Yes, I know there have been cabled ways to hook up monitors to smartphones for years, for echoing media content if you're lucky and a straight screen mirroring if you're less so. But I did wonder what would happen if I wired a Continuum-capable phone from its USB Type C jack to a monitor or TV's HDMI port directly, i.e. without a Continuum Dock. The result surprised me...

This was all prompted by the PR folk at Choetech sending over a review sample of their new USB Type C to HDMI cable. Curiously, availability seems patchy as I write this, but hopefully it will improve, along with a sensible price. Anyway, go via our link and keep an eye on it in the coming weeks.

It turns out that wiring up a Lumia 950/XL or Elite X3 directly to a TV or monitor gets picked up by the Windows 10 Continuum routines as a generic 'Plug 'n' Play' display, and this is OK, as the bare minimum for Continuum to work, i.e. using it as the phone's secondary display.

There are plenty of caveats, as you might expect, not least there being no sound transmitted through the HDMI link and no way to plug in a wired mouse or keyboard. Which is why I referred to it as 'Continuum Lite'. But used with care, there are still plenty of use cases here and the standalone cable is going to be a lot cheaper (and lighter) than carrying around either Acer's, Microsoft's or HP's official (weighted) Continuum docks.

The Choetech cables are well built, as usual, with gold plating to make sure of a good earth, plus I'll bet there's some active electronics in that elongated HDMI connector. Partly explaining the cost, perhaps - this isn't a simple straight-through wire. Upcoming in 2017 is the new HDMI 'Alt mode' which will let simpler cables do the same job, but we're not there yet.

Tapping through to my Lumia 950 XL's Connect pane shows, after a few seconds, a 'Generic PnP Monitor' and seems happy to work with it, complete with the usual Continuum 'Tap to control' toast - tapping this gets through to using the screen as a virtual mouse/trackpad, in the normal Continuum fashion:

And here's the proof of the pudding, below. Again, I want to emphasise that this is just with one cable - no dock of any kind is needed. The cable shown coming out of the top of the Lumia 950 XL is just audio, as we shall see:

In this simple scenario, we've just got virtual mouse control, so browsing through photos (below), web pages and maps are all a doddle - you still get the full multi-touch (i.e. two finger') gestures for scrolling around too, which is pretty cool. (Look, Ma, no dock!)

You'll notice that audio is missing from this HDMI cable/dongle when you try and play a game or a video. All isn't lost though, since you can route audio from the headphone jack and into headphones, a speaker or amplifier or whatever you need to make it louder in your set-up.

Here I am playing a Youtube (repair) video in Perfect Tube, one of the many Continuum-compatible UWP apps on my Lumia 950 XL:

It all adds up to a very workable Continuum experience for some use cases and you only have to carry around a single cable* - any HDMI-equipped TV becomes your application-running display surface for your Windows 10 Mobile phone. *plus perhaps a 3.5mm audio cable, depending on what you want to achieve.

It's true that you get slightly more functionality (including audio) by going wireless with the likes of the Microsoft Wireless Display Adapter, but this isn't as fast in my experience (as you'd expect) and uses more battery power. 

The next stage on from this is to hook up a Bluetooth mouse and/or keyboard to the phone. This is a little fiddly (and cumbersome, in terms of carrying bits around), but you're then getting a lot more of the Continuum experience, for example using Outlook and Office.

Mind you, if youre going to go that far then you're better off buying one of the Continuum docks (e.g. from Microsoft, Acer and HP) and having the functionality above plus top-up charging for the phone, wired accessories (faster and they won't need recharging), easier networking (e.g. via Ethernet) and even access to wired storage media (e.g. hard disks).

Still, that the basics of Continuum could be achieved with one 'simple' cable caught me by surprise. If this was all obvious to you then I apologise, but hopefully this 'Continuum Lite' and its use cases might be of use to someone else out there.

At the end of another transitional year for Windows Phone, in which Windows 10 Mobile became ubiquitous away from the bottom end phones. In which Microsoft announced one possible future for Windows 10 as a whole, running on the same ARM processors as phones, in which all PCs may be folded into the same architecture (eventually) yet the very term 'Mobile' may end up being deprecated. Confusing! And all the while Microsoft massively scaling back its first party phone hardware and support ambitions. It all adds up to a confusing year for the platform, yet - with Lumias no longer being made - also a good point in time to look back and pick my favourite phones running Windows in the modern era*.

* I guess I should acknowledge the original 'Windows Mobile' smartphones as well, which were around, with a totally different underlying OS and interface, from the early 2000s to around 2008. But they're outside the scope of AAWP, so....

The first Windows Phones were produced in 2010, made by HTC, LG and Samsung - and we finish 2016, six years on, with HP and Alcatel being the ones making the new hardware. yet in between there were (literally) dozens of Nokias and then Microsoft-branded Lumias. With around fifty different models to choose from (depending on how you count), let's pick the five that most impressed, the five that are worthy to be counted as classics and retained even today, and used with pleasure.

But wait... lest I get too carried away with current viability as a mental filter, I wanted to give a honorable mention to a smartphone which had almost zero sales when it came out in January 2011, because it wasn't marketed or pushed or distributed in any way. (Think the Lumia 950 range but six years earlier!) Yet it had a unique selling point at the time and, in today's homogenous fondle-slab world, that USP is even more remarkable now. 

So, at number six in my top five (if you will), it's the extremely rare (though I have one - ha!) HTC 7 Pro:

Get past that the screen is tiny by 2016 standards, get past the use of Windows Phone 7.8 (hey, it was 7.5 when it launched!), and the slide-out keyboard with sprung flip-up 'laptop' mode still excites. Especially since (the Start screen apart) an awful lot of Windows Phone (even in 2011) ran quite happily in landscape mode. So your email and Office activities, for example, were a perfect match for the form factor. Admittedly, the space bar was too small and the keyboard ultiimately too fiddly, but who wouldn't give their eye-tooth for something similar with 6" screen and modern internals in Spring 2017? In fact, you could make it all in aluminum and put it into the Surface line? (Wishful thinking, but hey...)

But on with the real top 5 Windows phones - and yes, note the small 'p', since this covers the Windows 10 Mobile era too, so we're not just looking at 'Windows Phone' per se.

5. HP Elite X3 (2016)

It seems a little harsh to put the recently reviewed Elite X3 so low down this list, but the X3 is hardly a classic. Arriving expensive (aimed at businesses), late and without all its accessories (is that a Lap Dock coming over the horizon? No, it's Santa. On a car-drawn cart, promoting this year's local extravaganza), the Elite X3 is undoubtedly powerful, it has the fastest chipset and the most RAM ever put into a Windows phone. Plus a fingerprint sensor, less futuristic than the iris scanner in the Lumia flagships but faster and more practical. (Plus the Elite X3 has the iris option as well.)

But it's hard to fall in love with the X3. At least not yet - the Lap Dock may change a few people's minds, but only if they're well-heeled - the Lap Dock is crazy expensive. Add in a camera which is decent but not as good as it should be (cough - resolution) and stereo speakers which significantly under perform and you have a flagship which simply has to be in the top 5 but doesn't deserve to be any higher than this.

4. Lumia 950 XL (2015)

Talking of love, it's also hard to love the official Microsoft flagship, and not just because you can't really buy it anymore. The relatively flimsy plastic is improved slightly with the addition of an (also plastic) Mozo replacement back, but you still never get the impression of this being a serious tool for serious activities. 

Camera excepted. The 950 XL still has the best camera in the phone world right now, with very few weaknesses. Maybe over-blocky digital zoom and very low light focussing could be picked out as minus points, but most of the time the 950 XL camera is without peer.

What also helps tip the 950 XL up into my number three spot is its incredible display, one of the best in the Lumia range or indeed in the entire mobile world, and the flexibility in terms of being able to swap out the battery, expand storage with a card, and generally get your hands dirty with its internals. This isn't an all-sealed unibody device wherein you're at the mercy of the manufacturer's design choice - here you get to see what's inside and have an influence.

3. Lumia 640 XL (2015)

The cheapest phone in this top 5 by some margin, at least at original RRP - I wanted to have at least one budget smartphone in the line-up. And, despite now being almost two years old, the Lumia 640 XL still runs well - in fact, it runs Windows 10 Mobile pretty well, helped by that large 5.7" phablet screen (the newer OS needs as much screen real estate as possible). And, unlike the other cheap Lumias of its era, the 640 XL has full ClearBlack Display (CBD), which makes a huge difference when outdoors (note that the smaller sister device, the 640, had to make do with 'CBD lite').

The spec compromises look savage when viewed through 2016 flagship spectacles, but the 1GB of RAM, Snapdragon 400 and 720p screen did work particularly well together. Add in a camera which is better than you'd expect (with ZEISS optics and f/2.0 aperture) and the same ultimate flexibility and repairability as the 950 XL above and the Lumia 640 XL can still hold its head up today. Not least because you can pick one of these up second hand for much less than £100 now - upgrade it to Redstone 2 Insiders 'Slow' ring and that's a very cheap way to get a W10M phablet!

2. Lumia 1020 (2013)

Ah yes, the only real surprise here is possibly that the classic 1020 (from 2013) wasn't number one in the list. But the 1020 did have an Achilles heel or two, as longstanding users will attest. The reliance on doing 38MP oversampling down to 5MP without a dedicated Image Signal Processor (ISP, as on the Nokia 808 predecessor) meant that each photo taken on this classic camera smartphone would take around three seconds to process and save. This is an eternity by modern phone camera standards and seriously got in the way of taking rapid bursts of photos of kids, pets and general action. Yes, there was Xenon flash, and this sometimes helped by freezing the subject, but you didn't usually get many 'bites at the cherry'. And then, even for flash-lit shots, there was often the distinctive Lumia 1020 yellowish colour cast.

But take all this with a pinch of salt, because for many of us the 1020 was a way to get much of the classic Nokia 808 camera functions plus OIS (for those arty night shots) plus the party piece of dual capture and 'reframing later' (or not) plus an OS designed for this decade rather than the previous one. As it turned out the 1020 wasn't that future proof, since the old Snapdragon S4 processor made something of a meal of Windows 10 Mobile and it was omitted from Microsoft's official upgrade program. But on Windows Phone 8.1, its native OS, the Lumia 1020 still runs very well, albeit with applications that have mostly not now been updated for a couple of years.

The yellow 1020 was the one chosen by Nokia to promote the model and it was by far the most common. And which of us hasn't glimpsed a Lumia 1020 in a TV programme or film and thought 'Hey, I've got one of those, good choice Mr Director!'

1. Lumia 1520 (2013)

But at number one I have to name check an outrageous phablet from Nokia in 2013 - the 6" screen looks quite normal these days, but the Lumia 1520 was released when most phones had 4" displays. Only the stylus-centric Samsung Galaxy Note range on Android dared to venture into 5" territory, and the Lumia 1520 made the Samsungs look like toys. But here's the thing. Not only was the phablet concept in the 1520 future-looking, the internals have held up well too, with the Snapdragon 800 and 2GB RAM still powering Windows 10 Mobile along nicely for all those lucky users who did the official upgrade.

I say 'lucky' because the 1520 as never distributed anywhere near as widely as the budget Lumias - so 1520 units today are prized, almost collectors' items. The 6" 1080p LCD display with CBD still looks fabulous at the end of 2016 and, with either version of Windows for phones on it, still gains admiring glances (I've tested this at pub meets)

The camera's the same as the one in the Lumia 930 (that followed) and set the 21MP pattern for the 950 and 950 XL that followed a couple of years later. In fact, you could say that the Lumia 1520 set the pattern in many ways for the whole of the smartphone world (even though it's Samsung and Google who will be remembered most for introducing 'phablets', as they were called at first).

Link: my original Lumia 1520 review back in mid 2014, after the WP8.1 update.

A worthy top of the list here - but your comments welcome on all of the above!

So here's the funny bit.... Here we have a perfectly valid comparison between two visionary phablets and... the HP Elite X3 is better value, i.e. the cheap one! But the legendarily pricey business smartphone is up here against something rather exclusive. Albeit partly because it has 18 karat gold inlays and a massive 256GB internal disk, but there's still a lot here that's worth comparing, like for like. Let battle commence...

The HP Elite X3, of course, needs little introduction to anyone reading AAWP regularly. The X3 stands for '3 devices in one', i.e. phone, and then Continuum displays such as the Lap Dock (that's one) and a desktop monitor with keyboard and mouse (so that's another, the third 'device'). Which is pretty futuristic in terms of looking ahead to how phones might be used and connected in the future.

The brand new Xiaomi Mi Mix comes at the future from a slightly different angle. Here it's all about putting as big a screen as possible in your hand without compromising on physical form factor. So we get a 6.4"-diagonal display in a form factor that's smaller than the 6"-screened Elite X3. Plus features such as not needing an earpiece speaker - the whole phone body vibrates to produce sound into your head when on a call. 

Away from their USPs though, there's a lot to compare directly - both very definitely come under the category of 'very interesting'. Each device, as usual, has its strengths and weaknesses. As usual, I've shaded in green an obvious 'win' for either device, I honestly have no idea which way this one's going to go (as I start to compile the feature)... Any row where a winner would be totally subjective is left uncoloured.

[By the way, if you're viewing this feature on an older Windows Phone then the table may well cause you problems. Try viewing in landscape mode? Failing that, go view this on a laptop or tablet and then roll on Windows 10 Mobile across the board on all the older phones!]

Verdict

The green 'wins' come out at an 8-5 victory to the HP Elite X3, which feels about right. The Mi Mix's huge USP is the display, but away from that there's a lot of 'meh' and a lot being required of the user, not least faith that updates will be forthcoming through 2017.

Both phablets are futuristic, though in different ways - the HP Elite X3 will appeal to someone wanting to extend the phone with Continuum displays and the Lap Dock, i.e. going way beyond what a mere 'phone' should be capable of by itself. While the Mi Mix is a slice of the future, albeit with plenty of real world compromises in 2016.

Following on from my detailed head to head between the current Windows 10 Mobile flagship and the highest end Android flagship in the world, I had requests for more details on how their cameras perform. Heading out into the Christmas wilderness, I plied the two phablets with some varied lighting use cases. Neither phone camera is world-beating (at least one notch beneath the Lumia 950s of this world), but both do a decent enough job most of the time. Can I pick a winner? Oh yes...

Notes:

1. The Elite X3 still only shoots in 16:9 at 10MP - we're expecting a Camera update at some point to add other resolutions and aspect ratios back in. However, 10MP isn't a million miles from the 16MP (at 4:3) images from the Mi Mix, especially allowing for the narrower angle optics on the Elite X3, so we don't have to worry too much about a mismatch for our comparator, below.
2. All shots were on full 'auto', apart from manual focussing on the red berry example.
3. In each case, the overall scene is shown as the X3 sees it - you'll say this is because this is AAWP and I'm biased, but it's more that, having looked at the shots below from both phones, I judged that the X3's were less 'processed' on the whole, plus the AAWP audience will be very familiar with the Windows 10 Camera image processing, so it's a known starting point.

Test 1: Sunny scene

My local supermarket, in unexpected winter sun. Here's the overall scene, as shot by the Elite X3:

In case you want to grab the original images to do your own analysis, here they are, from the HP Elite X3 and Xiaomi Mi Mix, click the links to download. And to look at the images in more detail, here are fairly central 1:1 crops, just wait to make sure the page has fully loaded and then use your mouse or trackpad pointer to compare the images:

Slightly more artefacts and noise in the Mi Mix photo, despite the ideal light conditions, plus the sky is an artificial shade of blue. I'm giving this one, by a point, to the HP Elite X3.

Elite X3: 9 pts, Xiaomi Mi Mix: 8 pts

Test 2: Overcast outdoors

A (ahem) 20 foot T-Rex! Here's the overall scene, as shot by the Elite X3:

In case you want to grab the original images to do your own analysis, here they are, from the HP Elite X3 and Xiaomi Mi Mix, click the links to download. And to look at the images in more detail, here are fairly central 1:1 crops, just wait to make sure the page has fully loaded and then use your mouse or trackpad pointer to compare the images:

Aside from the resolution/angle differences, there's not that much between these two shots - don't worry about the field of view, since I moved between shots, concerned that the wide angle optics in the Mi Mix wouldn't give me enough subject matter. I may (ahem) have overdone it. Anyway, a cracking shot from both phones under dim overcast light.

Elite X3: 9 pts, Xiaomi Mi Mix: 9 pts

Test 3: Close macro

An extreme macro of just about the very last berry of the year in my garden. For this, I used manual focus on each phone and got as close as the focus would let me, since auto-focus wasn't picking up the small subject. Here's the overall scene, as shot by the Elite X3:

In case you want to grab the original images to do your own analysis, here they are, from the HP Elite X3 and Xiaomi Mi Mix, click the links to download. And to look at the images in more detail, here are fairly central 1:1 crops, just wait to make sure the page has fully loaded and then use your mouse or trackpad pointer to compare the images:

It's tempting to say that the Xiaomi Mi Mix camera made a bit of a hash of this, but the focus is so critical when the subject is this close - and parts of the surrounding twiggery were in better focus. Suffice it to say that on both phones a degree of trial and error would have been involved in getting a perfect shot. Here, the X3 got it first time and the Mi Mix failed (on the phone screen it looked fine), but I'm sure the Mi Mix could do better if I could have another crack at it. Still, a slight win to the HP for not messing me around and nailing the shot on try no. 1.

Elite X3: 9 pts, Xiaomi Mi Mix: 8 pts

Test 4: Another macro, but auto-focus

Aware that manual focussing made for a tough comparison test, I tried a subject a little further away and a little larger - a dewey cobweb on the lawn, stretched from a leaf to the surrounding grass. Here's the overall scene, as shot by the Elite X3:

In case you want to grab the original images to do your own analysis, here they are, from the HP Elite X3 and Xiaomi Mi Mix, click the links to download. And to look at the images in more detail, here are fairly central 1:1 crops, just wait to make sure the page has fully loaded and then use your mouse or trackpad pointer to compare the images:

Focussing was still tough, but both phones did a decent job - I'm giving the win to the Mi Mix for nailing it, while the X3's shot isn't quite as crisp, plus it (as it tends to) over-exposes a few highlights and bright spots. (Top tip for X3 owners: whenever the sun is involved, consider using the manual mode in Windows 10 Camera to shoot at EV-0.7 or similar - you can always make a photo brighter in processing, you can't get rid of blow out highlights.)

Elite X3: 8 pts, Xiaomi Mi Mix: 9 pts

Test 5: Reindeer time

Heading indoors, here's a reindeer, shot at around 4 metres under artificial light. Here's the overall scene, as shot by the Elite X3:

In case you want to grab the original images to do your own analysis, here they are, from the HP Elite X3 and Xiaomi Mi Mix, click the links to download. And to look at the images in more detail, here are fairly central 1:1 crops, just wait to make sure the page has fully loaded and then use your mouse or trackpad pointer to compare the images:

Ignore the antlers moving between shots - what's evident here is very different image processing, with the HP producing texture which looks like matted fur, while the Mi Mix's algorithms have blurred things and removed too much detail. The fence just behind the reindeer is crisper, but there shouldn't be a depth of field effect at this range. And no, the reindeer wasn't moving, and no, there wasn't a fingerprint on the camera glass, so I have to mark the Mi Mix camera down  a notch here...

Elite X3: 9 pts, Xiaomi Mi Mix: 7 pts

Test 6: LED tree

Talk about tricky lighting - a Christmassy tree in a dark alcove. Here's the overall scene, as shot by the Elite X3:

In case you want to grab the original images to do your own analysis, here they are, from the HP Elite X3 and Xiaomi Mi Mix, click the links to download. And to look at the images in more detail, here are fairly central 1:1 crops, just wait to make sure the page has fully loaded and then use your mouse or trackpad pointer to compare the images:

I tried several shots, but the Mi Mix couldn't seem to get the hang of the exposure needed (perhaps the bright LEDs triggered something in the algorithms) - this one was typical and at 1/1000s, while the Elite X3 nailed the shot at 1/30s and without blowing out the LEDs completely. I get the impression that Xiaomi's Camera application is slightly hobbled together and not very mature, while the Elite X3 benefits from five years of Nokia's Windows camera expertise, all inherited in Windows 10 Camera.

Elite X3: 9 pts, Xiaomi Mi Mix: 5 pts

Test 7: Night time

My local golf clubhouse, always a great subject and here floodlit at night. Here's the overall scene, as shot by the Elite X3:

In case you want to grab the original images to do your own analysis, here they are, from the HP Elite X3 and Xiaomi Mi Mix, click the links to download. And to look at the images in more detail, here are fairly central 1:1 crops, just wait to make sure the page has fully loaded and then use your mouse or trackpad pointer to compare the images:

Exposures were similar, but the HP Elite X3 somehow managed to keep the resulting shot pretty crisp (maybe I got lucky) - neither phone has OIS to eliminate hand shake. The Xiaomi Mi Mix camera clearly struggles here and the slight shake in my hands even in 1/15s is enough to cause ugly blur. To be honest, handheld shots with OIS at 1/15s at night should be nigh on impossible, so take the Elite X3's luck here with a pinch of salt - the result could have been the other way around.

Elite X3: 7 pts, Xiaomi Mi Mix: 5 pts

Verdict

It's somewhat telling that I kept coming back to the Elite X3 'getting lucky' and to the Mi Mix as 'can I just have one more go at that shot?' While, in theory, the Mi Mix camera should be superior, it wasn't in practice and I had the feeling in use that Xiaomi needs to put more effort into their camera settings algorithms and image processing. Maybe this will come in 2017 - though the X3's camera will improve too, I'm sure, in future firmware updates.

For the record, from this somewhat small (seven) pool of test photos, the score was:

1. HP Elite X3: 60/70pts
2. Xiaomi Mi Mix: 51/70pts

I gave the Elite X3 the 'win' in my original head to head with this other futuristic phablet and I stand by this judgement. That the X3's camera is less than cutting edge is understandable - after all, its mission statement includes snapping whiteboards in offices, etc. But the more consumer-focussed Mi Mix is odd - to include a (merely) average camera in a device costing the best part of £1000 seems crazy, and the answer surely has to lie in Xiaomi's determination to keep the phone thin and to not have any camera bump - the camera glass here is actually recessed from the main ceramic body. Physics (usually) wins though and the larger optics and sensor in the Elite X3, along with the more mature Camera software ensure more reliable results at the end of the day.

Thanks to AAWP reader Alex in Russia, and his persistence across multiple conversations with (escalated) HP support in his native country, we have a translated transcript of HP's official responses to his complaints about the Elite X3 he had bought. Of course, these are (naturally) very defensive, but there are some insights worth commenting on.

What makes this especially notable here was that much of what follows echoes complaints that I've been making here on the site for the last three months.

What follows is Alex's introduction and then his questions to HP, one by one, with HP's answers inline beneath each one, for ease of reading here. And yes, note that the text has all been through several stages of translation from its native Russian. So we can't 'quote' HP on any of this, but we can get a good sense of the official line on some of the omissions from the device.

Still, let's press on and I'll throw in relevant links to previous AAWP comments and articles of my own as we go.

________________________

My name is Alex. I'm from Russia. Here are my questions to HP:

1. Screen 

Alex: I used to see the natural color of images on Lumia screens. 4 days ago I got a HP Elite X3. But I was highly disappointed with the screen and sound of this smartphone. The colour reproduction is just horrible, over-saturated. Remembering that in my previous apparatus was the ability to change colour settings, so I began to look for them here, to no avail (e.g. Settings > Extras > Colour profile > Screen Colour Profile). The OS version between my Nokia Lumia 1520 and HP Elite X3 are the same, the only difference is the firmware version. So, apparently HP, while developing the OS and firmware, 'forgot' to fill the menu item in 'Extras'.

HP responds: "Features not found in HP Elite X3 are extensions that the Lumia team developed independently, without distributing the source code. We will study the possibility of adding these features in our products in the future. HP can not provide specific dates of availability of these functions. In addition, note that the Nokia Lumia 1520 and HP Elite X3 are using screens made using different technologies (LCD vs AMOLED) and cannot be compared directly."

Steve's comments: The battles between those who prefer (backlit) LCD and those who prefer AMOLED displays has raged for the last decade and shows no sign of abating. Alex clearly prefers the more natural castes of the former, while I naturally gravitate to the glorious (if sometimes unnatural) colours of AMOLED. It's a personal preference, though I do think that the two technologies have been getting closer in recent years - LCD more colourful and AMOLED less saturated. The Elite X3's screen is excellent, though I too bemoan any way to adjust the colour profile - this was one of the missing Extras that I complained about here. Surely HP can politely ask Microsoft for the source code to the relevant modules? Aren't they supposed to be close partners?

The various display control options on the Lumias - though, not knowing the inner details of HP's display, we don't really know how much adjustment is possible...

2. Sound

Alex: By studying device characteristics, advertising, etc., I learned that the device comes with powerful stereo speakers from world-famous manufacturer of acoustics, Bang & Olufsen. I was very happy, looking forward to high-quality, powerful, bulky, and loud sound. But here I was disappointed. My world collapsed, for the second time, when I heard the sounds from this smartphone. The lack of comprehensiveness, volume, bass, and other nuances. There is only a stereo effect. And it turned out that 'Extras' (again) is missing the item 'Equalizer', i.e. the manufacturer allowing adjustment of the sound to your taste. But forgive me, I listen to music and want to adjust the sound for my own ears, the way I want it and not as decided for me by HP the company. In my opinion, EQ is missing probably only in children's toys. And this is the flagship worth $800!

HP responds: The sound of the HP Elite X3 should be compared with similar smartphones, but not with the full-size speakers of the brand B & O. The components used by the front speakers are of higher quality than in many other smartphones (e.g. the iPhone), but you must remember that they are still sub-miniature speakers.

Again, the 'Extras' menu contains extensions made by Nokia, these aren't a standard component of Windows 10 Mobile. Furthermore, it should be noted that sound quality connoisseurs consider equalizers something of a 'toy' and not able to really improve sound quality.

Steve's comments: Although I do agree about the missing equalizer functions (which can make a huge difference), I agree even more about the lack of intrinsic quality of the components used by HP here. I did a complete video comparison here which is very telling.

HP itself says "The sound of the HP Elite X3 should be compared with similar smartphones" but actually trying out similar phones with front facing stereo speakers (e.g. Nexus 6, Nexus 6P, Sony Xperia Z5, Nextbit Robin, iPhone 7/7 Plus, heck even the old £100 Moto G (2nd gen)) showed that all of them have better fidelity than the Elite X3. Is it the quality of the components used? Is it bad design in terms of the physical cavities the speakers sit in? Or is it that the speaker drivers are screwed up and that an EQ-fixing firmware update can improve things?

3. Screen saver

Alex: All top end devices on W10M have the function of a screen saver (a.k.a. Glance Screen), so when the device is locked, it displays the hours and all notifications (SMS, missed call etc). Not so much on the HP Elite X3.

HP responds: Glance screen is an extension created by Nokia for the Lumias. HP has decided not to develop a similar application for their product.

Steve's comments: I'm sorry, but this is rubbish. Nokia were indeed pioneers in always-on displays on smartphones (starting with the like of the 6630, I think, in 2004?), but the technology is now very well known and used in numerous Android smartphones, not least the well known Samsung Galaxy S7 range. Maybe HP means that the Glance screen code in the Lumias was Nokia's copyright and that (yet again) they have no access to it? Lack of Glance screen's not a showstopper, of course, but given the AMOLED technology used for the display, it does seem like a wasted opportunity. HP even has its own Glance 'lite' mode when connected via Continuum, so I don't see why they couldn't do more with this, perhaps activating this automatically for the first (say) ten minutes after powering the full display down?

_______________

It's a fair cop, there's not that much 'meat' in HP's responses here, but I did think it was interesting to see some official comment, however marketing-led or non-committal. 

There are plenty of other questions that I'd ply HP with, if I ever got access to the Elite X3 designer and/or product manager, including the thought behind the pricing of the X3 and its accessories, that faux-metal speaker grille, and 'whatever happened to the OIS that was supposed to be included in the camera?'

More questions for another day, anyway. Comments welcome on the questions and responses above!

2016 has been, I think everyone will agree, an 'annus horibilis' - notably high profile deaths and political disruption, but what of the tech world, specifically that under AAWP's remit? You may remember that at the start of 2016 I gave an exclusive 'report from 2017', looking back at 2016 from in the future (keep up at the back...) So how did I do?

I've periodically returned to the classic Nokia 808 PureView and Lumia 1020, highlighting the lossless 2.5x zoom and 'proper' Xenon flash, though there's been precious little to compare these with that's camera centric from the wider smartphone world in the last five years. Yet along comes something new, the Hasselblad camera mod on the Moto Z, a late 2016 Android smartphone. Along with the 808, 1020 and also ageing Samsung Galaxy K Zoom, I couldn't resist a quick photo comparison. No, not of results (that comes soon!), this time of the hardware itself...

Why am I making a fuss over both zoom and Xenon flash? Because they dramatically enhance the range of subjects and scenarios for taking photos. After all, every standalone camera, every DSLR, all have both zoom and Xenon too - so it's puzzling that phone manufacturers have steered quite so far clear away from these technologies. I realise that there's a slight increase in bulk and power requirements, but I'd have still expected that there be a few more camera-centric smartphone offerings. Than four. Over five years. (I don't count units like the Panasonic CM-1 or the Kodak Ektra because they had neither zoom nor Xenon.)

• Why zoom? As in 'lossless' zoom, implemented on the Nokia 808 PureView (running Symbian) and Nokia Lumia 1020 (running Windows Phone 8.1), and optical zoom, implemented here on the Samsung Galaxy K Zoom and Motorola Moto Z 'Hasselblad' (snap-on) mod. Because you can get optically closer to your subject, providing more detail and more intimate framing.
    
• Why Xenon? Because shots of pets and human beings in low light can come out perfectly sharp, 'frozen' in motion. I realise that this isn't always to everyone's taste, since the flood or pure white light can also affect the atmosphere (e.g. at a party), but sometimes when you're grabbing a moment at an evening event then only Xenon will do.

Step one then - comparing the physical propositions. (Step two will be to take these camera phones out into the world and see how they perform relative to each other, and this will take a day or two.) The Hasselblad solution is by far the bulkiest, but this is natural because there's not only the bulk of a telescopic 10x zoom mechanism, there's also the added bulk from having separate phone and camera portions (the 'mod' pulls off and you can swap it for extra battery or a large stereo speaker etc.) 

Plan form factors aren't that different, apart from the oldest, the Nokia 808, with its relatively tiny 4" screen (by today's standards!), though all phones are presented here camera-side first:

Aside from the 'DSLR-like' 'grip' on the Moto Z plus Hasselblad, the phone form factors don't seem too dissimilar at first glance. However, start to introduce a plan perspective and the difference in thicknesses is immediately apparent:

And you thought the Nokia 808 was chunky back in 2012...

In fairness, the detachable nature of the Hasselblad Moto Z Mod means that you're not holding the full form factor all the time. You'd typically carry the Mod in your pocket (it comes with a case) and clip it on when the time came to take some adventurous photos. Of course, if you're going to carry something in a pocket then why not a small standalone camera in the first place? You do get the immediate sharing via the Moto Z smartphone this way round, but the solution does seem a little overkill. 

The all-in-one Galaxy K Zoom seems svelte and elegant by comparison, while the Lumia 1020 is positively the looker in this group, offering a vastly slimmer profile with almost no compromises beyond that 2.5x limit on (lossless) zoom. 

And - gulp - this is all with the cameras not activated. Boot the Camera apps up and the electronics swing into action. The Nokia 808 and Lumia 1020 mechanical shutters power up and you can see the lenses, the Hasselblad Mod and the Galaxy K Zoom power up their telescopic lens systems, etc. And, to emphasise the difference further, I've set the latter two to their 10x zoom positions:

I'll return to how effective the combination of optical zoom and OIS is (in all cases bar the Nokia 808) in the next feature, pitching results head to head across a nuber of use cases.

Shooting the hardware comparison above from a slightly different angle, the Nokia 808 and 1020 look more comparable in terms of size, but it's all in the use of perspective - in the hand, the Lumia 1020 still feels 'right' to me. In every regard, even with a grippy shall case on - this may indeed be that I'm simply so used to the 1020 after three years of use, or it may be that the bulky newcomers are just that - too bulky for mainstream use.

The Galaxy K Zoom is so close to being useable day to day, I owned one for several months when it came out in 2014, two years after the Nokia 808 (2012) and a year after the Lumia 1020 (2013). The K Zoom always felt too big, heavy and thick in the pocket and I never found a belt holster large enough to take it. Plus, in hindsight, its specifications were Nokia-esque in their shortsightedness, with far too little internal storage - the K Zoom is stuck on an Android OS version from its launch year, sadly, abandoned by Samsung.

I seem to be in the possession now of a litany of camera-centric phones which have been abandoned by their manufacturer. I'm thinking also of the Symbian-powered Samsung G810, which also featured optical zoom and Xenon flash, back in 2008, even the Nokia N93 and N82, even earlier. Manufacturers persist in toying with camera-centric phones and never putting all their weight behind them in terms of design and then marketing. The obvious conclusion is that the mass market, the bulk of sales, are to people who simply don't need (or know how to use) a high end camera in their phones. For them, a 'good' camera is good enough.

Which is a shame from my point of view and I'm sure I'll find a few sympathisers here. Anyway, I'll have a use case photo shoot out between the four contenders here very shortly. Anyone think I should also throw the Lumia 950 into the mix, as a mass market top end data point? Comments?

Yesterday I looked at the arrival, in for review, of a rather rare thing - a Xenon-flash-equipped, zoom-equipped camera phone, competing (obviously) with such (also rare) Nokia classics like the 808 PureView and Lumia 1020. But never mind the bulk (in this case, removeable, but still...), never mind the form factor, how do these ultra-camera-phones perform against each other in a variety of challenging tests? Let's find out...

As hinted in the original piece, I'm going to throw in a known data point, the current world champion of camera phones (in my opinion), the Lumia 950 XL. Not because it's good at zoom (it isn't), not because it has Xenon flash (it hasn't), but because behind all of the thoughts here about super-specialist camera phones is the reality that a traditional LED-equipped, solid state flagship smartphone is good enough for most people. I.e. what's interesting here is how far (or otherwise) the 950 XL is behind the specialists here, given the specific tests included. The 950 XL stands in here for the iPhone 7*, the Galaxy S7 and other top end consumer phones.

* and yes, the iPhone 7 Plus now has a 2x zoom lens, though this isn't OIS-enabled and there's still just LED flash. I know, I know. See here for my iPhone 7 Plus imaging comparison feature.

Things are complicated, in terms of comparisons, by the different capture resolutions here, so there will be a degree of mismatch in all the crops below:

• The Nokia 808 has an 8MP oversampled 'Creative' mode, with zoom to 1:1 on the sensor where needed.
• The Lumia 1020 is best in its 5MP oversampled mode, though as with the 808, for zooming purposes, the full resolution of the sensor is, of course, used.
• The Lumia 950 has its native 8MP oversampled mode, and again the fuller 16MP (in 16:9) resolution is used when zooming.
• The Samsung Galaxy K Zoom shoots in 16MP in 16:9, natively, and there are no useful oversampled lower resolutions, so we're stuck with this in terms of comparisons. Zooming is optical, so there's no change in resolution or sensor use here.
• The Moto Z Hasselblad shoots in 9MP in 16:9 mode, with the same note about optical zoom as above.

In addition, the 2.5x (or so) lossless zoom in the Lumia 1020 (slightly less in the 808 in its 8MP mode and less still in the 950, with its lower resolution sensor) is no match for the true, optically stabilised 10x zoom in the Galaxy K Zoom and Moto Z Hasselblad mod, so these ultra-zoom cases are sometimes included separately - see the notes below, as appropriate to each test shot or use case.

Note that I'm deliberately trying to push the boundaries in every shot below, as noted in each case, I wanted the phones to struggle - many of the photos wouldn't have worked at all on more conventional phone hardware.

Test shot 1: Sunny churchyard

The easiest shot here, I still presented a challenge by shooting into the sun and noting huge differences in light and shade across the frame, so this was a test of dynamic range. No zooming needed - yet!

Here's the overall scene:

And here are central crops from, in sequence, the Nokia 808 PureView, the Nokia Lumia 1020, the Microsoft Lumia 950 XL, the Samsung Galaxy K Zoom and the Moto Z with Hasselblad mod - in each case click the phone name to grab the original JPG for your own analysis.

As expected, with such a relatively easy shot, there's not much to choose between the photos here, though the Lumia 950 clearly has the edge in terms of dynamic range, contrast and detail (especially because it has the full resolution 16MP mode up its sleeve too). This is fitting, the 950/XL remains the phone camera to beat in the world if you exclude zooming and Xenon flash, which is where this feature comes in, of course!

Test shot 2: Sunny churchyard, clock zoom

The clock tower remains a favourite subject of mine, here lit in bright sun, so there was plenty of light available.

Here's the overall scene:

And here are central zoomed crops from, in sequence, the Nokia 808 PureView, the Nokia Lumia 1020, the Microsoft Lumia 950 XL, the Samsung Galaxy K Zoom and the Moto Z with Hasselblad mod - in each case click the phone name to grab the original JPG for your own analysis.

And immediately, as zooming is introduced, the all-conquering Lumia 950 XL falters, with garish colours and horribly block digital zoom. The Lumia 1020 just bests the 808 PureView, as it usually does when zooming, with clearer detail down at the pixel level (remember we're down at 1:1 on the sensor here in both cases), thanks to the OIS and to the BSI sensor. But even though I'm reining in the zoom on the latter two test phones by artificially setting them to around the 3x zoom mark, you can tell immediately that results are superior - when zoom is needed, you really can't beat optical.

And to make this point, let's extend both the K Zoom and Hasselblad to their full 10x optical zoom - with loads of light available, what kind of detail can be achieved?

Here are central zoomed crops from, in sequence, the Samsung Galaxy K Zoom and the Moto Z with Hasselblad mod - in each case click the phone name to grab the original JPG for your own analysis.

Quite extraordinary how good both these two camera-phone hybrids are - but the penalty is all the extra bulk, of course. So we're not strictly comparing 'apples to apples', but the contrast is fascinating anyway. Let's move on with some more zoom examples before delving into the other USP of these phones, the Xenon flash.

Test shot 3: Late afternoon sun, distant aircraft

Always a good test of zoom because you can't get closer to the aircraft when the museum is closed, here shooting through the fence.

Here's the overall scene:

And here are central crops from, in sequence, the Nokia 808 PureView, the Nokia Lumia 1020, the Microsoft Lumia 950 XL, the Samsung Galaxy K Zoom and the Moto Z with Hasselblad mod - in each case click the phone name to grab the original JPG for your own analysis.

Note that here I skipped mimicking the 2.5x (or thereabouts) zoom from the Lumia 1020 and let the latter two phones go right to 10x optical zoom:

Optical zoom impresses again, of course, as it should, with the K Zoom's slightly larger zoom optics and more mature algorithms again producing the better zoomed shot. Of the other devices, the Lumia 1020 wins out, thanks to perfect performance down at the pixel level (the 808 is more optimised for 5MP oversampled, un-zoomed use).

Test shot 4: Low light sunset, zoomed

One final zoom test, here in low light into a late sunset, restricted in this case to a maximum of 3x zoom (you'll see why). Here's the overall scene:

And here are central crops from, in sequence, the Nokia 808 PureView, the Nokia Lumia 1020, the Microsoft Lumia 950 XL, the Samsung Galaxy K Zoom and the Moto Z with Hasselblad mod - in each case click the phone name to grab the original JPG for your own analysis.

Optical zoom is brilliant in bright light, but it struggles more in low light, since the effective aperture that lets light in is much smaller. Add in the lack of PDAF (Phase Detection Auto-Focus, used in the Hasselblad) in the older K Zoom and you can see that it struggled to achieve an accurate focus. The Hasselblad mod does win this test but the Nokia 808 and Lumia 1020 aren't far behind, each without the aperture restriction of the bulky zoom mechanism.

Now onto tests involving the Xenon flash in the main four phone cameras....

Test shot 5: Shaded gravestone, fill-in flash

One of the more advanced, yet most effective uses of Xenon flash is to fill in shady detail in an otherwise bright scene. Here lighting up the face of a gravestone, around a metre and a half away and darker than the shot below makes it seem (it was taken on the 950 with triple LED flash already forced on). Here's the overall scene:

And here are central crops from, in sequence, the Nokia 808 PureView, the Nokia Lumia 1020, the Microsoft Lumia 950 XL, the Samsung Galaxy K Zoom and the Moto Z with Hasselblad mod - in each case click the phone name to grab the original JPG for your own analysis.

Very different results from the different Xenon flashes and cameera solutions, then. The Hasselblad mod has the largest and brightest Xenon flash, but the K Zoom and Nokia 808 aren't far behind. The Lumia 1020's Xenon flash is comparatively weedy under such circumstances, though it's optimised more for balance against low light scenes. So let's start testing these in the remaining two test shots.

Test shot 6: Flash reach

By popular request, I was about 3m from my summerhouse in pitch darkness - how much could the Xenon flash light up, in each case? Here's the overall scene:

As it turned out, the test became as much a test of how good the sensor/aperture was in each case, since there's not only how far the light reached but how much of it was accepted back and processed. Anyway, here are central crops from, in sequence, the Nokia 808 PureView, the Nokia Lumia 1020, the Microsoft Lumia 950 XL, the Samsung Galaxy K Zoom and the Moto Z with Hasselblad mod - in each case click the phone name to grab the original JPG for your own analysis.

Very different results again. Let's take them from the top down: the Nokia 808 has a bright flash and there's no shortage of light, even at this distance, but the lack of OIS means that the photo isn't very crisp. The Lumia 1020 produces an almost perfect photo in the cropped region, with colours as they are in daylight - very impressive. The newer 950 lacks Xenon flash, but the combination of triple LED and a much larger aperture do net it the second best crop here. Meanwhile the smaller aperture needed by the bulky zoom optics in the Galaxy K Zoom and the Hasselblad Moto mod get in the way of stellar results, with the addition of focussing problems with the former (no PDAF again). The Hasselblad's shot is really crisp but the colours are miles away from daylight reality.

Test shot 7: Party time!

Are you ready? On with my traditional Xenon test. That's right, it's (Christmas) party time! And, unlike my usual tests, I've not only opened a bottle but consumed most of it! Note that I deliberately had these tests shot handheld by a third person, i.e. not on a tripod - so a completely realistic (party) test. I'm not trying to pose, but am chatting away and generally wobbling(!) as the shots were taken.

Here's the overall scene:

And here are central crops from, in sequence, the Nokia 808 PureView, the Nokia Lumia 1020, the Samsung Galaxy K Zoom and the Moto Z with Hasselblad mod.

All four Xenon-list shots were quite acceptable, varying slightly in precision of focus and colouration. My favourite was the Hasselblad's, perhaps unsurprisingly since this has the brightest Xenon bulb here, but the other three were quite acceptable, especially when viewed in toto rather than at 1:1, as here.

My tester did shoot with the Lumia 950 too, and I'm not quite sure what went wrong - but it wasn't good enough to publish here. Still, it goes to show the typical perils of shooting moving human beings in low light without Xenon! I return to my familiar rant: there's a reason why all 'real' cameras have Xenon flash...

Test shot 8: Night time

[Update] By popular demand, I popped outside and shot the photo below in winter fog. The K Zoom and Hasselblad both boast a multi-shot 'night' mode, and it seemed fair to allow this to be used. The only phone without something to help in the gloom was the Nokia 808, of course, with no OIS to stabilise the shot - so I stood extra-steady, with feet braced, and it seemed to do the trick, with exposure ending up at 1/8s - the other phones (with OIS) opted for a real or virtual 1/5s or so.

Here's the overall scene:

Because of the nature of the scene and not even me wanting to see 1:1 crops from high resolution night shots, I cropped the middle 50% of each photo, scaled to the same 750 pixels and then cropped/sliced from there. No cheating, I'm just trying to give a sense of the output from each phone. Here are central crops from, in sequence, the Nokia 808 PureView, the Nokia Lumia 1020, the Microsoft Lumia 950 XL, the Samsung Galaxy K Zoom and the Moto Z with Hasselblad mod - in each case click the phone name to grab the original JPG for your own analysis.

Aside from the unpleasant tinge to the Hasselblad shot, there's not much to be learned from all this, other than if you stand VERY still then you can still get good night time shots even on a non-stabilised Nokia 808! The weather conditions today were appalling, given the fog and the cold there's no point in me attempting a night time zoomed shot. Yet. I'll update this post if the fog clears over the weekend!

Verdict

For anyone in the know there are few real surprises above. The otherwise award-winning Lumia 950 is quickly left behind once you start to factor in zooming and/or Xenon flash, while the older Nokia 808 does as well as it usually does but struggles with low light landscapes and with real crisp results when zoomed. The Lumia 1020 does very well all round, with just some colour cast issues under certain conditions - and, for the slender form factor (in this company), remains perhaps my pick of all the hardware here. It's certainly the best balance of display, camera and thickness.

However, the old Samsung Galaxy K Zoom always impressed as long as there's enough light to go round and it remains a spectacular piece of kit most of the time - high quality optics and zoom, a decent sensor, let down by a slightly chunky form factor and (now) a really old, un-updated version of Android. The newcomer, the Hasselblad 'mod' for the Moto Z, is the reason why this feature exists and results are generally good. Focussing is fast enough, the flash bright enough, the optics good enough - add in the removeable nature (from the phone body) when needed and this 'mod' on a current late 2016 smartphone is a tempting solution for many.

All very interesting - my heart still belongs to the Lumia 1020 though, which still stands up overall without adding complications in terms of modularity or thickness. Your comments welcome - are you tempted by this new Moto Z camera modularity?

Here's last year's post, predicting 2016, along with my report card on how I got on (gulp).

So, as 2018 starts up and as we enter a second full year with Donald Trump as US President and Boris Johnson as UK foreign secretary and with international relations at an all time low, let's cheer ourselves up with look back at 2017 from a Windows and 'mobile' perspective:

January: A month of betas, as Microsoft's Redstone 2 branch of Windows 10, the so-called Creator's Update was finished off and shipped to enthusiasts for testing in the usual way. Move on, nothing to see other than fewer bugs!

Alcatel announced the IDOL 4S (a lovely piece of kit) for non-USA markets, and this was available almost immediately from tech shops online in Europe and the Middle East, though only on a couple of networks with contract, which limited sales rather to the mainstream.

February: At MWC 2017, HP announced the Continuum-capable Elite X3 Mini, with 5.5" screen, similar design and build to the X3, but without the pogo pins, with Snapdragon 617 chipset, 4GB RAM, with upgraded speakers for the consumer market and with a 1080p display, intended to cover the professional market still, but with a much more accessible price. RRP was £400 (cf. X3, still at a nominal £700), so marketed to individuals wanting Windows 10 on phones rather than big companies. USB Type C and compatible with HP's X3 dock and Lap Dock, though not bundled, obviously.

March: The initial predicted release date for Redstone 2 comes and goes, but the final Insider builds were stable and fast.

HP dropped the price of the Lap dock by 40% (to £249 in the UK) after poor sales to all market sectors. This price point seems much more realistic and should encourage more enthusiasts to pick it up and experiment, evangelising the 3-in-1 concept to all who see it. Hopefully.

April: This saw Redstone 2, i.e. the 'Creators Update' production released. Faster and smoother, arguably what Windows 10 Mobile should have been 18 months ago at the launch of the Lumia 950/XL. Continuum was more capable (multi-window now worked on devices with 3GB RAM or more), smoother even on mid range hardware (Snapdragon 617 etc), the Store ran faster, browser and many OS modules, including the kernel, represented a complete code refresh.

Every phone that received Windows 10 Mobile officially in the first place also got the Creators Update over the air, an impressive update for phones like (e.g.) the Lumia 735, well over two years old, and a staggeringly good update for the Lumia 1520, well over three years old.

May: This month saw the first 'Redstone 3' Insiders builds arriving, though there was little new on the surface (no pun intended!), with most of the work for the new Windows 10 branch intended to help things along for Windows on new, as yet unannounced ARM-based tablets, netbooks and phablets.

July: Prices for the Lumia 950 and 950 XL on the second hand market exceeded £200 for the first time in 2017, since the hardware was now pretty rare, Microsoft having stopped making the two flagships late in 2016. With 2018 hindsight, Microsoft stopped making its mobile flagships at least six months too early. Very sad to see. As at January 2018, my own 950 and 950 XL are still going strong though, they're pretty reliable. Heck, my old Lumia 930, now three years old, still works very well, though the 1520 died back in April 2017. RIP.

August: Redstone 3 Insider builds continued.

September: Microsoft announced that the official name for Redstone 3 will be the 'Universal Update', the idea being that one OS truly can span all form factors, as is, with universal compatibility and codebase. Ambitious, eh?

My own time machine is much more humble than this. Being based on a Renault. But hey, you'll recognise this one much more readily, so....!

October: In a Microsoft 'Fall' event (sigh - it's 'Autumn', guys....!), a Project Icarus (Surface Phone) concept was demonstrated with Windows 10 on ARM, W10M-style Start menu and full x32/x64 desktop app compatibility when hooked up to Continuum secondary displays, wired or wireless. The quoted timetable for a commercial launch was early 2018 (MWC?), now only two months away as I write this in January 2018 from within my time machine pod(!)

'Redstone 4' was also talked about, being quoted as arriving in 'Spring' 2018, though this now looks likely to slip a couple of months. Third party implementations using the 'Universal Update' and ARM chipsets are now expected in CES 2018, starting tomorrow, though probably not with phone or phablet form factors (yet).

November: Surface Phone renders appeared (not for the first time), though with Microsoft's concept video and slides now out in the open at least these renders were pretty convincing and realistic. The chipset this is based upon is the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 as other ARM chips, though we're also hearing of both a Snapdragon 640 and 840 in the industry, so expect mobile-relevant designs on each of these shortly.

December: What looked to be final Redstone 3 Insider builds appeared for existing Windows 10 Mobile hardware, though to be honest, there really wasn't much else to deliver for these phones - the law of diminishing returns seemed to apply... In fact, it's still not even certain that existing production status phones will get this update.

Hard core Windows 10 Mobile enthusiasts seem to be thinking about finally ditching their old Lumias and Elite phones in the Spring, 2018, in favour of the all-in-one mobile PCs set to arrive over the next few months from Dell, HP, Acer, Asus and, of course, Microsoft.

Is mobile nirvana finally upon us in 2018, or is all this just hype for an in-between form factor and use case that's less at home in the real world than in the 'concept video'? The jury's still out. Much as it has been since 2016.

______

Phew! Back in 2017 again and back from the future. Any comments on my futuristic retrospective?

PS. I'd hyperlink back to all my 2017 stories, but the hypertext transcoding got morphed in the time vortex. Sorry...

Yes, the standard Windows 10 Camera lets you take selfies with ease, but what about at night? Given that you're shooting the photo on a device with a (potentially) bright AMOLED or LED display, why not use this to illuminate yourself while the shot is taken? Here I compare two 'night selfie' UWP applications for Windows 10 Mobile.

The app links first though, since you can grab these and try them yourselves from the Store: Night Selfie and #NightSelfie - and yes, the names are very similar, causing no end of confusion for a reviewer trying to make sense of screenshots and photos!

Both apps open with a note to make sure that your phone is set to maximum display brightness and, for best effect, you'd have to dive into Windows 10 Mobile's settings and do this manually - I know I did on the Lumia 950 XL. A shortcut is here in #NightSelfie to go straight to the appropriate page, but there's nothing similar in the more rudimentary Night Selfie - one for an update.

Next is the viewfinder, opening to a full screen camera view in both, though Night Selfie's UI (right) has a prominent button that toggles between the opening dark view (you're taking this in low light, remember?) and minimising this to a thumbnail, letting a pure white background illuminate you constantly. This gives an accurate preview of the lighting for the photo itself, while #NightSelfie (left) leaves the final illumination as something of a gamble, since the full-on white display only appears after you tap the capture icon.

Results are pretty similar, mind you, with the main difference being that #NightSelfie's shots are always brighter, partly thanks to the whole screen being used for illumination (i.e. no thumbnail or Windows controls) and partly different exposure algorithms. Night Selfie produces slightly better colours and lower noise, but with less light overall. So it's your call as to which is better - why not download both and try them yourself? (#NightSelfie has a 'remove advertising' function, but I haven't seen an ad yet, so this might as well have been renamed to 'Donate'.)

Here then are sample shots, taken in gloomy conditions in my hall, #NightSelfie (left) and Night Selfie (right), just click each for the original JPG:

The interface for both apps here is minimalist - I was expecting 'processing' to take multiple shots and then composite a final render after aligning and removing noise, but the applications keep things pretty simple. Just an initial full-screen selfie viewfinder so that you can make sure you look OK(!) and then a button to capture or minimise and capture, etc.

On the whole, I prefer the 'hash' solution that gives the most light (and that handy display settings shortcut), but 'Night Selfie' does at least give an accurate preview of how your photo will turn out. So again I'm torn.... By the way, #NightSelfie also has a shortcut to Photos, but this wasn't working on my Fast ring Insiders device - I'm not blaming the app though - Photos is a disaster on Redstone 2 at the moment, so it's almost certainly a Microsoft issue that'll get fixed in the next Insiders build.

Both applications are Windows 10 only and full UWP apps, though there's little benefit to using them on Continuum and not much more on your laptop. Maybe for tablet use?

Those download links again: Night Selfie and #NightSelfie 

PS. I'm not sure how I feel about applications with hash signs in their name - a recipe for confusion or social media brilliance? The jury's out!

Three years ago, I pitched the last Android phone with 10x optical zoom, the Samsung Galaxy K Zoom, against the Nokia Lumia 1020, with mixed results, though the comparison was very interesting. The huge caveat with the K Zoom was the device's relative bulk in all modes and, to be honest, this is the same problem with the otherwise pretty impressive Hasselblad Moto Mod, which becomes the back half of the Moto Z (also running Android), see below for a new shoot-out!

The Lumia 1020 and Hasselblad Moto Mod, flanked by the Nokia 808 and Galaxy K Zoom

So, that caveat - the Hasselblad Moto Mod is almost impossibly huge in day to day life, as we saw in my look at form factors here. The Xenon flash is great, the sensor and general optics pretty good, the zoom mechanism very effective, and so on. But you can't use this all day long as the back half of your main smartphone, which means that you have to detach it and keep it in a pocket. Making finding and re-attaching it something of a 20 second operation (allowing for unclipping and storing whatever other mod you had attached in the meantime (e.g. an extra battery), so it's not exactly perfect for ad-hoc zoomed photos.

Still, there's no denying the effectiveness of optical zoom, where all the magic happens in (physically extending) optics rather than in software tricks cropping into a very high resolution sensor, as on the PureView-equipped 1020.

A few notes before you watch the video:

• As usual, for maximum effect, enlarge your playback window to at least 1080p size and quality. Don't worry about sound, there wasn't much ambient stuff to capture here (other than breeze!), so I've got a music track to add interest - though I did allow the Hasselblad's zoom noise to stay, to give you an idea of how this sounds in real life.
    
• The Lumia 1020's 'ball bearings' OIS never did work that well in video mode, as I've commented many times. It's better than having no stabilisation at all, but it's not in the same league as more modern OIS mechanisms (even those on the Lumia 930/1520, almost as old now) - I was disappointed by the lack of stability here in my 2016 testing. It's also possible that after three years of use, the bearings here are simply showing their age?
    
• Because I couldn't physically operate both sets of zoom at the same time, I dispensed with my usual 'jig' system for comparing phone cameras. Here I simply shot the same subjects handheld, i.e. realistically, and haven't worried about synchronising the zoom actions. Don't worry, you'll still get a feel for the relative merits of both systems.
   
• The 1020 maxes out at about 4x in 1080p capture mode, so I tried to get close to this for the 'first step' when operating the Moto Z with Hasselbad mod. In fact, the physical zoom control is so fiddly on the latter that it proved impossible to stop near this and the video below shows various 'first steps', from 2.5x to 6x - the zooming happens so damned fast that the tiny switch just isn't capable of stopping on a particular zoom factor. But hey, I did my best... 

A clear demonstration, of course, that optical zoom trumps PureView zoom, which is utterly as expected. Clever as the latter is - and better than downgrading to lossy digital zoom, as on traditional camera phones - there's no substitute for proper moving optics and the Hasselblad mod on the Moto Z works a treat. Its OIS is impressive, digital noise is kept to a minumum, even in low light (that's the beauty of using a modern 2016 sensor, of course) and being able to see everything crystal clear at a zoom factor of 10x on a 'phone' is astonishing. Just as it was on the Galaxy K Zoom a few years ago. The last Nokia (in fact, the only one?) to feature optical zoom was the N93 in 2006!

I did prefer the richer colours in the 1020 footage on the whole, while the Hasselblad's colours seemed over-muted at times to my eyes. But inconsistently, perhaps confirming that the Hasselblad mod is really in need of a few firmware updates (this is easy via the phone's interface).

Against all this is consideration of form factor though - and you can't help but be impressed by the comparative svelte lines of the Lumia 1020, even today in 2017. That 1020 looks just as sexy today as it did in 2013, even if the OS was left stranded on Windows Phone 8.1 officially.

Your comments welcome. For shooting videos, are the advantages of 10x optical zoom worth carrying around the extra bulk?

PS. Yes, I saw the anouncement of the Zenfone Zoom 3 yesterday, with an iPhone 7 Plus-like 2.3x zoom lens. I'll cover that in due course later in 2017.

It's all very well Windows (phone) fans talking about Windows 10 Mobile being 'just part of the huge Windows 10 ecosystem' - and Windows (phone, err...) bashers talking about Windows being dead on mobile. Neither party is really telling the whole story, as you can imagine. In the interests of chipping in with helpful facts though, as AAWP is wont to do, here's the truth, shown below in chart form, a picture hopefully being worth a thousand words...

I was prompted to do a little research and do try and depict all this graphically after numerous discussions in AAWP comments and on social media as to just how much part of 'Windows 10' the mobile SKU, 'Windows 10 Mobile' is. We've talked a lot in features and in on the podcast about the half billion strong Windows 10 ecosystem and although it's slightly disingenuous to imagine that this is all directly relevant to mobile, it's not entirely irrelevant, either.

You see, Windows 10 for Desktop and Mobile have far, far more in common than they do in terms of differences. As the chart below shows, Microsoft's move to integrate all their platforms over the last two years has paid dividends. In addition to Mobile and Desktop here, there's 'ioT' (Internet of Things), Hololens, XBox, and so on. All with the same common code, as shown in the central overlap below:

On top of the modules and systems shown in the chart, there are the actual first party applications, of course (e.g. Outlook, Mail, Maps, Groove), though these are nearly all UWP (Universal Windows Platform) applications these days and are also common to multiple variants of Windows 10. And then there are all the many third party UWP apps as well, most of which work just as well on phone, Continuum displays and desktops - they really are (for the most part) 'universal' too.

Although Microsoft has effectively - and hopefully temporarily - withdrawn from the first party phone hardware market (that's a rant for another day), it's clear that there's a lot of maturity that comes with Windows 10 Mobile now. Currently the 'Anniversary Update' (a.k.a. Redstone) is the production version, but the 'Creators Update' (a.k.a. Redstone 2) is due for release in April 2017, and it's quite a bit faster and sleeker, as current Fast ring insiders will attest.

Microsoft has already demonstrated 'Windows 10 on ARM', of course, the idea being to go back to Windows (NT)'s roots in running on multiple chipsets, for better portability, to reduce the dependency on Intel, and to establish better battery efficiencies in largely mobile hardware - phones, tablets, hybrids, etc. You can think of 'Windows 10 on ARM' as taking the few items in the white outlined area on the right above and optimising/compiling them for ARM too.

This raises an interesting question for the future - if everything above works on ARM then we only have one stack, one panel and a simpler chart - and the only differences in how Windows 10 looks and behaves will be in terms of the form factor it's running on and any minimum screen resolutions, for example. I can envisage phones, phablets and 7" tablets putting up the Start shell as we know and love it today, while 10"+ tablets, netbooks, hybrids and laptops will put up the rejigged 'Explorer' Start shell. But behind the front end user interface, there will be no difference whatsoever.

It's a compelling vision of the future and Microsoft's integration vision will have finally matured. Now all we'd need would be hardware to run it all - we have plenty of tablets, hybrids and laptops, but we're going to start needing more phones and phablets pretty soon, certainly by the end of 2017.

Anyway, hopefully you'll find the chart worth bookmarking, for the next time you wonder just what the heck is common to Windows 10 Mobile and W10 on the desktop...

Just a few back-of-envelope calculations that I thought you might like to follow along with. With the withdrawal of Microsoft from selling first party smartphones (for the time being), I wondered whether it was time to take stock of some numbers. In particular, the figure I wanted to get to was how many people out there, across the world, are actively using Windows 10 Mobile, i.e. the new OS that Microsoft is updating, that devs are writing for, and that we're covering. Some guesswork is needed, but bear with me.

Before I get going, I wanted to comment briefly on the silly 'Windows Phone sales reach new low' stories on various Microsoft-bashing tech sites - of course they're low, Microsoft hasn't marketed Lumias at all in 2016 and in fact stopped making them altogether. They're not really in phone shops or on carrier sites. So, unsurprisingly, no one's buying the phones because they don't know they exist!

Now, there are other vendors of Windows Phones, there always were - the platform launched on non-Microsoft, non-Nokia hardware, after all, in 2010. And as 2016 comes to a close, we have HP, Alacatel and a host of smaller players flying the flag (perhaps at half mast, but hey....) But in terms of sheer numbers, we have always had the Lumia range utterly dominant, usually around 98% of the market. So let's consider non-Lumia sales as a rounding error. Upwards, but a rounding error.

Firstly, let's start with the total number of Windows Phones and Windows 10 Mobile devices ever sold. Using data from (e.g.) Microsoft's various 10-K filings in the USA and Nokia's annual results summaries, we get:

• 2011: 2 million
• 2012: 13 million
• 2013: 30 million
• 2014: 32 million
• 2015: 27 million
• 2016: 6 million

Each of these is plus or minus a million or so - uncertainty mainly comes around the handover period between Nokia and Microsoft, because of lack of granularity in the various reported figures, and because of the staggered fiscal years that Microsoft reports, but my figures won't be far off.

Adding these together, we get a total number of Windows-running phones (in the modern era) as 110 million, about what I would have expected. (By comparison, the size of the smartphone market now is easily north of two billion.)

A selection of old Lumias, circa 2012 - the 520 did particularly well, into 2013 etc.

It's at this point that we have to start whittling down the numbers because of various factors (with that Windows 10 Mobile goal in mind). By my estimates, around 40 million of the phones sold are capable of running Windows 10 Mobile, i.e. they're on the official list of handsets which can run the Upgrade Advisor (see link in here) and thus get the new OS.

Next we have to knock a fraction off for handsets that are no longer in use. Not a huge fraction, since the 3+ year old handsets aren't in the W10M compatible list, but there are bound to be phones in drawers or handed down to teenagers who broke them and then bought iPhones (and then broke them....!) Let's knock off 10 million for all this - remember we're trying to get to an 'active' user base.

So we're down to 30 million. Now, some of these phones will be Lumia 550, 650, 950 and 950 XL, natively on Windows 10 Mobile out of the box, let's say 2 million (I'm being ultra realistic here), leaving 28 million smartphones which shipped with Windows Phone 8.1 and which could be upgraded by knowledgable users - but probably haven't been. Away from the Windows tech enthusiasts and sites (e.g. AAWP), how many WP8.1 users have been clued up enough to know that the Windows 10 Mobile upgrade exists and how to accomplish it?

I do believe that Microsoft was probably right not to push W10M to all WP8.1 owners, since there are some things which 'break', some things which still don't work as well as under 8.1, and performance on the same hardware is undoubtedly slower. Not to mention that quite a few people won't even have the free space on their internal disk to do the upgrade anyway.

A user has to want to upgrade to W10M, to move ahead, and to live in the future - and there are big benefits in terms of services, UWP apps and updates. So having people upgrade via running an opt-in utility was probably wise - though I'd still like Microsoft to have told users about Windows 10 Mobile. As it is, the use of Upgrade Advisor was largely limited to readers of AAWP and the other tech sites and their family and friends. I'm going to estimate that of those 28 million potential upgraders less than 20% actually made it to the new OS, so call it 5 million users/phones.

Add this to the native W10M handset number and we get 7 million people/handsets possibly running Windows 10 Mobile across the world. 

(And if you think that any of my estimates above have been generous then allow back in the extra few percent of non-Lumia Windows phone sales and you can probably allow my numbers to stand.)

Some W10M-upgradable or W10M native handsets (Lumia 640, 930, 950 XL and HP Elite X3)...

It's true that iOS and Android have similar issues with older handsets getting orphaned, unsupported and abandoned (by manufacturers), though not quite to the same degree. There are plenty of people still using iPhone 5 units, for example, five year old phones but on the latest iOS release (and it's pushed, so almost everyone upgrades). And there are a billion people on older Android handsets, never to be upgraded or updated for security patches because of the horrible fragmentation in the Android world. Yet the software stays pretty compatible, even back to Android 4.x, because of Google's intermediate Play Services strategy - and that is pushed to all.

So the whittling down mathematics when working out active users of an OS isn't completely limited to Windows mobile phones - but it's particularly dramatic given the step change opt-in nature of Windows Phone to Windows 10 Mobile.

Now, seven million people is a lot in one sense - after all, picture those millions in one spot, as far as the eye can see to the horizon. But it's a pretty small target compared to active users of the latest iOS or of (say) Android 5.0 and above, both of which are in the region of a billion. So the addressable market for developers to pitch phone-specific applications and games to (and for writers like myself to pitch W10M-specific web pages at) is under 1% of the size of the market for either iOS or Android. Which is why mobile applications almost always come out on those platforms first/at all.

Microsoft's ace in the hole here is UWP applications, of course, in that these work not only on Windows 10 Mobile, but also on tablets, hybrids, laptops and desktops, in fact anything running Windows 10, and increasing the pool of potential users up towards half a billion. With the best will in the world, mind you, the majority of Windows 10 users tend to only use a handful of applications or games from the Windows Store - so much is done within a browser window on larger screen devices. For service applications, at least, there will still be mainstream heavyweight applications and, of course, games, and these are much harder to do in a Chrome or Edge window.

So it's not as simple as saying that the Windows 10 Mobile 'ecosystem' should be counted as half a billion rather than seven million! The truth is, as usual, somewhere in between.

The 'one Windows' idea is still compelling, mind you, and the thing saving Microsoft's mobile ambitions from extinction - it's trivial to keep updating Windows 10 Mobile in lock step with Windows 10 for PC and, given the upcoming switch to Windows 10 on ARM, even critical that the ARM-compiled mobile builds don't fall behind. Which is good news for you and I, reading this.

There may only be seven million people using Windows 10 actively on phones right now, but Microsoft is betting on changing the face of portable computing (for professionals, at least) in the upcoming years - let's hope for higher numbers as the world of phone and desktop get woven even more inextricably together.

With another update for mid January 2017 (20 new entries), here's our directory of the very best of the Windows Phone and Windows 10 Mobile world. If you or someone you know is just starting out on the platform then look no further for suggestions.

Microsoft is making strides at clearing out old and unsupported applications from the Store, but there are still something like 200,000 available. Say half of these are games, that leaves 100,000. Which is still a very large number.

Fear not though, for All About Windows for Phones is here to help, with a bookmarkable page of the top 500 or so applications that should be a useful aide-memoire after a hard reset if rebuilding a phone from scratch or, perhaps more appropriately, a great place for a new Windows 10 Mobile user to start.

Some notes:

• Thanks to the AAWP community for suggestions so far (e.g. in the comments below), this is a crowd-sourced project!
• Not included (obviously) are games. They're here. Also not included are applications which come with every phone, such as the core Windows and Lumia apps.
• Where possible, I've included links to relevant reviews/features or to entries in the Microsoft Store.
• Yes, I know that a couple of entries are in two categories. Just trying to be helpful!
• Implemented as a table, I've kept the width right down, now with just two columns, in order to be phone-friendly. In other words, you can view this article on your phone and, depending on the link and the item, dive right into an app, its page and then download it. In theory!

I've broken down our recommendations into categories, to be helpful. No doubt things may get tweaked in time! Most applications will work equally well on Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 10 Mobile, but there may be one or two small incompatibilities here and there. I've started marking Universal Windows Platform apps with 'UWP' after the title, but it'll take more updates of this feature before all universal applications are changed/marked.

Directory updated 21st January 2017

General Adobe Reader Aerize Explorer Pro AppRaisin UWP Awesome Lock Band Store B2X SmartApp Bing Rewards Box (8.1) Box (UWP) Carpenter's Friend CloudMesh Copy Space DOSBox Dropbox UWP Easy Transfer Firmware Update Check Flashlight XT Folders Pro Glance Background (8.1 only?) Jack of Tools     LCARS Interface for WP     Lockie      Lockmix Lock Screen Text MyAppFree     MY EE OneReader Password Hide  Radaee PDF Reader Send Anywhere ShareFolder Explorer Spirit Level+ Toolkit Pro  Torch Pro    Web Tiles UWP Zedge	Productivity 2Day 9 Notes Appointile BlastNote Calendar Import CamCard Chronos Calendar UWP ChronoMts Clear List Clipboard Manip UWP Clipboarder Count-It UWP CV Sampler UWP Diarium UWP Evernote  Fast Post Feather Notes InstaNote Mileage Book    My ContacTile Notepad Next UWP NotepadX Office+   Office 365 Admin OneCalendar  OneDo PPT Sampler UWP Reading List Revent UWP SharePoint UWP Slack Squid (Papyrus) handwriting T3XT K1NG Text Reader Voicy Wunderlist
Travel and Movie Booking ATM Milano BookMyShow ComfortDelGro Taxi Booking (Singapore) Easy Taxi Expedia UWP Fahrplan Kayak London Travel Moovit National Rail Olacabs redBus Uber UK Trains	Communications and IM BBM Facebook Messenger UWP Hike Messenger Indoona Join Conference Jongla Line Loadkit Download Manager MetroMail (8.1 only) Skype UWP TeamViewer UWP TeamViewer QuickSupport UWP Telegram Messenger Truecaller TU (calls/texts over Wifi for some networks) Viber UWP Video Optimizer for Whatsapp (UWP on W10) Voice 2 Mail Whatsapp
Camera replacements/aids 1Shot camera   CamScanner    Fhotoroom GoPro Instaweather Pro Lens Picker Office Lens UWP Photo Scan UWP Pocket Magnifier ProShot UWP QR Scanner+ UWP SoZoom	Music/Speech recording/tuning 4TRX Accurate Tuner Pro Airyware Tuner Audio Recorder Hifi Audio Recorder Pro FL Studio Mobile 3 Guitar Tuna Karaoke One Kauna Lexis Audio Editor n-Track Tuner Piano10 UWP Pitchlab Guitar Tuner Talkinator UWP Wave Master
News and Web AAWP Universal UWP AlJazeera CBS News CNN Daily Mail Online EI Universal ESPN FeedLab UWP Flipboard Fox Sports Go (USA) Maxthon Browser Monument Browser UWP Newsflow UWP NewsSpot Nextgen Reader Opera Mini   Surfy The Guardian This is Money UCBrowserHD Wall Street Journal	Imaging/Graphics 6tag Perfect 9GAG UWP Adobe Photoshop Express    Afterlight UWP Black Fantasia Painter  Fotor Fresh Paint Fused Double Exposure Hi Collage Image Resizer Instagram UWP Instance Logo Foundry Lomogram Momento+ My Memories Interactive Slideshow Old Look Perfect Flicker UWP Photo Lab     Photo Marker Phototastic Photo Story PicsArt Rawer Reverse Image Search Screenshot Join UWP SpotBright UWP TouchRetouch Vinci Waterlogue
Music playback/streaming /downloading/FM 7digital Audiocloud UWP Audiotica BBC iPlayer Radio Core Player Deezer FM Radio FM Radio UWP foobar2000 Mobile Loco Music Player Music Locker Music Now MusicTube my Piano Phone NOIZ Qobuz Music Radio FM Phone Radio Lounge Shazam SoundByte UWP SoundHound Spotify Tidal Unofficial UWP TuneIn Radio Vacuum Tube Player YouTunes! UWP	Reference Advanced English Dictionary City Art Search Dictionary Duolingo (various) Elements - The Periodic Table Flightradar24 gTongue Pro offline dictionary Larousse Francaise Mathologica Memorize It! Merriam-Webster Dictionary National Trust park4night Perfect Dictionary Periodic Table Pro  Poki for Pocket SilverDict+ Star Walk 2 UWP Translator Vivino Wine Scanner Wikipedia WolframAlpha Yandex.Maps UWP yelp
Shopping/Banking AliExpress Shopping UWP Ally Bank (USA) ASB Mobile Banking (NZ) Bank of America UWP Bank ID (Germany) Barclays Mobile Banking Danske bank Mobilbank Norway DNB (Norway) First Direct Flipkart  foodpanda GSC Cinemas (Malaysia) HDFC Bank HSBC Mexico ICICI Bank iReff Recharge Plans Kotak Bank Mobile Pay (Denmark) Mobile Pay Norway My USPS UWP (USA) My Giffgaff UWP Myntra (India) NatWest Newegg Quicket Royal Bank of Scotland Sainsburys SBI Anywhere (India) Starbucks UWP State Bank Freedom (India) Swish USAA UWP Vips (Norway) Wells Fargo	Social 6sec Aeries UWP Baconit Disqus Facebook, Facebook UWP Fenice Foundbite Foursquare Instagram UWP LinkedIn MeTweets Ouga (Tumblr) UWP Pages Manager Peregrine Perfect 9GAG UWP Perfect Flicker UWP pin.it Readit SlimSocial for Facebook UWP Straw Swarm Tapatalk Twabbit Tweet It! UWP Tweetium UWP Twitter UWP Vine
Navigation/Travel AroundMe BeFriend Car Dash CycleTracks GPS gMaps Geocaching Plus Geocaching Pro GeoGPS Hike Blackbox London Travel maaloo Outdoor MapFactor GPS Mapsnap GPS Marine Traffic NaviComputer North UWP Simple Latitude Simple OSM Ski Blackbox Sygic GPS Navigation Trip Advisor	Settings/Internals/Utilities 8 Zip Lite AIDA64 Authenticator DataCounter UWP Feem Wifi Insider Pro Kirik Battery UWP Net Check Network Speed Test PhoNetInfo Specs Analysis UWP Speedtest.net   Storage Cleaner Pro Sys App Pusher Total Commander Wifi Analyzer ZAPYA
Sports/Exercise/Health Adidas miCoach Caledos Runner Endomondo ESPN Cricinfo fitbit Garmin Connect UWP MyFitnessPal Onefootball Pitlane One Push Up Trainer Runtastic SofaScores Live Scores Sports Tracker Striver Track Runner Yahoo Cricket	Media (Video) All 4  (UK) AllTube Grabber   BBC iPlayer  (UK) BBC Store  BT Sport Cast To UWP CCPlayer Pro Cineplex Enternatinment (Canada) Demand 5 (UK) Flixster Hulu Plus     IMDb ITV Player   (UK) LiveGaming (Twitch)      Metrotube myTube!    Netflix NRK TV, NRK Super, NRK Radio (Norway) Perfect Tube UWP Playcast UWP TorrentPlatinum UWP Tubecast PRO TuneIn Radio TubeMate Video Downloader TVCatchup TV2 Sumo, VG TV (Norway) Unstream (Twitch) UWP Vimeo VLC UWP Zattoo Live TV (Germany)
Podcast related/Audio-book Audible Audiobooked UWP BringCast UWP Carboncast CastCenter Grover Pro UWP i Podcast OneCast UWP Pocket Casts Podcast Brain Podcatcher Podcast Lounge Podcast Bandit PODCASTS Podcasts (Beta) UWP Podcaster Podcast+ Pro UWP Podcast Picker Poddi P | Cast pod.ding Podcast Critter SlapDash Podcasts WPodder	Privacy/Secrecy/Security 2FA BeFriend (personal) CodeSafe Pro Enpass KeePassReader UWP Lastpass MetroPass Microsoft Authenticator UWP OneLocker UWP
Reading Bookviser CHM Reader Comicana Cover ePub Reader FictionBookReader Freda Kindle Kobo Books Manga Blaze Tucan reader Wattpad: Free stories and books Xodo Docs (Best PDF reader)	Video editing/sharing Auto Witness Frame Grabber Hyperlapse Mobile Movie Creator MovieJax Movie Maker 8.1 Movie Moments My Memories Interactive Slideshow My Webcam PicPlayPost Vid2Pix Videoshop
Weather-related 4castr AccuWeather UWP Amazing Weather Appy Weather Asia Air Quality Blue Skies Forecast MeteoStation UWP MetService Towns & Cities (NZ) Perfect Weather Universal UWP Prognoza Rain Gauge (UWP on W10) Storm The Weather Channel UWP Yandex.Weather UWP	Calculators and (numeric) Converters Black Box currency converter Calculator2 Percentages Calculator Unit Converter

So there we go!

It's been a long time since I revisited this topic (16 months)... Just where does Windows 10 Mobile (née Windows Phone) stand in terms of third party applications, compared to the competition? I mean, first party, in-the-box offerings are outstanding, with Outlook, Skype, Maps, Office and much more, but what about the third party 'app gap', as popularly characterised? How bad is it, compared to iOS and Android? I took the current 'Top 40' from the application charts from the latter two platforms, as of January 2017, and tried to find equivalents.

Now, I should perhaps point out that I'm talking about 'applications' here, not 'games'. The latter comprising a pretty large chunk of the top charts on other platforms. Plus, each platform breaks down applications into 'Paid' and 'Free'. So, in a bid to try and stay on-topic, what I've done below is pick the top applications from both paid and free lists, on both Android and iOS, and hopefully you'll recognise just about every entry listed below. But can Windows 10 Mobile's ecosystem provide a match, aided by a few (fully compatible) WP8.1 apps, as appropriate?

For ease of reading, Where there's no match at all, I'll shade the cell in red, where there are 100% viable alternatives, I'll shade in a less obvious orange(!):

A slightly patchy, but not disastrous, report card for a platform widely perceived to have a yawning 'app gap', though I'd add three huge caveats:

• Where there's not an obvious official application for a service, some of the third party replacements are downright opportunistic, merely existing to scoop up search results and serve ads or worse. Again, there's a lot more that Microsoft Store QA (if, indeed, they employ anybody - I do wonder sometimes!) could do here.
   
• Although in many cases the third party replacements are very good (e.g. Perfect Tube for YouTube, 6tin for Tinder), their naming is not obvious. While the Store application correctly throws them up as valid search results for the original service or site, user confidence isn't going to be very high in terms of them having found what they're looking for....
   
• A cursory look at 'top 40' applications, as here, completely misses a bigger failing for a minority platform like Windows 10 Mobile, i.e. that there's a 'long tail' of lesser used but critical applications that are missing altogether. Archetypal here are banking and store apps, though there are also niche utilities and corporate/database stuff - and it might only take one "Oh, Windows 10 doesn't have that!" moment to dismiss the entire platform.

We're still living with a platform that can suit millions of users then, but a lot depends on what someone needs a Windows 10 Mobile device for. I could personally live with Windows 10 as my only platform, with only a couple of small niggles, and we know from recent podcasts that there are others who are 'all in', but there's so much good hardware on iOS and Android now, along with an even fuller spread of software, that you really have to want to exist in an all-Microsoft ecosystem (W10M, Surface, etc.)

Comments welcome!

Without doubt, THE most popular category of application for Windows Phone 8.1 was 'podcatchers', i.e. applications to auto-grab and play your favourite podcasts. I did so many features and updates for these for 8.1 that I've lost track. Making this a great point to reset everything and only consider dedicated UWP applications, i.e. those expressly built for Windows 10 (Mobile/Continuum/desktop). There's still quite a choice, however, as we shall see!

Podcatching, as you'll probably know, is the act of grabbing podcasts directly, over the air, on your smartphone. Automatically, seamlessly and without needing a desktop or any direct manual intervention. And then sorting them, playing them back in sensible fashion, working around interruptions, and cleaning up afterwards. It's a tall order for an application, and here we have some likely contenders here for Windows 10 Mobile, all of which I've put through their paces. 

I don't need to evangelise the need for a good podcatcher to you, gentle reader. The very fact that you're reading on means that you're a podcast fan and that you too want a decent system for grabbing them on Windows 10. My testing was on a mix of Windows 10 Anniversary Update and Redstone 2 Fast ring Insiders, just to try and cover all bases.

Now, obviously, I can't go into gory detail for each of the applications, every last setting and feature can't be explored. But I can set out some ground rules and see how well each of the applications do:

1. Import of an existing set of podcasts (e.g. from an OPML or XML file, or from an online service such as gpodder.net or from a previous OneDrive backup) - having to add podcasts manually by searching or typing in URLs is a right pain when you've got 20 or 30!
2. Export or back up your podcast selections and/or playback positions to the Cloud (including OneDrive)
3. Include search functions for new podcasts that you've been told about, or for simply browsing for likely candidates. The test search strings here are for the AAWP podcast (of course), plus my own Phones Show Chat, a totally separate entity with different RSS/directory history, and my fairly new Projector Room.
4. Auto-check for new programmes in each feed and auto-download them in the background.
5. Play podcasts, of course, remembering where you'd got to in each.
6. List new programmes, across all your feeds, in chronological order, or at least isolating new content that you haven't heard yet.
7. Include clean-up options to remove listened-to podcasts and reclaim space on the phone, preferably as quickly and automatically as possible.
8. Able to run in dark or light themes, according to AMOLED-screened power efficiency and taste/preference - note that this doesn't have to be an explicit setting in the application, so long as the app picks up the chosen Windows 'theme'.
9. Ability to skip past adverts with 'nudge' controls, both in the main UI and in the OS's pop-up audio handler (as opposed to moving between podcasts as if they were music tracks)
10. Support Continuum displays (on compatible devices), plus Windows 10 Desktop as well as Mobile. This is all usually a given for a UWP app, but worth checking.

____________________________

Grover Pro (v1.4.1.0)

(last covered here)

* Although there's an automated system for removing played episodes and a setting for the number of episodes of each podcast to keep, plus ways of manually deleting old files, there's no over-arching 'clean up and reclaim space' system, curiously.

Deliberately styled after Groove Music (hence the adaptation of the name), Grover Pro is perhaps the podcatcher that's been the most reliable in my testing, consistently pulling down podcasts in the background so that they're all ready for listening. With regular updates and fixes, it's hard to see what else could be improved.

Unusually, there are three ways into new podcasts - 'Playlist' (with new shows being auto-added if you set it up this way), 'Unplayed' and 'Downloaded', lists which are often almost identical, obviously, though if you're used to listening to podcasts in bits and bobs then I guess the distinction might become important. Still, you'll find a way to make this work for you, even if the barrage of views is a little confusing at first.

There's a podcast 'Store' which you can browse and add from, as needed, and the whole thing works beautifully in landscape mode and on a Continuum display (or Windows 10 laptop or tablet).

Overall rating: 88%

Gallery of screenshots - Grover Pro:

One of the various 'what's new' views and (right) the 'Now Playing' pane, with the variable speed control slider popped up...

Here in landscape mode, showing the built in podcast 'Store' and a well thought out interface whatever the orientation or resolution.

____________________________

BringCast (v4.0.18.0)

(last covered here)

Although nothing to do with me personally, I'm declaring a slight interest in BringCast here because I've submitted a fair amount of feedback over the last few years - in particular at least one of the themes and the 'All episodes by date' filter, presenting shows in reverse chronological order - exactly as I like them. In addition, there's a 'Playlist' system, if you prefer, perhaps for grouping new shows from a few favourite podcasts.

Each podcast subscription can be tweaked and set-up individually if required, customising for auto-download and the number of shows to keep stored, plus there's an overall 'Delete' function in Settings that shows the amount of MB currently used by all podcasts and offers the chance to reclaim space quickly with one tap - very useful.

This podcatcher round-up does come in the midst of a time of change for BringCast and I'm dodging between versions here somewhat, plus there are a few cosmetic glitches here and there (in landscape mode and on a Continuum display the interface definitely needs some tweaking) - yet I'd still recommend it in the top bracket. The interface is deliberately 'big' in places, even 'garish', but consider this part of the application's charm - or head for Grover Pro if it puts you off!

Of note is that BringCast is moving to a subscription model, where 'pro' features require a semi-regular in-app-purchase - this also won't be to everyone's taste, though I've done quite a few IAPs in BringCast over the years and in fact I'm happy to have paid for all the applications on this feature - it's how developers get paid and earn a living.

Overall rating: 85%

Gallery of screenshots - BringCast:

Playback in progress in BringCast, with a nice and large finger-friendly playback position control, and similarly large skip controls; (right) the hamburger/navigation menu - and all nicely themed.

Delving into Settings, it's apparent that there's an awful lot that's customisable in BringCast, though the defaults are also sensible, especially for those who only want big downloads on Wi-fi...

____________________________

Onecast (v1.4.45)

(last covered here)

* In the current version, auto-download is disabled, the developer is clearly fiddling with making it reliable - watch this space for updates.

** Podcasts are deleted according to internal rules in the app (e.g. playing beyond 90%), there's no overall 'Clear out' function, though see one of the screenshots below.

You've got to smile at the vision and interface here - it's either charming or annoying, elegant or frustrating, depending on what you like and what you expect to happen. The idea is that there's no need for a hamburger menu, no need for a toolbar and so on. The only trouble is that there are functions here which need putting somewhere. So you end up with import and export functions in the Search bar, mode selection (including Airplane mode) as a toggle by tapping on the application's name, long pressing on things to see if you can find associated context-sensitive functions, etc. It's not always intuitive, but you do get used to it and you have to applaud the effort and the concept.

As much as possible is handled by the application, including podcast clean-up and how and when to download rather than stream. Onecast does work on the whole, but it's also clearly a work in progress.

When plugged into a Continuum display or when used on a Windows 10 laptop, Onecast works but the podcast artwork isn't properly sized, yet another sign that further updates are needed.

Overall rating: 80%

Gallery of screenshots - Onecast:

This is the most interesting mode, in terms of automation, but there are two others to experiment with. Note the download going on at the bottom of the UI - downloads start when you start playing by default - it's neat enough and you can listen while it all happens; (right) 'All episodes' is a handy view and you can accomplish extra clean-up options from here.

Some of the long press options in the UI; (right) the playback pane, complete with sharing and speed options. It all works well enough and displays well - on mobile, at least!

____________________________

Podcasts (Beta) (v7.0.6)

(last covered here)

* There's no 'clear all' function, but you can opt to have all but 'n' downloads kept for each podcast, plus you can set them to be auto-deleted after 'n' days too.

The name suggests that this is attempting to be a direct successor to Microsoft's own Podcasts for Windows Phone 8.1, but the UI is totally different, being based around a Windows 10 hamburger navigation menu and a pastel/white control bar at the top of the screen. It's a little odd on Mobile, though all becomes clear when you plug Podcasts (Beta) into a Continuum display or run it on a Windows 10 tablet or laptop - the UI looks a million dollars with the larger landscape screen.

The basics are here, with podcast feeds being checked and parsed when the application is started, though this does take a while and there's no background downloading that I can find, so this is the least automated of the applications on test. New shows are added to the playlist and you proceed from there. Unlike the other apps here, the full-screen 'Now Playing' view doesn't include album art but does include the HTML show notes from the source URL, which is a nice touch.

Podcasts seemed somewhat sluggish in my tests, plus I experienced quite a few small audio glitches, especially when podcasts were downloading behind the UI - I suspect that there's still optimisation needed in the code for phone use. I was testing this (and Onecast) on the Lumia 950 on the Redstone 2 Slow ring, though I don't think this would have affected playback functions.

On the plus side, there are extras such as a sleep timer, which works well, plus this UWP application is totally free, with just a 'tip the developer' link found in 'Options' - yes, 'options' and not 'settings' - 'Podcasts' does everything its own way. It's worth a try, you may love it or hate it on Windows 10 Mobile, but either way it won't cost you a penny to find out!

Overall rating: 74%

Gallery of screenshots - Podcasts (Beta):

Categories are a nice touch in the podcast library - you don't have to use them but they're there if needed; (right) downloaded episodes are clearly marked. And note the blue bar and arrow at the bottom, indicating that the player pane can be popped up...

Playback in progress and popped up, with speed options and more on the '...' overflow menu. There's now album art here but you do get show notes, often useful; (right) the integral sleep timer, shutting off playback after a set number of minutes.

Delving into the 'Options', many of which will be familiar from other applications - all the defaults are sensible, with the only real omission being background operation.

____________________________

Podcast+ Pro (v6.0.6.0)

(last covered here)

* From the 'Downloaded' view and also via auto-delete on a per-podcast basis

The UI here is based around a three tab/pivot concept - feeds (which you can sort in various ways, though not according to date of last episode, annoyingly), 'now playing' (as it sounds, though notable because it has super-large control buttons, for in-car use), and 'playlists' (these auto-populate according to various sensible rules, though you can fiddle more if you like).

And it all works on the whole. Podcast+ Pro isn't the prettiest podcatcher here, but it's bold and functional and hey, that works pretty well on AMOLED screens, as on the test 950 here.

There's no background agent for auto-checking and grabbing new podcast episodes, but there is background support for carrying on downloading podcasts once the initial startup check has identified what to download. So there's a wait while audio becomes available sometimes, but it never gets in the way of you switching away to another app on the phone.

There are extensive settings and filters, with a sleep timer, auto-play of the next episode in the playlist, and so on. The settings are different from the main menu and from within a podcast listing - this makes sense, logically, if you think about it, the latter are more specific and context sensitive.

On a Continuum display or on a laptop, Podcast+ Pro does a good job too. It's a solid podcatcher and a worth alternative to the big guns (Grover Pro and BringCast).

Overall rating: 77%

Gallery of screenshots - Podcast+ Pro:

Big bold fonts, but all super clear, and I liked the download summary pane at the top; (right) browsing episodes within a podcast listing.

Huge controls, perhaps designed for in car use; (right) the sleep timer is hidden in the '...' pop-up menu...

The 'dynamic' playlists work really well and are the first port of call when you have a lot of podcasts subscribed; (right) the auto-downloading works well once the app has been opened and the feeds update - here are some of the salient settings...

______________________

Verdict

Five UWP applications then, all aimed at keeping you up to date with your podcast listening on Windows 10 Mobile and on tablets and laptops. Grover Pro is the standout so far - it's understated and lacking in 'wow', but it's super reliable and perfectly styled after the built-in Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile applications - it just fits in.

BringCast should be in second place - the UI is more flashy but the functionality's there under the hood - or at least it should be once all the bugs have been ironed out. In the meantime, check out the remaining three UWP podcatchers, they all have unique UIs and you'll love or hate them in turn.

Comments welcome as to your own favourite (so far)! I'll update this feature from time to time, as new UWP podcatchers appear.

PS. Yes, most of the Windows Phone 8.1 podcatchers still work fine, even under Redstone 2, but they're on borrowed time in terms of APIs, support, styling and even compatibility (no doubt), so best switch to a UWP now.

Well done if you spotted the title change - 'Anatomy of a Lumia photo' (here's #1!) just got widened because, in this case, I was using the HP Elite x3 instead! The software and platform are the same though. I do wonder whether these occasional smartphone photography tutorials are too 'basic', but they do seem to be popular. So here goes another!

Autumn is a wonderful season for shutterbugs - green leaves turn brown/copper/red and the entire landscape changes colour over a couple of weeks. In the UK, it's often raining as well, which puts a damper on things, but occasionally the sun comes out or it (at least) brightens up a bit and then you'll find me outside getting some fresh and looking for ways of capturing the season in a suitable snap on a phone camera.

In this case it was the HP Elite x3, running Windows 10 Mobile, but the exact smartphone camera doesn't matter that much, as long as there's sufficient resolution and dynamic range. The Elite x3's camera is now surprisingly good, as I found out here.

As I strolled along in bright Autumn conditions, I was struck by the tree shown below - yes, it really was that colour, this isn't a HDR shot and there aren't any alterations:

Simply amazing, and a nice shot (not that anyone will believe the colour!) But, continuing on my walk, I decided I wanted to try something with real detail, i.e. a macro, i.e. fallen leaves on the ground. I had a few attempts, crouching right down on the ground and tapping on the subject on the Elite x3 screen, to ensure an accurate focus:

Arty enough, but a bit underwhelming and very simplistically framed. I found a patch with lots of fallen leaves and tried that instead:

So far more of a sense of the season, but it's obviously hard to know what to do with focus, the depth of field at this distance produces a little 'bokeh', though not enough to make its effect obvious. Plus the sheer amount of leaves reduce the impact - the eye just doesn't know where to start looking!

My third attempt was more successful though, picking a particular multi-faceted leaf with its folds reaching upwards to the sky and surrounded by just a few other leaves for atmosphere. Again, I was able to focus accurately because of the single subject, positioning most of the leaf on the 'one third' line from the left of the frame and letting its stalk extend to the right hand 'third' line, etc. I kept it central vertically and I think the framing works well:

I was very pleased with this, though even with some weak sun filtering in to bring out the colours, the scene still didn't live up to my memory of reality, let alone my vivid memory of the original tree, a mile back on my walk.

Which got me wondering about how much I was allowed to 'cheat' here? The above shot is still a lovely piece of Autumn artwork and will do as a finishing point (you can click it to download the original if you like), but what would happen if I tweaked the photo's hue in an image editor? I use Seashore on a Mac and cycled the 'hue' 5% towards red, with the resulting photo below: (again, click it to see it at full resolution)

Yes, it's a fair cop, the colours here aren't 100% accurate, but the photo is wonderful. Does it matter that I cheated? I suspect I'll see a 50:50 split in the comments below - and I guess each faction that take home the image that they prefer and each be just as happy(!)

As before, the idea here is to give you a glimpse into my thoughts and actions in getting to a smartphone-shot photo that I'm really happy with - if this helps anyone else then the feature has served its purpose. 

I'll have more in the series in due course, I'm aiming to do one every few months.

Yes, that capitalisation in this new camera-centric smartphone's name is intentional - it's how KODAK itself refers to it. Sigh. Anyway, with retro camera styling and 21MP 1/2.4" six-axis-OIS specs, it's an unashamedly imaging-focussed (ahem) device and, with the Lumia 950/XL being arguably top dog in the world of phone imaging still, I thought an interactive head-to-head was in order...

More black leather than at a Hell's Angels bike meet.... the Lumia 950 and KODAK EKTRA!

In truth, aside from the '6-axis OIS', there's little that sets the KODAK EKTRA apart from a number of other Android phones with decent cameras, but the styling and marketing here hype the EKTRA up, so I wanted to put some pixels and stats into the comparison relative to my no. 1 contender here.

Notes:

1. Both smartphone cameras shoot at 16MP in a 16:9 aspect ratio, so I can crop down to 1:1 and there should be no issues with framing, other than minor differences caused by the optics.
2. All shots were on full 'auto', apart from manual focussing on some of the macro examples.
3. In each case, the overall scene is shown as the Lumia 950 sees it - you'll say this is because this is AAWP and I'm biased, but it's more that the AAWP audience will be very familiar with the Windows 10 Camera image processing, so it's a known starting point. And I steer clear of digital zoom, which is just about the Lumia 950 camera's only weakness, so it's a damn good starting point too...

Test 1: Sunny scene

My standard suburban shot in weak winter sun. Here's the overall scene, as shot by the Lumia 950:

In case you want to grab the original images to do your own analysis, here they are, from the Lumia 950 and KODAK EKTRA, click the links to download. And to look at the images in more detail, here are fairly central 1:1 crops, just wait to make sure the page has fully loaded and then use your mouse or trackpad pointer to compare the images:

Not bad from the EKTRA, but its image, when you look closely, is more 'processed' and 'artificial', compared to the Lumia 950's. I put this down to higher quality optics in the Lumia, plus more mature image processing.

Lumia 950: 10 pts, KODAK EKTRA: 9 pts

Test 2: Into the sun: HDR

Forcing HDR on, a shot into a bright sunny sky. Here's the overall scene, as shot by the Lumia 950:

In case you want to grab the original images to do your own analysis, here they are, from the Lumia 950 and KODAK EKTRA, click the links to download. And to look at the images in more detail, here are fairly central 1:1 crops, just wait to make sure the page has fully loaded and then use your mouse or trackpad pointer to compare the images:

This one's more of a score draw and I wasn't happy with the results from either phone - perhaps I was expecting too much. The 950 XL blew out the brighter parts of the sky too much while the EKTRA's detail again looks too dark and too processed.

Lumia 950: 8 pts, KODAK EKTRA: 8 pts

Test 3: Sunny macro

Taking advantage of a ray of bright sun through the window, a semi-macro of a trainer, which I thought came out nicely as a piece of still life. Here's the overall scene, as shot by the Lumia 950:

In case you want to grab the original images to do your own analysis, here they are, from the Lumia 950 and KODAK EKTRA, click the links to download. And to look at the images in more detail, here are fairly central 1:1 crops, just wait to make sure the page has fully loaded and then use your mouse or trackpad pointer to compare the images:

This is interesting, the Lumia photo has an artificial pink tint, perhaps influenced by pink elsewhere on the shoe? Either way, even allowing for the warmth of sunlight, the shoe should be whiter than this. The detail in the laces is sumptuous, though. In contrast, the EKTRA's photo nails the colour (i.e. pure white), but the laces are slightly out of focus, the depth of field didn't quite extend that far, though if you grab the full shot then you can see that the front of the shoe, with the logo, was perfect, so we'll write this one down as different focal points on the subject.

Lumia 950: 8 pts, KODAK EKTRA: 10 pts

Test 4: Stark detail and contrast extremes

Still in the low sun, but stark winter detail of a heavily pruned tree. Here's the overall scene, as shot by the Lumia 950:

In case you want to grab the original images to do your own analysis, here they are, from the Lumia 950 and KODAK EKTRA, click the links to download. And to look at the images in more detail, here are fairly central 1:1 crops, just wait to make sure the page has fully loaded and then use your mouse or trackpad pointer to compare the images:

Interestingly, it's the EKTRA that gets the colours wrong here, with the illuminated trunk not quite golden enough and with the rich blue (patchy) sky reduced to a pale turquoise. In contrast (pun intended), the Lumia 950 nails the scene (to my eyes).

Lumia 950: 9 pts, KODAK EKTRA: 7 pts

Test 5: Low light

In a curtained room, in quite dim light, a picture on the wall. Here's the overall scene, as shot by the Lumia 950:

In case you want to grab the original images to do your own analysis, here they are, from the Lumia 950 and KODAK EKTRA, click the links to download. And to look at the images in more detail, here are fairly central 1:1 crops, just wait to make sure the page has fully loaded and then use your mouse or trackpad pointer to compare the images:

As ever, low light picks out the men from the boys when it comes to camera phones. Here, despite the newer OIS, and with the same exposure (1/7s), the Ektra's photo is dramatically noisier - this surely has to be down to immature software, driving the ISO higher and not handling pixel level noise well?

Lumia 950: 10 pts, KODAK EKTRA: 7 pts

Test 6: Flash time

The same picture as above, from the same distance, about 2 metres, but this time with the LED flash units activated. Here's the overall scene, as shot by the Lumia 950:

In case you want to grab the original images to do your own analysis, here they are, from the Lumia 950 and KODAK EKTRA, click the links to download. And to look at the images in more detail, here are fairly central 1:1 crops, just wait to make sure the page has fully loaded and then use your mouse or trackpad pointer to compare the images:

The EKTRA does better with more light, but the result is still slightly noisier than the Lumia's. Then it gets points for greater detail and less over-sharpening on the picture frame, but loses the points again because it gets the wall colour wrong (it's white). A small win for the Lumia 950  here.

Lumia 950: 8 pts, KODAK EKTRA: 7 pts

Test 7: Night time

My standard suburban dead of night scene - as usual, the Lumia makes it look (below) lighter than it was to my eyes! Here's the overall scene, as shot by the Lumia 950:

In case you want to grab the original images to do your own analysis, here they are, from the Lumia 950 and KODAK EKTRA, click the links to download. And to look at the images in more detail, here are fairly central 1:1 crops, just wait to make sure the page has fully loaded and then use your mouse or trackpad pointer to compare the images:

This is interesting - the Lumia 950's OIS lets it take (this is all handheld, of course) a 1/3s exposure, and with incredible control over noise - almost night into day. The EKTRA goes for 1/14s exposure - I'm guessing the OIS isn't in the same class as the Lumia 950's - the software certainly doesn't put enough faith behind it - and both units shoot at around ISO2000. Your own eyes tell the story above, in the comparator - it's light and clean and clear versus dark, noisy and murky!

Lumia 950: 10 pts, KODAK EKTRA: 5 pts

Verdict

For the record, from this somewhat small (seven) pool of test photos, the score was:

1. Lumia 950: 64/70pts
2. KODAK EKTRA: 53/70pts

In short, there's very little evidence of real imaging expertise in the KODAK EKTRA - it's outclassed on the whole by the 16 month old Lumia 950 (and also by most other top camera-toting smartphones from late 2016) - which is a shame, given the hype and pretensions.

I even wonder about the '6 axis OIS' - there's precious little evidence in the results that this is present.

In fairness, you do get a neat retro form factor, free (even more retro) leather pouch, plus a camera interface that rivals Nokia's/Microsoft's, with (again retro) thumbwheel selection of camera modes. But it's not enough until KODAK gets its imaging software in line - maybe this will come with future updates?

In the meantime, the Lumia 950/XL's mantle as perhaps the best overall camera phone remains. Its closest competition as of now is probably from the Google Pixel/XL and iPhone 7 Plus. 

(Thanks to Clove for the KODAK EKTRA loan)

See also my older features:

PureView vs the Pixel: the 808, Lumia 950/1020 vs the Google Pixel

Camera phone zoom test: Lumia 1020/950 vs Apple iPhone 7 Plus

Camera phone head to head: Lumia 950 vs Apple iPhone 7

We're starting to get to the point now where Windows 10 'Redstone 2', a.k.a. 'The Creators Update', is feature-locked, meaning that it's time to assess what's new and different from the 'Anniversary Update' (Redstone). And there's quite a bit - here's AAWP's breakdown. This OS release is due to hit production phones on Windows 10 Mobile in about two months time.

Of course, for many AAWP readers, especially those on the Fast Insiders ring, most of the improvements below have arrived gradually - but I'd been promising a semi-definitive Redstone-to-Redstone-2 changelog for ages and now's the time to deliver.

The information here is curated from a myriad sources over the last six months. Don't take everything here as gospel truth, since we're still a couple of months away, but I think we're nearly there in terms of new features and enhancements. It's surely just a case of more bug fixing from here on in?

While the headline features for Creators Update are to do with Ink and Paint 3D and gaming, over on the Desktop SKU, there's still plenty of note for Windows 10 Mobile, not least that much of the underlying code is shared:

• Faster operation on the same hardware, thanks to kernel optimisations - in my tests (e.g. here) I saw a general boost of 20%, which is significant and noticeable day to day. This is on devices with 2GB or more of RAM - I can't vouch for performance on 1GB devices at this point.
  
• Faster, improved Edge browser:
  • with new architecture to prevent problems from one unresponsive tab or page.
  • should include 'Microsoft Wallet' support (needs page support).
  • includes EPUB ebook purchasing and reading (in the same way that Edge already handled PDF files in the Anniversary Update) - this also works with side-loaded EPUB and PDF files, e.g. on SD card or on OneDrive.
  • can now read aloud your EPUB ebooks, with the current line highlighted as it goes.
  • now displays full-color, updated emoji by default on websites that use emoji.
  • text scaling and zoom re-implemented - you can now zoom into a web page regardless of zoom settings defined by the website, matching other mobile browsers. Pages are now zoomable to at least 500%.
    
• Apps for web sites: Clicking links to websites that support web-to-app linking will now open that page in the respective app (AAWP Universal supports this, in theory - I'll come back to this in a future post).
  
• Many Settings hierarchy changes - sections affected include Wi-fi, Apps (new), 'Bluetooth or other devices', and 'Update & security'.
• Settings pages now contain additional information on the right or bottom (depending on the window size) providing links to support, feedback, and any other related settings (if available).
  
• Camera improvements. Windows 10 Camera for this OS release is faster to start up and has UI tweaks to streamline operation.
  
• Glance screen can now be turned off when charging if you prefer (e.g. at night)
  
• Faster Windows Hello: some of the animation (the wink) is now missed out (though I'd like to see the time consuming graphics cut completely)
  
• Alarms sent by 3rd party alarm apps will now break through Cortana's Quiet Hours.
  
• You can now reset an application back to its original state. So if you have a UWP app in a bad state, just open Settings > System > Storage, and navigate to the app. Under 'advanced settings' you'll now see a 'Reset' option. Tapping it will clear the app's cache, and reset the app as if it had just been installed (without actually having to reinstall it).
  
• You can now specify more recurrence options for Cortana Reminders, e.g. "Every Month" or "Every Year".
  
• There's a new mono audio option in Ease of Access setting, making sure that stereo output can still be heard in situations where only one earbud is being used.
  
• Many Continuum improvements in terms of stability and remembering application status (though we'll have to wait until Redstone 3 for a proper 'multi-window' desktop interface when connected.
  
• (Rolling out worldwide, starting in the USA) You can now use Cortana to control music playback on more of your favorite music apps, with natural language compatibility for iHeartRadio and TuneIn Radio. While you are listening to music, you can use your voice to control playback and volume. With radio stations, you can say "What's Playing?"
  
• Sync your settings using Azure Active Directory (AAD) Identity. Enterprise users can now sync passwords, Wi-Fi profiles, Edge Favorites, Edge Reading List, and app data across desktop and mobile devices on AA-Joined phones using Enterprise State Roaming. You can also now sign in to Cortana using your AAD identity, i.e. with your work or school account instead of your Microsoft Account. Just go to Cortana's Notebook and "About Me" and sign in. You'll get the full Cortana experience with most of the same features.
  
• Improved legibility for UWP apps when your phone is set to 'High contrast' mode in 'Ease of Access'.
  
• New Bluetooth APIs that enable GATT Server, Bluetooth LE Peripheral role and unpaired Bluetooth LE device connectivity - all of these help compatibility with fitness aids, smartwatches and Internet-of-things gadgets.
  
• There's a new 'View 3D' application, mirroring the Paint 3D application included for Windows 10 Desktop - this lets users view/spin 3D graphics embedded in (e.g. Office) documents or on the web in Edge.
  
• For enterprise users only, there's a new option to pause Windows 10 Mobile updates for up to 35 days.

Set against these positives, there's one negative, something that has actually been removed for The Creators Update:

• Due (apparently) to 'decreased usage', Apps Corner is no longer available. And there's no direct replacement in sight - comments and suggestions welcome! I suspect a full 'sign in as other user' function might not now appear until Redstone 3...

The bullet points above are in order of importance, the big two being the overarching performance improvements and the big new version of the Edge browser - more and more is now being asked of this, not least because many niche/boutique apps aren't available for Windows 10 and so any interaction with many banks/shops/services has to be within the browser (in fairness, this is already default behaviour for many on the desktop/laptop, but it's going to become more common on mobile).

It's something of a cliché to say that this is the version of Windows 10 (Mobile) that should have launched in 2015, since that sort of thing is always said in hindsight, but in some ways it's true here. Almost all the 'holes' in Windows 10 Mobile are now filled in, the UWP applications are feature packed and mature, there are precious few bugs left that impact day to day use, and - just as it has become hard to actually buy a Windows 10 Mobile phone - the OS is finally ready for the prime time. Ironically.

Which means that the changelog above will be of initial use only to the seven or so million users of the OS across the world - though hopefully future devices and initiatives from Microsoft and others will bring new life to the platform (Windows 10 Mobile already is 'Windows on ARM', but a fuller implementation with Win32 emulation thrown in should debut within a year).

__________________

Anyone with an existing phone that's officially deemed Windows 10 Mobile compatible by Microsoft can join in the fun. The full list of phones includes Lumia 430, 435, 532, 535, 540, 635 (1GB RAM version), 640, 640 XL, 730/735, 830, 930, 1520, Icon, BLU Win HD w510u, BLU Win HD LTE x150q, and the MCJ Madosma Q501. Plus, of course, all the devices which have shipped with Windows 10 Mobile in the last year, of which the Lumia 550, 650, 950, 950 XL, Acer Jade Primo and HP Elite X3 are the highest profile.

In each case:

1. Upgrade to Windows 10 Mobile (if appropriate) using the Upgrade Advisor.
2. After at least one update cycle you should then be on the Anniversary Update (a.k.a. Redstone). Head into Settings/Update & Security/Windows Insider Programme
3. Join the Insiders programme and choose the 'Fast' level in the pick list.
4. Within a few hours your phone should be seeing the build mentioned above and you'll be running next year's mobile OS today. Fun, fun, fun....!

Never mind niche or boutique applications which are missing from the world of Windows 10, there's one whopper which affects me daily and - if you stop and think about it - probably affects you too. At the very least it could make you safer when driving. Read on for my thoughts on the lack of a decent in-car mode in Windows 10 (Mobile)...

The use case for a car mode is obvious, hopefully. In the car, your smartphone is probably your sat-nav these days, your source of podcasts and music, plus it's obviously your main mode of communication with the world. You'll probably have the phone propped in a holder by your dashboard and youll be used to barking 'Hey Cortana' commands at it, for example asking to send a message to someone, call someone else or navigate to a particular destination. 

And, not withstanding road noise, but possibly helped by whatever Bluetooth or in-car set-up you have in place, Cortana has a fighting chance of being your all-in, hands-free assistant that gets most things done. But not everything, which means that you'll often be tempted to reach over, unlock your phone's screen and start fiddling with the UI to start an application, find a podcast or look for something in Maps, that sort of thing. And if you're driving along while doing this then you're probably breaking the law and are, at the very least, extremely distracted and generally unsafe on the road.

Which is where the idea of a car mode comes in, with the phone presenting a drastically simplified UI and with far less functions, deliberately just presenting the stuff that you need when driving and hiding absolutely everything else. 

Android has such a mode, albeit as a Google app that has to be sought out by the user, it's called 'Android Auto' and it's screenshotted below:

Looks good, doesn't it? And it is - it's SUPERB. Within the three main modes, selectable with large finger-friendly buttons, there's navigation, telephony and messaging, and music/podcasts. And no function in any of these simplified app views requires more than a few taps or swipes - in fact, if you do interact too much with any part of Android Auto, the app deliberately locks you out for 30 seconds, to force you to concentrate on the road ahead. As messages come in, they're read aloud to you, and one tap or voice command is enough to start dictating a voice-to-text reply.

So... where's the Windows 10 equivalent? 

There isn't one. Yet. But the really bizarre thing is that just such a car mode existed, built into the OS in the days of Windows Phone 8, as reported here by Rafe, chatting about the way to 'unlock' this mode and get it working on any phone. This functionality got lost in the big switchover to Windows 10 Mobile, sadly.

All is not totally lost, mind you. Even under Android OS, the app (Android Auto) is something the user has to seek out and install in the Play Store - under Windows 10 Mobile, there's a third party utility called Car Dash, from the WP 8.1 era but still maintained and (largely) working.

Car Dash was originally reviewed three years ago here, showing how long this app has existed(!), but it has received several updates in 2016 that keep it relevant on the likes of the Lumia 950 range and Elite x3/IDOL 4S. Don't expect too much, it's not even in the same ball park in terms of usability and integration as Android Auto - but it exists and it works to a basic level.

Car Dash's default opening screen and (right) the 'Music' section links up to Groove Music's library, albeit with this custom car UI for control.

Car Dash's Contacts section ties in well enough with Windows 10 too, here I've picked out five contacts that I use fairly often and then calling them is just a tap away. It's.... workable. (right) Tapping on a destination launches Windows 10 Maps, though it exists separately to Car Dash and, as a result, you can't navigate and (say) listen to music....

..,since, when you do switch back to Car Dash, you get a toast indicating that navigation has paused and with the option to 'tap to resume'. Hmm.... (right) Windows 10 Mobile's nominal 'driving mode' is more just about preventing trivial notifications than presenting a car-centric UI.

Car Dash is quite configurable, though note that the default (shown here) is for the lockscreen to be enabled. In the car, you'll probably want to set this as 'Disabled'; (right) there are other swipeable panes of tile shortcuts in Car Dash, though these don't work under Windows 10 Mobile at all, try as I might (e.g. here!)

So it's a way forwards at least - I'd dearly love a UWP app version of Car Dash, with better integration with more of today's streaming audio applications, for example. Plus the ability to navigate while listening to audio at the same time. 

It's at this point that nit-pickers will pipe up with 'But Windows 10 Mobile already has a 'driving mode'! It's in Settings/System. The title gives too much hope though - W10M's 'Driving Mode' consists of a couple of toggles to control what notifications break through while driving, plus the setting up of auto-replies to calls and texts. And that's it.

Every time I get in my car, I put my primary phone into my hands-free holder as a matter of course. Much of the time recently it has been an Android phone SIMPLY BECAUSE OF ANDROID AUTO and the knowledge that it can guide me to any destination, play audio to keep me entertained and help me with all communications while being totally hands-free. 

Car Dash on Windows 10 Mobile aims in the right direction, but needs massive degrees of extra development. So I'd like to see Microsoft Auto or similar, a first party UWP app that did much the same as Android Auto, but tying into Windows 10 Maps, Groove Music (and a podcatcher of your choice), and Phone/Skype/Messaging.

Is it just me that misses such a facility? Comments welcome!

PS. I did email the developer of Car Dash, trying to make contact, but haven't heard back as yet - I do hope that development of this application hasn't totally stalled.