Amber update for Lumia 920; your questions answered. (corrected a little)

Yesterday Nokia uploaded the Lumia 920 GDR2 AKA Amber update to its servers, this meant that anyone with access to a Nokia care suit or a software updater could flash the new update on their phones.

Having flashed all of my Nokias in the last 4 years (except the 808) I went ahead and flashed my Lumia 920, and it a good thing that I did as Nokia pulled the update few hours later.

Yesterday I posted an Ask Me Anything about the new update and today I’ll wrap up the questions and answers to most of my abilities.

 

How is the heating up of the device now on using apps or while playing games .. any improvements ?

The heating issues in the Lumia 920 aren’t software related, they occur in these situations:

•  wireless charging while using data and/or bluetooth.
• Taking indoor pictures with location tagging, searching for a signal indoor heats up the device which will heat and drain your phone’s battery really fast too.
• playing intensive games for a long time specially online games on data connections.
• some people agree that 3G connectivity in the Lumia 920 is both a heating nightmare and an energy hog, I can confirm that once I switched to a 4G sim my battery life improved drastically.

 

im downloading it right now. so now i or we can now use the nokia pro camera?

translation: Can we use Nokia Pro Camera in GDR2/Amber?  (same one found in the Lumia 1020)

No, not yet anyways the app is not compatible with our phone which makes lots of sense as the difference in functionality is massive.

 

Is there any way to hide toast notifications for SMS messages? DO they still pop up no matter what?

No, not yet messages will always show up as toast notifications unless you’re in Kids Corner which you can customize so your friends could use your phone without accessing private messages.

(Thanks for JGROVE303 for suggesting this solution)

 

Any notable difference on the camera quality?

YES, you can tell immediately after the first shot you take, ISO is upped to 3200, which means night photos are so bright you’ll dial it back a notch!

for your night shots using the default camera app will be a breeze, however Auto will no longer give you the “more than your eyes can see” magical effect.

EDIT: Low light photography in Amber is unrivaled the above remark was totally incorrect as I had flash on (while my flash was broken so the software assumed better lighting and gave me bad results) Auto Mode works supremely well too. 

It’ll give you an Iphone quality picture in terms of lighting that is, my guess Nokia choose this approach because people still want underexposed pictures too for artistic effect, but once you set that thing to night mode, it’ll blow your mind.

The algorithms are going for sharpness in almost everything which is a welcome change as post softening pictures is easier than post sharpening them.

 

 

 Its even over exposed!

 

Magical low light clouds.

A well lit JBL Power Up Speaker, blur? anyone?

The only problem I found with the camera is white balance misbehavior, which presented it self in the Nokia Smart Cam, I haven’t taken lots of pictures yet in the default camera app to find out if this is app specific or not.

White Balance “acts out” sometimes.

Sadly you can’t rearrange the lenses position just yet, but on the positive side I found out that you have the ability to use lenses even from within the Nokia Pro Cam. (Lumia 925 users already know this) So you can set Nokia Smart Cam as a default camera without worrying about your other lenses. (its currently my default camera)

 

 

Does the glance screen drain your battery life?

Well I can’t answer that just yet, it does take a toll if it was always on but once you update the Display + touch and get the peek mode, you will not even notice it. ( if you’re running GDR2 on your Lumia920 clicking the link above will force update to Peek mode).

Cool things to note in Glance screen:

• If you’re charging the phone wirelessly or otherwise, and you’re in peek mode, the clock will always be on! This will make the always on clock experience an amazing one.
• Glance screen also offers battery charging status and vibrate profile warning. (I always forget my phone on vibrate so its great to have the warning front and center.)
• Glance screen will not burn* your screen even if its always on because it moves around constantly.
• Glance doesn’t hurt your eyes at night on the Lumia 920 LCD screen as it doesn’t light up like AMOLED does, you’ll not need Night mode for it but its still present.
• Glance has 4 settings: off,always on,timed and peek the latter being the best option of the bunch.
• Peek mode comes handy as once you take your phone out of your pocket the Glance screen lights up which is just PERFECT.

*In both LCD and AMOLED and even in CRT screens if you display the same content for long periods of time, the shape of that content will get burned and will be always visible even while showing other contents, this is why screen savers were invented by the way.

 

How is xbox music now? is it stable enough? or does it still hang when u press shuffle play etc?

as I’m a Nokia Music user I never had to deal with Xbox Music, so I really don’t know if anything really changed, but i tried shuffling lots of songs and it works perfectly, I also created Playlists flawlessly.  No repeated files have showed up.

 

notification center? notification light? closing app, one by one, directly from the task manager?

We already know those weren’t going to be included in GDR2 or GDR3 for that matter, you should wait for Blue update for those (early 2014.)

 

How about lock orientation screen.. Is there an option on that?

Again this might come with GDR3 but most likely coming with Blue.

 

Does it have gap-less playback?

No it doesn’t.

 

Data Sense available? (Why the hell was this carrier-exclusive to begin with?

Yes,Its there and I think Microsoft wanted to be on carriers good side at least until they pick up pace.

 

Have you experienced any issues at all?

No.

 

Radio support?

Yes works perfectly with a pair of headphones and yes loudspeaker mode is available.

 

why there is no call blocking and sms blocking available in nokia lumia as it is available in other windows phone 8 manufactured by other oems

I think Nokia should get on that, however my advice is to use  a non-Lumia device and see if you are going to miss Nokia’s input :D.

 

can install sailfish?

There’s always that one question.

Has the music player been fixed? As in, does it finally have a scroll bar or do you still have to mash the fast forward button? Also, does Nokia Glance incorporate music controls like the beloved N9 or even Symbian?

No the music player doesn’t have finger seeking through songs just yet.

Glance doesn’t have music controls neither did the N9 or Symbian, the lockscreen had music controls in the N9, in all WP8 phones even before Amber/GDR2 if you have a song playing once you press the power button  the music controls shows up along with the lock screen. This feature only becomes better when you add double tap to wake to it. 🙂

 

are there any sort of toggles? And are the settings better organised or is it still the same scattered mess?

No toggles and the settings screen is still a mess.

 

Have you experienced some restarting or freezing after the update?
Is the bluetooth going better without freezings?

Not a single freeze or random reboot or shutdown of apps/services, some old apps wont install however as they need to be updated in store. (not too many apps like 5)

Bluetooth has improved dramatically, before Amber it’ll take 4 to 5 secs to actually turn on! Now it instantly does, also pairing it with JBL Power Up Speakers used to be a chore now its easier than ever. I don’t know if its the BT4.0 or not but I’m liking it.

 

Hello,I love my nokia 920

We do too 🙂

 

Thanks for reading guys hope that helped.

Category: Nokia, update, Windows Phone