The new Outlook and Skydrive

Recently Microsoft has been modernizing it's  core products in quite a fast pace. I've already talked about Windows 8, but now also Outlook.com and Skydrive.com have new, fresh and modern appearance and they're totally worth a try.

SkyDrive
 

I've used SkyDrive a lot in the past year because of the great integration with my Nokia Lumia 800 Windows Phone. Instead of always connecting my phone to the computer to download the images, I quite often upload them to the cloud storage straight from my phone. The SkyDrive app on WP7 is pretty neat, but now that Skydrive.com has been totally modernized, I'm very pleased to use it on my computer.

The interface is very clear, simple and fits greatly to the browser window. You can easily have side panel to show extra info, or access the settings or social media share options, etc. The new SkyDrive site uses some modern HTML techniques that enables e.g. re-arranging photos with drag-and-drop gestures and uploading photos by dragging them from your desktop to the browser window, skipping the annoying "Select files to upload" type of dialogs!

One of the few things that annoy me is the fact that you can't rotate images that are already uploaded to SkyDrive. That should be fixed since sometimes the camera doesn't get the rotation of the image right, causing many portrait images rotated into landscape pics.

Outlook.com

I haven't used Hotmail much since it's always been my secondary email, but with the re-branding (to Outlook.com) I'm considering using it more than before. First of all the web email interface is better than anything else I've tried, even Gmail seems less easy to use compared to it. You can change the interface main color, reading pane position and more very easily.

One cool thing is also an extra panel that shows social media (FB, Twitter) content from the person who's email you are reading, nice! You can also chat on Facebook (also on SkyDrive) directly from Outlook.com without need to swap back to other browser tab or window. It's the same high social media integration that I've seen on Windows Phone.

Outlook.com could have many inboxes, from 3rd party services like Gmail, but I haven't tried that yet. What I did like was the option to create aliases for my old Hotmail account. The old email, macjuhruo@hotmail.com, obviously isn't the best possible, so just with few clicks I created a juho.ruohola@outlook.com alias that automatically forwards the mails to my Hotmail-account and inbox. There's still plenty of settings and stuff I haven't tried, but overall the impression of outlook.com is very positive.

Nokia Lumia 920 and 820 announced

It's been a long time posting, but Nokia announced it's new Lumia phones in NewYork last Wednesday and they're worthy of a post!

The new Lumia phones, 920 and 820 are the successors of the current models Lumia 900 and Lumia 800 (which I have). While the old models will not be upgradable but to Windows Phone 7.8, the new models will run Windows Phone 8 that brings a whole lot new features to the table and better integration with Windows 8, also released later this year. Windows Phone 8 enables the new technical features both the Lumia 920 and 820 have.

Lumia 920

Lumia 920 is definitely the new flagship phone of Nokia. It has big 4'5" screen with a lot of exciting and innovative technology, such as doubled refresh rate, super high resolution (tops the retina display of iPhone 4s), NFC and most interestingly super sensitivity that enables you to use the phone even with your gloves on! This will be great especially in winter time, one thing I cried about in my earlier blog post. Lumia 920 also features wireless charging, which sounds awesome, something I didn't expect to see in mass products for some time.

To me personally, one of the greatest improvement of Lumia 920 is the Pureview technology they're bringing in. A floating lens enables Optical Image Stabilizaion (OIS) which should allow blur-free photos in low light conditions and stabilized videos instead of shaky ones. Some of the demos from the announcement event were really impressive and promising. I like low light photography and that's basically what the coming Finnish winter has to offer anyway =)

Lumia 920 comes in bright and vibrant colors red and yellow (in addition to white, black and gray) which makes the classic Lumia design look even more tempting. I'm really looking forward on getting hands on time with this phone! You can read more about Lumia 920 on Nokia's website.

Lumia 820

Lumia 820 is a classified as mid-range phone, although by it's specs it's not a far cry from Lumia 920 and certainly it's much more powerful and fuller of new features than the current flagship phone Lumia 900! It even has removable battery and micro-SD card that some people would've liked to see in Lumia 920 as well. Where 820 lacks the most in my opinion is the design. It differs oddly from the award-winning design of the Lumia 800 and 900. Also the screen resolution is only 800x480 which is the same as with Windows Phone 7.x.

Of course, some compromises have to be done with the mid-range phones. Still, the phone has large 4'3" screen and many of the cool stuff of the Lumia 920, like wireless charging and NFC. More about Lumia 820 on Nokia's website.

Availability, price?

The new Lumia products are very cool, but the event that went down in New York could've gone better. For instance, I couldn't see the official Nokia stream until halfway into the show. Also the people who where on stage seemed lacking enthusiasm and perhaps missed some rehearsals.. Such important events for Nokia deserve a much better execution. And why didn't CEO Elop speak more? He's great on stage! And then there's the "scandal", certainly a PR nightmare, that arose when their sample video of the OIS system proved to be misleading if not totally deceitful and faked.. But the worst of all, they didn't announce any information about the pricing or availability except "Q4 in select markets". I can't believe Nokia is still doing it this way, which is killing-the-hype-and-letting-competitors-sell-the-phones -way. I met Mr Elop at the Nokia AGM last spring and the only thing I complained about to him was the huge gap between announcing a phone and getting it to the market shelves. It's really frustrating they have not managed to fix this and I am afraid it will come with a heavy price to Nokia.

All I can hope now is that they'll bring these new superb new phones on the market fast! Surely before the holiday season. And I hope this time homeland of Nokia, Finland, won't have to wait until next year.

Update:

Just as I got this post out, rumours started to appear on the web that these phones would be shipping mid-to-late November, perhaps even earlier in Europe. I hope this is true so it would hit the markets just in time for the Christmas shoppers!

Secondly, Nokia apologized the OIS video mess, then stepped up and took The Verge outdoors for a real photo session with Lumia 920 with Pureview and some competing smartphone flagships like iPhone 4S and Samsung Galaxy III to see how much Nokia's OIS improves the image quality in low light conditions.