Vocal Voices

So here I was in Brussels looking for a replacement for one of my 3 phones. I have an old Android phone which is useful but quite limited. I've upgraded the Android to Ice Cream Sandwich but there it will have to stay. The screen is too small to read much without 15 hours of scrolling or a magnifying glass, but it does allow me to share my internet with other devices when I'm using a local sim.

So, I bought a Mobile Vikings sim (€15) and I needed a phone.

I'm never going to buy an iPhone, even after they finally capitulated and now ONLY sell large phones I don't need a magnifying glass to read the screen of. I also don't want another Android phone. Google maps may be good but they are pathetically useless if you are always roaming. The only mapping system I know of which has more information on the map "Before" you ask it to tell you where you are than after, when it's dumped everything it knows and tries to download more.

I could go for a very cheap dual sim phone, but I have no idea about the media sharing features of the phone and less interest in looking them up.

So I've wanted a Nokia phone for a while now, if only for the maps. I was wandering around the 200 or so phones on display in Media Markt in Central Brussels when I saw some reasonably priced Nokia's. Looking around them I finally decided to get the Lumia 625, with enough memory to do what I want and the ability to add a SD card and the latest Windows 8.1 phone software on it. It's a 4G phone too which is a plus. OK it was £160 but then I'd have had to pay £80 to get an Android equivalent which I would only have wanted to get rid of in the long run.

Great, get the phone home (still don't have the sim) and decide to set it up on wifi to begin with. Lovely can't register the phone without a sim.... Nice. So I put my Vodafone sim in it and it registers. It also sucks 35kb of data off the network before it decides it's roaming and so costs me £2.

Still, setting the phone up was easy. First 4 hours and I've set up and installed things that took me 4 weeks with my Android, a lot of forum searching and having to take the SD card out of the phone, put it into a Linux virtual machine and create folders....

The in built maps were actually OK too. So not so bad.

Then I get the Sim. Another 4 hours and almost every thing is set up. This is really good. I've had a play with the keyboard and I can see what MM is saying. The text entry is very good. The sliding suggestions on the top only require one or two swipes per complete paragraph, so good is the contextual recognition. A large part due to the L&H voice recognition firm they bought, I'm sure.

Now the bad parts.

So I wanted to enable 4G. It's not an option. OK it might be the Sim so I contact Mobile Vikings and ask them but at the same time I check the forums.

Bugger.

Nokia ship these phones which people actually buy with generic European firmware on them. 4G is disabled because, apparently, only the ISP's are allowed to enable that in the firmware. Checking on the 10+ posts which state that the Nokia service centre has refused to help is not looking good. I contact the Nokia helpline (text chat) and they tell me to go to the Nokia service centre. Now I'm getting annoyed.

I do some searching on this subject and, yes, there are numerous threads on, first of all, how to get the firmware images, then how to flash them to the phone. I took particular note of the comment that the SL on the end of the firmware denotes that the operator has locked the sim to their own network. A further check of the model numbers reveals that all UK networks lock the sim.

With my own experience of EU mobile networks, I know that Italian network operators are not allowed to lock the sim to a phone in Italy, it's illegal. So a quick check reveals that TIM has a 4g network. I download the TIM firmware and flash it to the phone. Another 2 hours re doing settings I did last time (8 hours down to 2...), as all was lost in the firmware update and I'm working and I can set the phone to 4g. Great, I do so.

But I'm still not getting 4g. Quick check on the network maps and I see why. Mobile Vikings respond and tell me they will check with their operator. They come back on Friday and tell me the sim is OK. On the way to the train on Friday I keep checking the network. E, H, H+ but no 4G. I've about given up when the TGV pulls out of Brussels Midi and my phone suddenly changes to 4G. A quick check with a speedtest app, whilst the train is rolling and the signal is dropping and I get 20mbits down and 7mbits up.

4G great.

I have to enable Skype again. Sigh, missed that one in the 2 hour setup. Then I try to send a text to Mrs S via Skype on the Nokia. No option. OK so surf for it. No there is not an option and Skype are looking at it. (dated early 2013).

So I pull out my main Andoid phone which is tethered to my Nokia (the whole reason for this exercise) and send the text via Skype....

So I think about this. Microsoft own Skpye. Microsoft own Nokia. Microsoft doesn't care?

So, anyway, irritation aside I decide to put my Symantec Anti Virus on the phone. It's supposed to cover "all" my portable life. Says so. Look in the Windows store. Not there. Check Symantec. They don't support it.

OK so let's look at my work mail. I use touchdown for smartphones so that work can't encrypt my whole phone and take it over. So I go looking for touchdown for my Windows phone. I can't find it in the store. I go to their home page and find...... They don't support it. OK off to the forums. Ah, they used to support it, until this year, when they were bought by....................... Symantec who discontinued it.....

Now I know I don't go with the flow and I don't have the same usage pattern as most others. But does everyone have to make it so Damned Difficult to do what I need to do. I feel a mail coming on to Microsoft. Because as far as I can see they have just bought the biggest Dodo of all time. Unless they, themselves, lead the way, their operating system is going to die.

So my aspirations of moving my main phone to a Nokia Lumia 1520 are lying in the dust, covered in bargepole marks....

I am exceedingly irked. Especially as my Lumia still has 20% of power left and it was taken off charge Friday morning.... My Samsung Note 2 on the other hand has had to be charged twice in that time...

I'm afraid I got lost halfway through your message, Suff, and didn't understand much.

(Apart from the ice cream sandwich bit).

What a funny world we live in now.

In simple terms I bought a Nokia Lumia phone from a store in Brussels. It wasn't cheap either it's the most expensive phone I've ever parted direct money for.

When I got it back I found that 4G was disabled. By Nokia. I also found that the only way it could be enabled was by getting a contract with a carrier which sells Nokia Lumia's and getting them to put their "firmware" or their version of the operating system on it.

Naturally as I've bought the phone to connect to a specialist pay as you go operator, I was never going to get 4G. Nokia service centres won't fix this issue. Really they should be done but the rest of the EU really doesn't have either trading standards or sale of goods act the way the UK does.

So in short, I found out how to download the operators own firmware, update my own phone and enable 4G. The difference is electric. I can get data faster than most fixed internet lines.

But it is just so totally annoying that they do this.

Then I found that few of the main software houses (Symantec), really support the phone and Microsoft which now owns Nokia, the Windows phone operating system and Skype, can't even be bothered to produce a version of Skype for Windows Phone which has all the functionality of Skype on the iPhone or Android.

And, yes, the Google naming scheme for Android is bizarre. My current one is KitKat. The old one was Jelly Bean. They have a food fetish. But, then again, they are American....