Category: How To

While the need to restore your Nokia Lumia firmware is a rare event, there are times where you may need or want to do so.  It could be that your Lumia is stuck during an over-the-air (OTA) upgrade and you have had spinning gears on your Windows Phone for hours.  Or, more likely, you have been using the Microsoft Developer Preview to check out Lumia Cyan and Windows Phone 8.1 and need to revert back to get the update that has now been released on for your phone.  Regardless of the reason, Nokia has actually made it quite easy for you to restore your Lumia’s firmware and in this How To I’ll show you what you need and how to do it.

For many of you, today is the first day since the Christmas holiday this weekend to get back online and do some post holiday shopping or searching for information on your latest gadget.  If you are the proud owner of a Windows Phone, congratulations and welcome to the community!

If you are moving from a feature phone or another smartphone (Android or iPhone), then this Windows Phone experience will be somewhat of a left turn for you.  It’s different.  A lot different.  You’ve probably already figured that out but just in case the whole Live Tile start screen thing didn’t tell you… this is a lot different! 🙂

Over the course of the past year I’ve put together a series of How To’s for Windows Phone.  Some of these are basic while others are more advanced but they are all designed to help you get a handle on the new experience that is Windows Phone.  The How To’s are generally Windows Phone focused and not device specific.  That said, there are some specific How To’s for HTC and Samsung phones but only one or two.

To get to all of the How To’s here on ClintonFitch.com, just navigate to the How To section in the left-hand side bar.  And of course you can always post a question on Twitter or here on the site.

Yesterday I posted a quick How To on resetting a Samsung Focus, Focus S or Focus Flash using the hardware buttons instead of the built-in reset function of Windows Phone.  It seems that my post generated a lot of questions around the HTC Titan & Radar on how to do it for those devices.  Fortunately it is similar to the Samsung devices.  I have found that this works on the HTC Titan and Radar and a colleague of mine confirmed that it works on the HTC Surround, the 1st generation Windows Phone offered by AT&T.  Remember that a hard reset (or factory reset) completely deletes all of the information on your phone so make sure you have any important information stored on your phone backed up.

1. Turn the power off on your HTC Windows Phone.  If it is locked and non-responsive, remove the battery to power it off completely.
2. Press and hold the middle of the Volume button then press and hold the Power button.  Continue to hold these buttons until your phone turns on and displays a text display with various options and information
3. Use the Volume Down button to highlight the “Factory Reset” option, then press the Power button to select this option.
4. Follow the onscreen instructions and confirm that you indeed want to reset your phone

Of the first generation Windows Phones, the Samsung Focus was the only one that had a readably accessible MicroSD slot for memory expansion.  The problem of course is that neither Microsoft or Samsung necessarily encouraged users to add memory to these phones and the results were mixed at best.

Having done some serious working on this over the course of the past few months I have come to some conclusions that I hope will help you if you decide to try to use the MicroSD expansion.  I’ve classified this post as a How To but it is really more For Your Information than anything else.

The first thing in all of this is the MicroSD card itself.  I’ve tested Kingston, Parrot and a generic card so brand isn’t really an issue.  The key is the Class of the card which needs to be a Class 4 in this case.  Every test I did with a Class 2, Class 6 or Class 10 failed.  The phone never recognized the card.  Every Class 4 card I tried worked.

One of the frustrating things about the Windows Phone People Hub and Friends Live Tiles is that updates from Facebook for your contacts are not shown.  In principle, this should work on Windows Phone because of the tight integration the OS has to social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Live.  If you have struggled with this you are not alone and it is not a problem with Windows Phone.  It is a problem with the social network.

The problem lies with the privacy setting in the service and in order for you to see your friends updates, they have to allow it in Facebook on their account.  So yes, you have to ask friends to change their privacy so you can see them.  Odd?  Yes.  Frustrating?  Absolutely.

If there is a dark side of all our computing power, social networking and email-on-all-the-time, it is the impact this has on battery power.  This challenge has remained throughout many devices on multiple platforms and Windows Phone is no exception.  I jokingly stated on Twitter last night that 4G will only add to this problem.  Fortunately with the release of Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango), Microsoft has built in a way to save that precious battery power.  It is called the Battery Saver in your phone’s setup and in this How To I will show you how to set that up along with another battery saving tip.

This How To only applies to Windows Phones powered by the 7.5 update (Mango) as the feature I’m describing was added in Mango.