Review: Microsoft Lumia 830

Microsoft’s Lumia 830 delivers a high-end experience without the high price tag attached, epitomising the concept of value for money.  

However, there are a few chinks in the armour which take away from the overall positive aspects of the phone. 

Let’s have a look at the main aspects of the Lumia 830 experience.  

Look and feel 

The Lumia 830 is a good-looking phone – not too big and unique enough to be distinguished from other brands. It also has a tapered Gorilla Glass screen giving the phone a slicker appearance.  

There are a variety of colours available for the back panel of your phone – mine was green, my favourite colour, so naturally I liked this aspect of the phone.  

At 150g, it’s lightweight, while also fitting comfortably in your hand. 

When it comes to colours and display, the Lumia 830 is not as crisp as certain high-end phones, but the level of detail and vividness remains impressive.  

The phone comes with an HD 720p display, which is more than adequate when looking at the phone’s price.  

This makes the phone great for viewing pictures and watching videos – but not to the extent that I would rank it as the selling point of the phone. 

Despite being a mid-range phone, it really does deliver when it comes to colours. Colours are bright and vivid and you won’t feel disappointed.

Operating system 

While I usually don’t focus much on the operating system of the phones I review, much of the high-end feel of the Lumia 830 comes from the presence of the Windows Phone 8.1 OS.  

At first it took me a while to get used to the feel of the OS as I’m personally an Android lover, but the OS seems to definitely work in the Lumia 830’s favour.  

The Lumia 830 comes with a host of pre-installed apps – you can even get the Cortana voice assistant if you set your region to the US.  

Even though Cortana doesn’t have a version specifically tailored for South Africa, the digital personal assistant is pretty good at interpreting voice commands and our accents (with only the occasional “You thought I said walrus?” moments). 

Any apps that are missing can easily be downloaded from the Windows Phone Store. But otherwise, there is already a great variety present.  

Something I will miss about the phone is the health and fitness app, which made the 830 feel like a high-end phone. The platform comes with the perks and feel you’d expect from operating systems of high-end phones, but at a far lower price. 

There are also cutting-edge apps like LiveSight present on the phone which delve into the realm of augmented reality. 

Another aspect I liked is the way the apps worked together – LiveSight drew on HERE Maps to signal points of interest around me, and Nokia Camera could use OneDrive to backup my pictures.  

The OS is also aesthetically pleasing, adding to the overall high-end look and feel of the phone by being sleek and minimalistic.

So if you are looking into taking the leap and trading in your Android, iOS or some other phone, the Lumia 830 definitely delivers a good impression. 

India’s Nimbuzz Plans New Emerging Market Apps, Starting With Android Call App Holaa

It’s nearly one month since Nimbuzz, the mobile messaging and calling service with 200 million registered users, was bought by UK telecoms company New Call in a $250 million deal. Today we get a glimpse of what’s to come after it released its first post-acquisition product: a dialer app for Android called Holaa!.

Holaa (sorry, Nimbuzz, but adding ‘!’ just isn’t cool — ask Yahoo) is a free call management app designed to replace the default on your Android phone. To tempt you in, it offers a range of features that go beyond the stock, ‘dumb’ dialer, most notable of which is spam blocking.

Crowdsourcing Dodgy Numbers

The app lets you identify unwanted callers as spam — a situation that is common in India, where Nimbuzz claimed as many as 40 percent of calls are unwanted. That information is then uploaded to a central server which collects spam-marked numbers from other Holaa users in your area to create a central list of dodgy numbers — if a number from that list calls, Holaa will warn you that it has been marked as spam by others.

It’s not a new concept — both Truecaller, popular in India, and Line-owned Whoiscall do the same — but Nimbuzz hopes Holaa can offer more. There are also dedicated missed call actions (big in India), merging Facebook and Google IDs to phonebook contacts, and showing a photo and location information for contacts who call.

Nimbuzz CEO Vikas Saxena told TechCrunch that Holaa is very much an ongoing project that will be made “more feature rich” over time. The core offering will always be free, but some future features could be unlocked via an in-app purchase, such as services for SMBs.

The app has a smaller file size and takes up less RAM than rival services, Saxena said, because the aim is to cater to as many people in emerging markets as possible — that’s also why there is no iOS version.

Nimbuzz intends to use a range of strategies to distribute Holaa, including promotion via the Nimbuzz app, deals with operators, and alliances with OEMs to pre-install it on phones. India aside, Holaa is targeted at other places where Nimbuzz has strong adoption, including other countries in South Asia and the Middle East.

Saxena said Holaa has been in development since before Nimbuzz’s acquisition, but the timing is interesting for a couple of reasons. One, it mirrors the trend of unbundling services into standalone apps in the West — Facebook is doing this consistently right now, Foursquare did it too — while it also speaks to Nimbuzz’s focus on serving emerging market users more than ever before.

More Apps For Emerging Markets

That focus will spawn other apps and services like Holaa, so said Nigel Eastwood, Group CEO at New Call.

“Nimbuzz has exceptional talent — there’s Silicon Valley happening in India in their offices,” Eastwood told TechCrunch. “People who left India for the U.S. are now returning from Silicon Valley because the world is looking east for the next great thing.”

Eastwood said that New Call, which has big plans for India, is able to help Nimbuzz monetize and distribute new services, and he hinted that we can expect other apps to be incubated by the company.

“Nimbuzz is one of those best of breed applications that is serving real needs for emerging markets. Holaa is another, the first one of a series,” he explained.

There appear to be more expansive plans on the horizon. Eastwood revealed that New Call is in the final stages of announcing two other strategic acquisitions in India.

One target is a large WiFi hotspot provider, a deal for which is expected to be complete within the next month. The other is a fixed-line ISP — this deal is made more complicated by regulations but Eastwood said it is likely to be announced in early 2015.

Saxena hinted that Nimbuzz is working on another app that ties into WiFi, and it seems clear that the company is seen by New Call as an engineering hub that can develop products and services that tie in with these service providers and take its services direct to consumers in India.

Operators may have missed the boat on mobile messaging, watching WhatsApp and others rise up and steal large chunks of their business, but New Call is pioneering an interesting model that uses a messaging app company to create new business opportunities. Let’s see what these two companies come up with over the coming few months.

NEW SOCIAL NETWORK TSU — WHICH PAYS USERS WHO POST — RAISES $7 MILLION

New social network Tsu believes it can get you excited about seeing advertisements. (Seriously!)

That’s because Tsu, which launched on Tuesday with a $7 million investment led by Sancus Capital Prive, is splitting its ad revenue with users, paying them for actively posting on the platform and inviting their friends to join, too.

Sign up Here and get more Revenue :

https://www.tsu.co/TechWonder

New York-based Tsu, which looks a lot like Facebook at first glance, only takes 10 percent of the ad revenue it generates, passing the other 90 percent back to users, according to founder Sebastian Sobczak. All the ad revenue Tsu makes in one day, for example, is distributed to users based on how many organic post-views they get during that 24-hour period. The more views and engagement you generate as a user, the larger portion of the pie you get.

This breakdown certainly benefits the site’s most popular users (i.e. celebrities), but there are other ways to make money, too. Smaller percentages of this revenue pie are also used as incentive for people to invite their friends to Tsu, which is invite-only. Users also receive payments when the friends they invite share engaging posts, too.

The idea is that content creators, not just the platform provider, deserve to reap the monetary benefits that come with having an active user base.

“If you contrast the established networks today, they’re like radio stations playing everybody’s song and not giving them any royalties for their work,” said Sobczak. “It’s very unusual that all these amazing [users] provide this free content that is very valuable to them and is a hundred percent monetized.”

It also is not precious about who joins its network. If you have a short code, you can join. If you know someone else’s short code (mine is eileenb) you can create your own account on the network.

The premise is simple. The more interesting content you create which gets shared, the more money you make. Early adopters can get in early and take advantage of its relatively clean interface, small set of users, and limited spam.

The follow stats are impressive. After less than 24 hours on the network, I have gathered a few followers and generated several comments and likes from people I did not know. I used hashtags to find and be found. I like the way Tsu works so far.

So what does this mean for business influencers and brands? Tsu keeps 10 percent of the revenue it earns from its ads. It gives the other 90 percent to its content creators and the people that share posts.

Despite only launching publicly on Tuesday, Tsu received some early support from investors and users alike. In addition to the funding from Sancus Capital Prive, Tsu accumulated a handful of celebrity users on the platform during the site’s beta test, including rapper 50 Cent and NBA star Carmelo Anthony (although neither celeb has been active over the past two weeks). Celebrity users can often help to put new social products on the map, and Sobczak hopes Tsu is one of them.

The money and early celeb attention doesn’t mean Tsu is going to dethrone Facebook anytime soon. Paying users to join your service may not be common, but it’s not unheard of, either. Bubblews, a social network founded in 2012 with a similar mindset, pays users when the content they share generates engagement like comments or Likes. The payouts are small — about one cent per Like — but the idea remains the same.

WHY PEOPLE WERE FORCED TO DOWNLOAD FACEBOOK MESSENGER

n August Facebook started to force people to download “Messenger” app  and mean while “Messenger” app was rocking at the top in the app store.

During a live Q&A session CEO Mark Zuckerberg finally explained the reason why Facebook decided to make “Messenger”

“Asking everyone in our community to install a new app is a big ask,” Zuckerberg said. “I appreciate that that was work and required friction. We wanted to do this because we believe that this is a better experience. Messaging is becoming increasingly important. On mobile, each app can only focus on doing one thing well, we think.”

Facebook CEO Mark explained the primary purpose is its News Feed, and even more about messaging feature

“10 billion messages are sent per day, but in order to get to it you had to wait for the app to load and go to a separate tab,” Zuckerberg said. “We saw that the top messaging apps people were using were their own app. These apps that are fast and just focused on messaging. You’re probably messaging people 15 times per day. Having to go into an app and take a bunch of steps to get to messaging is a lot of friction.”

Zuckerberg also acknowledged that forcing users to download a separate app is “painful” for users, but only in the short term, and the result is a more focused experience.

“Why wouldn’t we let people choose to install the app on their own at their own pace? The reason is that what we’re trying to do is build a service that’s good for everyone. Because Messenger is faster and more focused, if you’re using it, you respond to messages faster, we’ve found. If your friends are slower to respond, we might not have been able to meet up.

“This is some of the hardest stuff we do, is making these choices. We realize that we have a lot to earn in terms of trust and proving that this standalone messenger experience will be really good. We have some of our most talented people working on this.” 

MICROSOFT OFFICE 365 SUBSCRIPTION? NOW GET A REFUND

Microsoft Office 365 subscription? Now get a refund

Announcement of giving some important features in the Office app for free, Microsoft will give prorated refunds to all those who purchased the Office 365 subscription.

Previously, users had to buy the Office 365 subscription in order to be able to use Office apps on an iOS or Android. The app was a huge success on non-Windows platforms (especially iPad) as there are few productivity apps that can match the flexibility and ease of use of Microsoft’s popular Office suite. Buying an Office 365 subscription gave full access to Word , Excel and PowerPoint to help users create and edit documents on the move.

ALSO READ :  Why Microsoft decided to make officeapps free for Android and iOS

Now that the company has made the editing feature free for Office apps, it is offering a refund to all those who earlier paid for the subscription. iPad users will need to contacti Tunes Store Support for a refund. Others can cancel their Office 365 subscription and receive a pro-rated refund of any unused remaining days between the date of cancellation and the date that the subscription ends via Microsoft Accounts and Billing agent. To Check if you are eligible for a refund, read the full list of requirements here.

Premium features, which include full office applications (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, and OneNote) on PCs and Macs, unlimited OneDrive storage, and Skype calls, will still require a subscription, though. Similarly, using it for commercial purposes also requires an Office 365 subscription.

“If you’re already an Office 365 Home or Personal subscriber, you’ll continue to have access to premium features on your iPad, like tracking and reviewing changes in Word, customizing Pivot Tables in Excel, and checking your speaker notes while you present in PowerPoint”, says Microsoft.

WHY MICROSOFT DECIDED TO MAKE OFFICE APPS FREE FOR ANDROID AND IOS

Why Microsoft decided to make office apps free for Android and iOS 

Microsoft’s move to make its Office apps for Android and iOS free for consumers is not surprising at all. The software heavy weight is simply reacting to consumer demand, which is increasingly shifting its sights away from desktop to mobile.

Analysts believe that Microsoft’s decision to make Word, Excel and PowerPoint for the iPad and iPhone and their Android counterparts is mostly due to the fact that limiting the functionality of these apps did not provide enough incentive for users to purchase an Office 365 subscription. To take the bait, users will need to do more than view their documents on their tablets and smartphones.

Microsoft has released a press statement that says, “Microsoft took the next step to bring the productivity of Office to everyone with new Office apps and experiences for the iPhone and iPad, a preview of Office apps for Android tablets, and the ability for customers using these devices to create and edit Office content without a subscription.”

So what is the logic behind this move? Microsoft would like you to believe that it’s all business as usual.

“It’s an extension of the strategy that we’ve got. It’s not a total strategic shift, as much of an extension of the existing strategy”, the company told TheVerge. 

For those who are wondering whether this will be a setback to Microsoft’s revenue, it should be noted that the company won’t be extending the free functionality to businesses, which is the major source of revenue for the company.

This means that consumers with documents on OneDrive for Business or Drop box for business will have to still pay for subscription. So, it will continue to generate revenue from businesses that rely on its productivity apps and cloud services.

Interestingly, this piece of news comes just a few days after Microsoftannounced its strategic deal with Dropbox that will allow Office software users to manage and share files through Dropbox’s website and mobile app. Microsoft said the functionality would be included in the next updates to the Office mobile apps, to be rolled out in the next few weeks, and online accessibility would be available in the first half of 2015.

Microsoft Office apps can be downloaded from the Google Play store and Apple app store.

CHINA IS HACKING ITS OWN CITIZENS’ ICLOUD ACCOUNTS – REPORT

CHINESE APPLE USERS ARE FACING A WAVE OF CYBERATTACKS — NOT FROM CYBERCRIMINALS, BUT FROM THEIR OWN GOVERNMENT.

That’s according to GreatFire.org, a non-profit that tracks Beijing’s online censorship efforts. The site says Chinese authorities are staging a so-called “man-in-the-middle” attack in iCloud, intercepting the log-in credentials of Chinese Internet users when they attempt to access the site through certain browsers.

“This is clearly a malicious attack on Apple in an effort to gain access to usernames and passwords and consequently all data stored on iCloud such as iMessages, photos, contacts, etc,” GreatFire said.

The alleged attack coincides with the launch in China of the new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.

 

How China’s iPhone 6 black market works

The Chinese government has previously staged similar attacks on Google (GOOGL,Tech30) and Yahoo (YHOO, Tech30) users, GreatFire said. But in those cases, the site added, the authorities gained the ability only to see what content users were accessing, not their passwords.

How safe are you? CNNMoney’s cybersecurity Flipboard magazine

Apple (AAPL, Tech30) did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Chinese Internet users can counteract the problem by using secure Web browsers like Chrome and Firefox, and by enabling two-factor authentication on their iCloud accounts. 

LG’S NEXT PHONE WILL BE THE FIRST WITH ONE OF ITS OWN CPUS INSIDE

LG has been trying for years to catch up to Samsung and Apple in phone sales, and its next step on that path is to make a device with an LG CPU inside. The G3 Screen phone that it’s releasing this week in Korea will have an eight-core “NUCLUN” (pronounced NOO-klun) processor, based off of an ARM big.LITTLE design similar to Samsung’s octacore Exynos chips. NUCLUN has four 1.5GHz cores for the tough tasks, and four 1.2GHz cores for easier stuff that help it save on battery life. Otherwise, there’s also a 5.9-inch 1080p screen and support for the new, faster LTE-A networks that download at up to 225Mbps. Until now, LG’s phones have mostly relied on Qualcomm chips for their processing needs, but Dr. Jong-seok Park believes going its own way will help the company “achieve better vertical integration” and greater flexibility going forward. Of course, we’re wondering when a NUCLUN-powered phone will go on sale outside of Korea, but considering the progression of Exynos, that could take a while.

INTERNET-CONNECTED BATTERY COULD BRING SMOKE ALARMS ONLINE

A startup has come up with a simple way to make smoke and carbon-monoxide detectors more useful: a nine-volt battery with built-in Wi-Fi. The battery can alert you on your smartphone if the alarm goes off or the battery itself is about to die.

Roost, the Sunnyvale, California-based company behind the battery, plans to sell the batteries starting next year for $25 to $35.

“We were approaching the Internet-of-things space not from a perspective of ‘How can we build a whizzy new device that does something?’ but ‘What information do you have in the house that’s useful to you that you’d like access to when you’re not home?’ ” says cofounder and chief technology officer James Blackwell.

The idea could reach beyond alarms. Roost has its sights set on other devices, battery-powered and not, that are currently excluded from the growing throng of connected gadgets.

Roost’s first batteries, which are lithium-based and meant to last for more than five years, contain a Wi-Fi chip and sensors for audio detection and voltage monitoring. To get one working with a smoke alarm, you’d set it up with a forthcoming Roost smartphone app. Using the app, you can give a battery a name (like “living room” or “kids’ bedroom”), and connect it to your home Wi-Fi, and then insert it in the battery compartment of the alarm.

Right now, Roost has a working prototype in a plastic box about the size of an external hard drive; Blackwell expects a battery-sized version to be ready in the spring.

Roost plans to go beyond the nine-volt battery in the future—Blackwell says the company is thinking about AA batteries, since they’re commonly used in toys and remote controls. He’s also thinking about adding other sensors, such as an accelerometer or thermometer, to the battery.

GOOGLE’S ‘INBOX’ IS A SMARTER TAKE ON EMAIL, CREATED BY THE GMAIL TEAM

If you’re anything like us, Google’s Gmail has an iron grip on your life. Google’s looking to create a whole new iron grip with a new app from its Gmail team, and it’s called “Inbox.” What is it? That’s a good question — Google’s made a demo slash advertisement video that we’ve dropped below. As far as we can tell, Inbox is a combination of Google Now and your Gmail inbox — a “smart” inbox, if you will. It combines alike pieces of email (bank invoices, for example), highlights related information (like Google Now alerting you to flight changes, traffic, etc.) and keeps track of your life (it’ll give you reminders, among other heads ups). Is this the end of Gmail? We seriously doubt it, but it is Google’s latest foray into simplifying email. Head below for more!

In introducing the service, Google’s Sundar Pinchai called out the frustration of an overflowing email inbox. Inbox is Google’s attempt to make the inbox more approachable and organized without much user effort. ” For many of us, dealing with email has become a daily chore that distracts from what we really need to do-rather than helping us get those things done,” Pinchai wrote. “If this all sounds familiar, then Inbox is for you. Or more accurately, Inbox works for you.”

As seen below in GIF form, the app both shows prioritized events and emails you’ve received. Think of it as the lovechild of Cards and Gmail. Whether it’ll replace our standard Gmail app is another question altogether; trading the flexibility of Gmail for a more streamlined inbox is appealing, but also Gmail has an iron grip on our lives. In case that wasn’t clear the first time.

The app’s still in the invite stage, and Google says the first round of invites are already out in the world. Should your current Gmail (or whatever service) inbox be without an invite,Google’s set up an email address for you to ask to get in on the action. It’s only running on a Nexus 6 in the image, so we’re betting it’ll start out on Google’s mobile OS before getting ported to Apple’s (and beyond).