss optics, though falls short of PureView branding. Nonetheless, it’s a capable shooter, particularly in the sort of low-light settings we’ve praised PureView devices for previously.
So, you don’t get optical image stabilization, but you do get a camera that doesn’t lose its nerve when it comes to scenes with mixed bright and dark areas. There, the Lumia 720 leans toward maintaining detail in the low-light patches – though that can leave brighter scenes over-exposed – with results that belie the mid-range positioning of the phone. The LED flash is satisfactory, but we found we could often leave it switched off and rely on the camera’s inherent light-grabbing skills.
On the flip side, both photos and video (recorded at 720p maximum on both front and back cameras) have a tendency to introduce glare and lens-flare when you’re in brighter environments. Otherwise, video from the Lumia 720 looks solid, and the continuous auto-focus does a reasonable job at keeping your subject clear.
Our interest in front-facing cameras usually begins and ends with the odd Skype video call, but Nokia has made a specific play for those particularly keen to take self-portraits. As well as being equipped with a wide-angle lens, to fit more people in-shot, the Lumia 720 supports the new, wretchedly-named Glam Me app, which automatically enhances your selfies. Brightness, skin smoothness, blemishes and more are all ironed out, tweaked, and generally finessed; alternatively, you can apply one of several filters, with Instagram-like textures and color tones.
Phone and Battery Life
Nokia’s legacy for decent call quality continues with the Lumia 720, though the relevance of voice calls alone is perhaps questionable these days. Instead, we can’t help but feel that omitting LTE support was a missed opportunity.
The Lumia 720′s battery may be non-removable, but at 2,000 mAh it’s oversized for a 4.3-inch phone. That pays obvious dividends for runtimes: Nokia quotes up to 13.4hrs of talk time or up to 520hrs of standby (both on 3G), or alternatively 79hrs of music playback (locally-stored, not streaming).
In practice, with regular use – push email turned on, social networking use including Facebook and Twitter, some photography, music streaming, and HERE Maps – we easily made it through two days without having to reach for the microUSB charger. That’s almost enough for us to forgive the fact that wireless charging (or the kit needed to use it) isn’t bundled.
Wrap-Up
In some ways, the Lumia 720 is everything we’ve asked for from Nokia. It’s slickly designed and has superlative battery life, the camera out-performs rivals in the same price bracket, and the screen – though lower resolution than we like – is a nice compromise of size, outdoor usability, and general clarity.
Letting the show down are the absence of LTE and the potentially limiting 512MB of RAM. You could well say that the Lumia 720′s target audience won’t miss 4G, but there’s a growing cadre of people wanting higher-end features without a massive display, and they already know they want LTE. As 4G spreads, more and more people are going to expect it to on their phone. As for the RAM, that’s a more obvious drawback: games like Temple Run are quietly omitted from the Store, since they demand twice the memory the Nokia has.
It’s a frustrating flaw in what could’ve been a fantastic device, though the strengths in camera and battery life still make it a solid choice in the midrange.
We’ve been hearing a number of rumors of Microsoft possibly creating a Microsoft-branded “Surface Phone,” which we expected to hear by the first half of this year, especially since Foxconn has reportedly been chosen to manufacture the device. But Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Windows Phone, Terry Myerson, decided to shed some light on the company’s plans on possibly delivering an official Microsoft-branded Windows Phone.
Myerson hulk smashed his way through all of those previous rumors by denying such a handset would launch anytime soon during AllThingD’s Mobile Conference. He followed up by saying if Microsoft were to produce an officially branded smartphone, it would do so with an effort to provide a unique user experience its Windows Phone partners wouldn’t be able to achieve. Myerson believes Windows Phone partners, such as HTC and Nokia, are already providing some great mobile experiences to Windows Phone users. (more…)
It is no secret that Android smartphones account for 70% of the entire smartphone market. While its rival, the iPhone, maintains a clear lead in the U.S., Android has long passed it in the global market. One major reason for this is that Apple does not license iOS, whereas Android can be used by any mobile manufacturer in any part of the world. Despite its global success, Windows Phone Chief Head Myerson believes that Google’s mobile operating system is still “kind of a mess.”
Speaking at the D: Dive Into Mobile conference today, Head noted that Samsung is the only manufacturer that is really making money off of Android. He said that Windows Phone is thought to be more of a global competitor as they have momentum in markets where carrier subsidized phones are only a dream. He also snubbed Facebook Home, which sits on top of the core Android OS, and makes the smartphone more “people-centric.” While Google has said that Facebook Home is what open source is all about, Head believes that there’s probably an entire team at Google that is devoted to figuring out how they can quash Home. When asked about the possibility of Home like relationship of Facebook with Windows Phone devices, he didn’t rule it out, despite the company already labeling Home as an imitation of Windows Phone.
Terry Myerson, who took over as corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Windows Phone division following Andy Lees’ departure in 2011, is helping to kick off the second day of D: Dive Into Mobile here in New York City. Right out of the gate, host Ina Fried asked where Windows Phone is seeing the most success. The response?
“When you think about the world, there are markets where operators are subsidizing phones, and then there are markets where they aren’t. We’re seeing the most success in markets where operators are not subsidizing the phone. What happens in the subsidized market — the market that Apple and Samsung have chosen to focus on — is that the best innovation happens in the $650 product that’s sold for $200. For us, the momentum we’re building is with building a phone we can offer for less than $650 [unsubsidized]. Getting to 20 percent share in Mexico or Poland, that’s the opportunity.”
Today Microsoft has released a new update of the Skype for Windows Phone 8 app. The beta tag that previously accompanied this app has now been dropped in the latest update, which brings the version number up to 2.5. Despite that, there aren’t any substantial new features in this update. The new Skype for Windows Phone 8 version 2.5 is now available for download from the Windows Phone Store.
The new app update primarily brings general improvements and better reliability. Various bugs have been fixed which plagued both chat and video chat, they’ve also fixed some crashes. The only new tweak in this update is the change of handling of Messenger buddies in the app. The Skype app now be default displays message notifications for Messenger buddies. Microsoft hasn’t clarified one thing, since Windows Phone 8 has Messenger integrated, wouldn’t this mean that users will get notifications from both the Skype and built in Messenger apps? Perhaps the company has disabled the integrated Messenger app’s notifications? The company has yet to say something on this matter, we’ll let you know when they release an official statement.
Last week it was reported that according to the rumors, Windows Phone could support 1080p Full HD resolutions in its next update. Given that Android phones already support 1080p, this move is more or less expected, although the question of “when” is probably in the forefront of peoples’ minds. So while 1080p Full HD could eventually become the new standard of Windows Phone devices, what about actual screen size? Will we be seeing an increase in that too? Well it seems that it could very well be a possibility, according to a new rumor that has suggested that Microsoft could be looking to add more tiles to Windows Phone, hinting at the possibility of a larger screen.
This is according to Mary Jo Farley from ZDNet who learnt via her sources that Microsoft could be interested in adding an additional column of tiles to the Windows Phone UI. With the Nokia Lumia 920 sitting at 4.5”, it is a pretty big phone and is pretty close to its Android competitors whose displays sit around the 4.5”-4.7” mark, with more modern devices going 5” and beyond. If Microsoft is really interested in increasing the display sizes of future Windows Phone smartphones, seeing a Windows Phone phablet-type device in the future might not be a stretch of the imagination. What do you guys think? Do you think Microsoft is interested in venturing into phablet territory, and would that be a welcome move by Windows Phone owners?
Instagraph is an app that posts your photos to Instagram from Windows Phone. Sure, it’s not the official app. But it’s about as close as you’re going to get for the foreseeable future. More »
Modern Combat 4: Zero Hour was first released back in December for iOS and Android, but Windows Phone 8 ended up getting the shaft. However, Gameloft has announced that the game is now available on Windows Phone 8, allowing users of Microsoft’s new platform to play one of the most intense mobile first-person shooter games out there.
The game will take up around 1GB, so be sure to free up some storage space if need be. It’s worthy to note that the game won’t play on all Windows Phone 8 devices. Gameloft doesn’t provide a list of approved devices, but Microsoft says on their Windows blog that it can only play on “high-memory Windows Phone 8 models.”
As for gameplay elements, it looks like Modern Combat 4 is merely just a port from the iOS and Android versions, so don’t expect anything exclusive to come your way if you plan on playing the game on your Windows Phone 8 device. The game will cost you $6.99, which is the same price as the iOS and Android version.
Modern Combat 4: Zero Hour comes with pretty much everything you would ever want in a first-person shooter, including multiplayer, complete with leaderboards, and over 20,000 weapon arrangements. It’s certainly nothing special when you consider a console game, but this is a mobile game we’re talking about, which is insanely impressive. Give the game a try today and let us know what you think.
It is being reported that two step authentication for Microsoft accounts is coming soon. This boost in account security is being developed side by side with a new authenticator app, which is being developed for Windows Phone, Microsoft’s mobile platform. Last month it was said that Microsoft would be adding enhanced account aliases which would ultimately replace the current account renaming feature, though the enhanced aliases feature for accounts has not been rolled out yet.
There’s a caveat with two factor authentication though, it will not work with the user’s linked accounts. All such accounts will have to be unlinked from the account on which the enhanced authentication feature is to be turned on. Microsoft also adds a feature called “app password” for those apps and devices that don’t support two factor authentication. When a user signs in to an app or device that doesn’t support it, they can easily generate an app password from the Microsoft account website, which can then be entered to get access to the account on said app or device. It is not known when Microsoft will be releasing this.
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Considering how Microsoft are the ones behind the official Facebook for the Windows Phone platform, this would mean official Facebook software developers are unable to keep track of it too well. Well, earlier this morning, the folks over at Facebook could very well have made modifications to unknown bits within the APIs which are used in the Windows Phone 8 Facebook app. Just how did we arrive at this particular conclusion? As the adage goes, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and it seems that the Facebook app for Windows Phone 8 tends to crash consistently whenever one makes an attempt to access either comments or notifications in their Facebook account.
Last week it was reported that according to the rumors, Windows Phone could support 1080p Full HD resolutions 
