sade027

By now you would have read countless of op-eds about Nokia's sale of their phone division to Microsoft. Suffice to say I have nothing to add, except that I am glad that we will still be getting Nokia phones, one way or another. Sure, phones with Nokia as a brand will go away eventually, but that would happen if Microsoft doesn't buy them anyway.  In fact, this whole sale reminds me of IBM's sale of their PC division to Lenovo. Many ThinkPad fans, like me, were understandably concerned that Lenovo would not have treated the brand with enough respect. Fortunately that hasn't been the case. Long time ThinkPad designers stayed on, and today Lenovo makes some of the best ThinkPad laptops we have ever seen. The same can happen with Nokia's phone division if handled properly. It will be a while before we will see the benefits from the sale. But here's hoping that Nokia's phone hardware engineers and Microsoft's software engineers will work closer than ever. Pas...

When Microsoft Studios first announced Halo: Spartan Assault on Windows Phone 8, I almost reeked with disgust. Here was a franchise which gameplay was deeply rooted as a first shooter genre. I admit that I have a deep seated biased against developers who attempt to shoehorn a gameplay designed for consoles onto smartphones. It would be unplayable. Thankfully, the developer Vanguard alongside Microsoft Studios seems to have realised that and designed the Halo: Spartan Assault around a smartphone's more limited input options. The result is something beautiful and is easily one of the best tactical based shooter available on any smartphone. This isn't yet another Halo first person shooter. The huge difference in gameplay mechanics, not to mention the platform, Halo: Spartan Assault deserves a proper examination. In Halo: Spartan Assault , you play a series of missions/campaigns using a UNSC training simulator (yes, it's a game withing a game!) fighting off an invasion of a...

I haven't blog for a month now, which is pretty long I guess. It's been a busy time in my life, but I am planning to get back to blogging here slowly once again. Let's just say that house hunting in London is a little more overwhelming than we should have allowed it to be. I am pretty sure I aged ten years in these last couple of months. I just want to put a few thoughts about the latest tech news and what I think about them holy hell, iOS 7 looks a heck a lot like Windows Phone doesn't it? I mean it still features a boring old grid design with static icons and inconsistent UX, but look at that multitasking page and flat(er) UI design! The drop shadows and fake 3Ds and textures mimicking real life products are all gone. It finally looks the bit of a 21st century OS. Barely. O hai modern UI wannabee Still, it's shift from skeuomorphism to something a bit more modern is something I can accept - after all I have been calling for Apple to ditch their 20th century desig...

Instagram (update: since renamed to Instance) has finally come to Windows Phone! Well sort of. Itsdagram is the first fully featured Instagram client on the Windows Phone Marketplace to allow direct uploading. In fact, it is the first fully featured third party Instagram client on any mobile platform that will allow you to register, upload, like, follow and comment. This is particularly impressive, when you consider that Instagram has yet to open up their upload API to the public. For a first version release, Itsdagram is impressively featured. Apart from Instagram's stock filters, it can do everything that an official Instagram client on iOS and Android can do, and more, including features exclusive to Windows Phone. For example, you can pin hashtags and users to the homescreen for easy access, something the official Android app can't do (iOS don't even support widgets). Unlike the official clients, it also supports grid view as well as a more traditional timeline view. Yo...

Windows Phone 8 has a strange storage 'bug' that keeps eating away at your storage space if you are not too careful. Now this happens all the time (it happens on my Android and iPhone as well), but on my HTC Windows Phone 8X , with its limited 16 GB of storage (12 GB after formatting and system allocations) and no ability to expand storage via microSD slot, this can lead to tons of frustration. A Windows Phone developer once told me that all Windows Phone apps are run sandboxed, meaning if you delete them, everything associated with the app goes. This also means there is no reason for a file explorer or registry so you can go an manually delete any orphan and temporary files. Unfortunately this isn't always exactly true. It appears that Windows Phone 8 uses a susbtantial amount of storage space which is labelled as 'Other'. And like the misunderstood villains of the first few series of Lost (before the series turned into an orgy for writers to make stuff up as they...

I have been using Windows Phone 8 for a solid two months now, first with the Nokia Lumia 920 and then the HTC Windows Phone 8X . And just like it was a year ago with Windows Phone 7.5 , and the year before that with the original Windows Phone 7 , I am in love with this OS. The beautiful Swiss-style Metro UI is just perfect for my mobile needs. It's so intuitive even a bloody cat can operate it. I can't go back to using an Android or iOS device without muttering, bloody Xerox grids. Go back to the 1980s where you belong. But as before, Windows Phone's great UI and UX aren't enough. There is so much to Windows Phone 8 that doesn't deserve Microsoft's inaction. I understand they had to get Windows 8 launch out of the way, but their strategy with Windows Phone is now making less sense than ever. They stumbled upon such a beautiful UI that they even made their core OS and Office products out of it, so the first product line to ever use it (Zune doesn't count) ...

London-based Design Museum has announced the nominations for this year's The Designs of the Year awards. The award will showcase innovative designs spanning across seven categories: graphics, transport, product, fashion, digital, furniture and architecture. Among those nominated., these includes the A Room for London, a pop up hotel currently sitting on top of the Queen Elizabeth Hall building at the Southbank Centre; The Shard, Europe's newest tallest building build in the London Bridge district and Kapow!, the book set about in the Arab Spring. From a digital/mobile technology perspective (only because I blog a lot about phones), Windows Phone 8, the Swiss style inspired mobile OS reboot by Microsoft - which I recently reviewed with the HTC Windows Phone 8X and Nokia Lumia 920 , was also nominated. According to Pete Collard , the exhibition's curator, “the language that Windows Phone 8 presents is a very digital language, it says ‘this is digital information presented on...

Windows Phone platform has a surprising number of working emulators. The first released was vNES, an emulator for the Nintendo Entertainment System also known as the Famicom in Japan, a relatively old console and hence easy to emulate. There are also emulators for the Sega MasterSystem, Sega GameGear and Nintendo Game Boy Color. For a walled garden platform, Microsoft has been surprisingly lenient when it comes to allowing such apps on their Marketplace. Perhaps this is Microsoft's way of compensating and apologising for the severe lack of Windows Phone Xbox Live games... Chrono Trigger , still one of the best Japanese RPGs One of the newer and perhaps more impressive emulator on the platform is Snes8x, an emulator for old time gamers who wishes to relive their favourite childhood SNES games, many of which rivals even modern gaming. What is a SNES? Well any self respecting gamer will know about the SNES, Nintendo's second home console. The Super Nintendo is known to ...