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Reply 200

username612415

Original post by Nick Longjohnson

Please tell us what it's like. I'm really liking the look of WP7, and the Nokia is a sexy beast.

Original post by Mad Vlad

Right, after my first day of using the phone I've got a few major likes and a few reservations.
-Windows Phone 7. The OS itself has proven for the most part to be excellent, it's ticked all the boxes in terms of what I was looking for. It's also gorgeous to look at, it's obviously not going to suit the Android fans who like to customise anything and everything, but coming from an iOS background it's a breath of fresh air that's nicer to look at than any Android skin I've seen.
-Lovely screen. Great colour contrast and while I didn't think I'd notice it, the ClearBlack tech Nokia have been touting really does create pitch pitch black. This, coupled with the black bezel and black unibody, almost give the appearance of a far larger screen when browsing the menus.
-It's bloody quick. I don't know what it is about Android that sees manufacturers diving into insane spec wars with each other, but this single cored phone is running software and applications just as quickly (And a lot more fluidly) as the Galaxy S2 my course mate's let me use for the sake of comparison. I'm yet to run into any noticeable lag whatsoever.
-Good quality music. The loudspeaker isn't any different from the tinny boxes you find in every other phone, but the player itself is putting out a good standard of Audio when I whack in my Sennheisers.
-Design. As well as looking bloody lovely, it's a pleasure to hold and use as well. The curved back sits nicely in the hand and is just the right size that I can reach anywhere on the screen with my thumb (For the sake of comparison, it's about equal in width and depth to the iPhone 4, while being slightly taller and heavier). I've heard a couple of reviewers comment on the more angular corners being uncomfortable to hold, to whom I wish to ask why they have the phone in a death grip, because it's certainly not an issue for me.

Onto the gripes;
-Screen Resolution. This is most likely something I'll be alone in, and the display really is excellent quality, but when it comes to web browsing I realise why exactly Apple go on about the Retina Display so much. The difference is night and day, text looks very pixelated until I've zoomed in. Again, this is probably something exclusive to me coming from a 960x640 display because 480x800 is perfectly decent (Identical resolution and a much higher ppi than the Galaxy S2, for example), but if you're a fellow iPhone 4/4S user thinking of getting this, I'd seriously recommend getting a live demo and checking out the web browser (I know Phones4U have test models and there are also Nokia reps touring at the moment).
-Physical button responsiveness and position. Only a couple of minor things. First, responsiveness- I've had a couple of instances of the lock button not recognising the press whilst locked, which is annoying. Also the camera button is a two stage button (half-press to focus, full press to shoot), but the camera app only seems to open on a full press (Most likely intentional, but it gripes me slightly regardless). As for positioning, this may once again simply stem from my time using an iPhone, but the lock button appears below the volume rocker, whereas above seems much more sensible, and is placed closely to volume rocker as well, leading to a few instances of incorrect presses. Not a major issue if you drop the volume down slightly, could be an issue if you lock yourself out in the middle of something. I'm sure this will fade as I familiarise myself with the device.
-Music player volume and settings. Or rather, the lack thereof. The maximum volume seems somewhat on the low side compared to my iPhone, and there don't appear to be any EQ options. Granted these can be fixed by editing the files themselves pre-sync (The WP7 Connector App microsoft have made allows for easy syncing from iTunes and iPhoto on my Mac which is nice), but because I use a pair of bass-heavy in ears and more balanced on ears I'd like to be able to switch EQ on the fly.

Overall consensus so far- bloody love it, well recommended. A few minor nitpicks at the moment which could well fade with extended use and software updates, but otherwise an excellent phone well worth looking into. Feel free to drop me PMs if you have any questions Nick, I'll try my best to answer [=

Original post by Kenny_uk

Must... have.... more ... pictures?
Please? :P

We recently had microsoft's windows phone camp at our university, wasn't too bad, no new information though

I'll get some up tomorrow, my iPhone's camera doesn't take too well to low-light conditions now that the lens has fallen off XD

Reply 201

Kenny_uk

Great review mate, on the volume part, it's possible that nokia/microsoft limited it to avoid causing problems like the ipod had where people complained it could go too loud

Reply 202

username612415

Original post by Kenny_uk

Great review mate, on the volume part, it's possible that nokia/microsoft limited it to avoid causing problems like the ipod had where people complained it could go too loud

Thanks, these are all just first impressions so I might put together some sort of actual review (thinking of starting up some kind of blog in my spare time) in a week or so. Regarding volume, while I can appreciate that sentiment, I'd still have thought it would have gotten slightly louder by default. I'm planning to get a FLAC-compaible media player in the near future anyway though so I'm not massively bothered either way [=

In other news, if you count tablets in the figures, Apple are on the verge of overtaking HP as the top PC manufacturer in the world.

(edited 12 years ago)

Reply 203

Kenny_uk

It'd bother me too, since I'm partially deaf in one ear, having it up louder is my only way to hear things such as audiobooks properly

Reply 204

ch0llima

Original post by mikeyd85

Kinda goes without saying that though.

A lot of the time it comes down to the whole principle of least privilege business. If you're running, say, Apache as root, and somebody comes along with an underground 0day exploit and manages to exploit Apache to access the rest of the underlying OS, they'll be doing this as root. If you're running it as a gimped user account in a chroot jail or similar then the damage and privilege escalation possibilities will be greatly reduced.

It all ultimately depends on what your aims and motives are :moon:

A lot of this is common sense and you already know it :smile:

Original post by Dez

Big sites like TSR have more than one computer serving them. Any sysadmin that leaves the database server accessible to the outside world is a complete and utter muppet. :p:

It often only takes one security vulnerability in one of these servers to blow the whole operation wide open, though. You can have 100 servers, but if one of them is unpatched and another one has username admin and password hunter2 then anything on them or anything they are trusted to access is fair game. It could be like welding your front door shut and placing razor wire on your doorstep but leaving the bathroom window open.

As a would-be attacker and 1337h4x0r I just need to make off with the important stuff by any means necessary. Defacing the home page with pure nonsense is a pathetic and skiddy thing to do (can often be done without even touching the underlying OS infrastructure :colonhash:

) and just makes your presence all the more obvious.

Can't argue with the bold bit in principle though :p:

I haven't tried in great detail but apparently some DBMSs will warn you if you make the server listen on public facing IP addresses :moon:

, I know that MySQL craps itself regularly with

Reply 205

Nick Longjohnson

Excellent write up bro. Would you consider WP7 intuitive? I'm thinking of getting this for my father, but he's absolutely crap with technology. There's no way I'm getting him an Android (the amount of hacking and modding I've done to mine would make his brain bleed if I tried to explain it).

Reply 206

wizard710

Good write up thank :smile:

Original post by Nick Longjohnson

I'm interested in this too :smile:

Reply 207

Dez

Original post by ch0llima

[snip]

Basically, yeah, you're right. It all comes down to how well the servers are administrated, and how rights are granted. Generally, a user with access to the deployment machine or mail server should not be granted automatic rights to the credit card database, say, so if there are no internal locks in place to prevent that sort of traversal then you're in a big pile of donkey manure.

I mean that's basically padlocking the building and leaving the safe open, basically just a complete waste of time. But it's perfectly do-able to prevent any external access to the credit card DB except from the front-facing app, and in fact I think that level of security is considered a legal requirement for such systems.

Reply 208

Tathrim

So looking forward to be going to see The Blanks (Ted's Band from Scrubs) on Saturday in Preston!! :biggrin:

...

.....Except I still not received the tickets. I've phoned Seetickets, and they told me to leave it until Thursday when they will request a duplication for the box office. :mad:

Gig organisers, why U no send tickets!!

Reply 209

wizard710

Original post by Tathrim

So looking forward to be going to see The Blanks (Ted's Band from Scrubs) on Saturday in Preston!! :biggrin:

...

.....Except I still not received the tickets. I've phoned Seetickets, and they told me to leave it until Thursday when they will request a duplication for the box office. :mad:

Gig organisers, why U no send tickets!!

MMy mates are seeing them when they play at Warwick

Reply 210

username612415

Original post by Nick Longjohnson

Thanks. I think that's a good way of describing it, everything feels quite well thought out once you get used to it. The main learning curve is likely to be if he uses any sort of social networking, because the phone has an all-encompassing "people list" rather than separate places for your phonebook, Facebook friends, etc. But once you get all the information in, it's a nice way of keeping all of your means of contacting people unified, as well as being able to create groups (I have two at the moment, family and university mates, for example) then pin those groups to the home screen for easy access. The fact that there's only two pages for the home screen, the main page and the applications page, also simplifies things and makes it easier to stay organised. It's definitely an easy OS to pick up from what I can tell.

Another discovery: Mango has the best virtualised keyboard of any Mobile OS I've used, hands down.

Original post by Kenny_uk

Must... have.... more ... pictures?
Please? :P

We recently had microsoft's windows phone camp at our university, wasn't too bad, no new information though

Not exactly sure what you'd want pictures of, so I've just taken a couple of quick ones. Let me know if there's anything else you'd like to see [= Again, excuse the poor camera quality, lighting is pretty terrible here and there's issues with my iPhone's camera XD

The lock screen. Lots of information there for quick glances, including how many messages and emails you have (I assume voicemail and missed calls will also show up). Music info and songs as standard, no album artwork like iOS gives you but I'm not really all that bothered.

The password input slides up as you slide to unlock, which is a nice little feature (I don't know how android does it, but with iOS you used to have to slide to unlock then wait to the keys to come up afterwards).

The home screen. As I said before, customisation options are very far and few between, consisting entirely of which tiles you use, what colour you'd like them to be (From a choice of only 11 colours) and whether you'd like a white or black "theme" (The obvious change is the background, although I think it recolours other things like the keyboard). Again, not a problem if you like the interface, and there are apps in the app store claiming they can create custom tiles which you can assign functions to, but anyone who likes to tweak their android devices to their heart's content will end up pulling their hair out. On a final note, the blank space is where my girlfriend's tile lives. I've deleted it because I don't think she's want me showing off her mug to anonymous strangers, but I can confirm that individual people's tiles actively update with any profile changes they make or whether you have new texts/calls/emails from them, which is nice.

Using either button on the volume rocker drops down the music and the mute controls, which is handy because I've discovered another minor gripe- the Nokia Music app sits on a screen displaying the Nokia logo for 2 or 3 seconds before taking you into the app (If you choose it from the home screen/app list, it can be avoided by accessing the app through multitasking). I highly doubt this is a loading screen because it has no problems bringing everything else straight up and a music player's hardly the most demanding of processes, so hopefully they'll cut out the shameless plug of their brand in a future update.

Aaand finally the back of the device, just in case you haven't seen it XD I haven't had a chance to test out the camera yet, it's a relatively sunny day though so I'll get some pics on my way up to lectures and some low-light ones at the poker tournament I'm playing in tonight. I've heard mixed reviews so far, which I'm sincerely hoping are being overblown just as the sharp corners were.

(edited 12 years ago)

Reply 211

Kenny_uk

They are exactly the sort I wanted :tongue:

I haven't had the chance to properly look at a windows phone, except for the developer models that microsoft brought to the uni.
Quite impressive tbh, What about locking the phone? does it have a code/pattern unlock or does it use a different method?

Reply 212

username612415

Original post by Kenny_uk

They are exactly the sort I wanted :tongue:

I know Phones4U have models you can use (There were also nokia reps in the store I visited to play with one), if you don't mind being pestered by staff every two minutes =P as for locking, it's just a numeric code. You can, however, make it as long as you want from what I can tell.

Reply 213

IamBeowulf

Is this laptop powerful enough if I want a laptop to use the internet and microsoft office?

http://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/lenovo-essential-g575-15-6-laptop-11358336-pdt.html?intcmp=currys_seg_s3_laptops_laptop_giveaway_lenovo299

Reply 214

wizard710

I do love the smooth red colour :smile:

Reply 215

Wednesday Bass

Urgh. My laptops begun overheating lately. Last thing I need is the expense of a new laptop. But just in case, any recommendations <£300 for largely Office, some light coding and occasionally something like Worms/Super Meat Boy?

Reply 216

Nick Longjohnson

Original post by Wednesday Bass

You could open it up, and clean out all the dust. That usually does it.

Thanks for the write up. :yy:

It sure does look good. I want to get rid of my phone and pick one of those up now dammit :p:

. I've only played around with WP7 on a Samsung something-or-other (Microsoft has strict regulations for specs, so I dont think it should matter which phone it's on) and it was the smoothest experience ever, and I definitely preferred it to iOS.

TSR should start paying you to write reviews for tech on here! :p: