Lumia 925

My Lumia 925 is an upgrade from my Lumia 920. I purchased it due to my affinity towards Windows Phone, sleek looks and fluid interface with no lag.

You can read full review by GSMArena.

The screen has changed from LCD to OLED and this now looks awesome. Videos specially look very nice due to deep blacks.

Battery life is little improved compared to Lumia 920 due to OLED screen. It still depends on how you use the phone though.

I have also updated the list of apps I use with my Lumia now.

Unify Remote – Control PC using Lumia

As you all know, I switched to Lumia 800 recently from my Nokia N8. I still love Symbian a lot and find Windows Phone lacking in features but just cribbing about Windows phone won’t give it features. The only way to fix Windows phone is to make apps for the features it lacks and make some money too in the process Smile with tongue out. For this along with many developers making apps for Windows phone, I also have to give accolades to Mike Dabney.

If you remember, I designed a Remote profile for Vectir for my Nokia N8 which lets me control Windows Media Centre from my N8. This was something I was missing a lot since I started using Lumia 800 as my primary phone as Vectir isn’t available for Windows Phone yet but it is coming soon with something awesome.

I tried a lot of remote control apps for Windows phone but none of them were as nicely designed or developed as Unify.

home_media home_touchpad home_keyboard

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Unify lets you control your Windows PC completely. Some benefits are…

  • It gives you a remote control for Windows Media Player or Media Centre.
  • It lets you control the cursor on your screen using an area designated to register movement on your phone which moves the cursor in your Windows PC.
  • It gives you key commands like Ctrl+C, Ctrl+alt+del and much more.
  • It even gives you the ability to type in your phone which in turn will type on your just like you would using a regular physical keyboard connected to PC.

You can check more screenshots and download Unify at its Windows Phone marketplace page.

Here is the thing. You must try this app because once you get hooked to it, you won’t let this app go. It is that wonderful, magical and useful.

Custom app icons for Nokia Belle and Icon Changer

So, Nokia Belle OS is coming soon. I am already using a custom firmware for Belle by “The One” in my Nokia N8.

Previously, defining a custom icon for an app needed to be done via Symbian theme designer. You could also use SisContent to manually apply icons. You would need the App UID and a SVG icon for the app. This was cumbersome.

I found a nifty little app called Icon Changer from LanternSoft who make some awesome utility apps for Symbian. What you need is just a PNG file which is easier to create compared to a vector file which needs more learning for creating properly optimized SVG files via Illustrator or InkScape.

I have made some icons for my personal use which I am releasing here. You can use them for the mentioned app they are made for. If you want to distribute them then give credits to me and please link to this blog post.

Download

GX Nokia Belle custom icons

Nokia N8 – Also a Mini PC

Right now, I am in the middle of shifting my house so I am without Internet at home. The only way to access internet is through 3G Data plan in my Nokia N8.

However, tethering is costly in terms of bandwidth. My Vodafone 3G data plan in India is limited to 1 GB so it is better to use internet in phone. So, I thought about something and tried to use my Nokia N8 with my Samsung P2370MS monitor as a mirrored screen.

IT WORKS

All you need is a HDMI cable & connect your monitor to Nokia N8 via mini hdmi to hdmi convertor supplied with N8.

Everything you see in your N8 will be visible in monitor too. The only issue is that the output is not 1080p which is native resolution of my monitor. I think the resolution via HDMI to monitor was limited to nHD only.

After this, you can use any generic keyboard and mouse via the USB OTG cable supplied with your N8. In my case I am using my Microsoft Wireless Desktop 6000 v3.0. I just plugged in the USB receiver in my N8 and I immediately saw a cursor in my phone & visible in monitor. Mouse movement was choppy but workable. Keyboard was working flawlessly.

The Windows key mapped to “menu” of Nokia Belle OS and showed me all the app. However, I haven’t been able to figure out what key combination to use for showing the task switcher. I tried alt+tab, ctrl+ tab etc but they did not work. I had to use an app for this from Nokia Store called “Task switcher” or something.

Here are some screenshots of the process

This is just another reason among many due to which Nokia and Symbian rocks.

fMobi 2.3

We just released latest version of fMobi 2.3 on Nokia Store. This new version continues on our work of making fMobi a breeze to use.

With fMobi 2.3 we are the first ones to provide support for Unified Messaging and User actions. This means that now you can write a message to a friend and it will be visible to him next time when he is using either a desktop browser or Facebook app on other platforms or even Facebook Messenger.

Facebook messaging support in fMobi

However, we did not stop here. We wanted to give our paying customers the most value for there purchase, so we also enhanced the album and picture viewer. It is still not perfect so we request users to provide us feedback.

Some of our users gave us feedback so the exit dialog is gone for good.

We have added more notifications

With our next version, we are aiming not on giving new features but on making interaction and experience better. Features can wait but a bad experience cannot be given to our valued customers. In the next 1 or 2 versions we are only going to fix visual and interaction bugs. Once this is stable, we will again start making new features for you.

Here is the changelog for fMobi 2.3

  • We are trying to move to Qt Components everywhere, but it also depends on compatibility with users of Symbian S60 v5. For now we are using the default Qt Component for buttons. The colour etc will change to better reflect fMobi branding.
  • You can now send and receiver messaging with support for new Unified messaging of Facebook.
  • New Picture and Album view.
  • Support for Facebook user actions in newsfeed like “Someone shared a wall photo” etc.
  • Haptic feedback
  • You can now reply friend requests. Accepting a friend request is still not possible from within fMobi due to API restriction so we open a new webpage in your mobile browser for this.
  • Various interface and visual bug fixes.

We request you not to pirate the app. fMobi is available at a very decent price of $2 only and buying it will support us in making this app better. Also, you will buy us a coffee that way. Download now. 

 

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