Know Which Reset Is Which And When To Do It

In the modern day world of Smartphones, one common piece of advice is, “Have you done a battery pull?” It’s sort of the same as asking, “Have you tried turning it off and back on again?” Unfortunately, in this same world, more and more manufacturers are tending to build in these batteries so “pulling” them isn’t quite as easy as it once was. That said, getting around a battery pull isn’t all that bad on your Windows Phone device, but when you should do that is probably the more important question.

Let’s start with the three types of resets you can do with your device. The first is the simple power off and power on. This will take care of most common problems like lagging, closing the music player and even smaller issues like that. The second is a soft reset. This will clear bigger issues like a full cache, Live Tile lockups and even sync issues. The final reset is a hard reset, or factory reset. This should only be done when you are at a last resort. This clears the entire content of the device back to the original shape it was in the box when you purchased it. This clears almost any software based issue on the device. Of course, you also lose all of your Apps and App data, though the former is reinstalled automatically if you have your backup software set up in the phone settings.

Taking a quick look at the three options above, it is usually pretty easy to figure out which one to use and when to use it. If your phone is a bit laggy, simply power it off and back on. If you notice that your signal is wonky, power it off and back on. Basically, if the device is responding to touch and the power button, turning it off and back on is the best course of action. If this doesn’t solve the problem, head on to step two as a soft reset won’t do any permanent damage to the device. I recommend power cycling your Windows Phone device about once a week for general health. When compared with my daily recommendation for Android, you can see why I prefer Windows Phone.

Step two, of course, is the “soft reset” method of resetting the device. A soft reset keeps all the hard memory of the device (the ROM or internal storage) but clears the entire soft memory (RAM) for a clean boot. A power cycle should do the same thing, but sometimes the internal battery will keep a few things hanging out that it shouldn’t. This soft reset will keep things neat and clean. This is something you only need to do when the phone starts behaving poorly. It could be random rebooting, earphone jack not outputting sound correctly or even sync issues with your PC.

A soft reset is done by holding both the volume down and power buttons for about 10 seconds. While holding the volume down button, also press the power button. You will see the normal power down screen, but do not drag it down to turn it off. Just continue to hold the volume down and power buttons until the screen goes blank and the phone vibrates. Once the phone has vibrated, you can release the buttons. Your phone has now been soft reset.

The final reset is just that, a last resort. A hard reset to the device will restore the device to a like new condition. It is virtually the same as running that CD or Program to restore you computer back to factory settings. This should only be done when there is a major issue with your device – or you just want to get rid of all the Apps, Games and Emails that your phone has stored on it. Although you SD card contents (if your phone has an SD card in it) are saved, internal memory only phones will also lose their videos, photos and anything else in it. Before you execute a hard reset, make sure to have the entire device backed up, either via PC cable or via SkyDrive – or are we calling it OneDrive yet?

It is a three part selection process to initiate the hard reset with a Windows Phone. First, enter the settings menu. Then click “about phone” and scroll to the bottom of that screen. There you will find the “reset your phone” button. Clicking this will bring up the warning screen. This screen will tell you everything that you are about to erase from your device. Once this is done, there is no way to retrieve all your data. Apps can be restored, most settings will come back when you log in with your Windows Live ID at startup, but many things never come back. This should only be done as a last resort.

Get A FREE Windows Phone With Xbox Music Pass

If you are in to free stuff, the Microsoft store has the hookup for you right now. If you jump online to www.microsoftstore.com or visit a local Microsoft Store location, you can snag a free Windows Phone with the purchase of a $99 yearly Xbox Music Pass. That is correct, it is a free, no contract Lumia 520 (AT&T) or Lumia 521 (T-Mobile) with the purchase of a year long Xbox Music Pass.

The Xbox Music Pass will allow your Windows PC and Windows Phone to access 30 million songs, commercial free, for an entire year. With Apps from the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store, your Xbox Music crosses over to almost any other device on the planet as well.

With a few simple clicks, you can create a playlist that instantly syncs to any of your connected devices. A few more clicks and those playlists are pulled from the cloud and downloaded for offline listening. You also gain unlimited skipping through the standard and customized playlists with the pass.

When you snag a new Lumia 520 or 521 from the Microsoft Store and pair it with a plan from www.4gfastdata.com, you can significantly cut your monthly cell bill by hundreds of dollars every month. If you grab the Nokia Lumia 520, you can get a free Red Pocket Mobile SIM that can hook you up with a $29.99 unlimited talk and text plan. If you grab the Nokia Lumia 521, a Spot Mobile unlimited plan will cost you under $40 a month. That plan will give you unlimited talk, text and data for that low cost.

Either way you look at it, this great deal is yours for the taking. Visit www.microsoftstore.com or your local Microsoft Store to grab this amazing deal.

App Review: Tube Download

With all the fanfare that Microsoft’s amazing YouTube App received last year, many newbies to the scene haven’t been given proper notice. While I doubt that anything out there will match the power and look of the official Microsoft App, there are a few that function quite well.

Tube Download is one of those perfectly functional Apps, with a few twists thrown in for fun. First off, there’s not much in the way of frills for this media streamer. The screen opens to a search bar with a few videos listed. A swipe to the right takes you to your videos and another takes you to playlists. One last swipe takes you over to the downloads list, where you can see the videos you have downloaded.

Simple and clean, and did I mention that it is a data mongers dream? When you tap on the videos in the search bar, you get a screen that gives you the option to download, play or share the video. One click of the Play Video button and we are off and running.

If the video was encoded with playback options, you can select the stream level at this point. Fortunately, our test video was, and this is where those with limited high speed data will appreciate this App – you can select the bandwidth of the playback stream before it starts playing. This means over Wi-Fi at Starbucks you can watch the HD video and when you are on that precious cellular plan, you can choose to watch a lower quality stream.

Overall, the playback quality is great, navigation is easy and the App does exactly what it says. You can jump online and save content with a few simple clicks, then play it back later for friends, even when you don’t have data.

Tube Download is available in the Store for $2.99 and for those with one of those limited data plans can really rack up the savings for you. Don’t let the simple layout and the ease of use take away from the power that Tube Download brings.

App Review: 4Blend HDR Camera

Many smartphones are boasting their HDR or High Dynamic Range capabilities. What isn’t always explained, is that this has much more to do with software than hardware. Of course, having a great camera, like the Lumia PureView cameras or the amazing shooter on the HTC 8x is a great start, but you won’t have those amazing HDR images without some software to enhance things for you.

The first thing about shooting HDR images is understanding what they are and how they are made. Dynamic Range is the unit of measurement that many people use to define the amount of tones between black and white in an image. The larger the range, the more detail you will see in the image. The lower the range, the more detail will be lost. HDR will take multiple images ranging from under exposed to overexposed and stitch them together in to one High Dynamic Range image. This HDR image will combine the detail of the images that are captured into one perfect image.

HDR filters are applied to each level of the image, or each individual image in order to capture the detail. Different filters will have a different effect on each image. Fortunately, in this case, 4Blend HDR does a great job of applying these as needed.

The interface itself reminds users of Apps like Nokia Camera or even Camera360. The shutter button is on the right of the screen. The individual controls are located at the top of the screen. To the left is a selection filters that can be applied to the image before you shoot.

The top controls simply open the popular “ring style” controls that are easy to move and quick to set up. The controls set up in threes on the stock settings. This will control the under exposed, auto exposed and the over exposed images. The menu includes settings for the exposure, exposure time, ISO, focus, gamma and flash. It also has a button to engage the voice command.

Finally, in the settings menu for 4Blend HDR, there are controls for saving all shots, capturing an image after manual focus and showing the shooting grid. You also have some controls to help the voice command shooting as well. Overall, it’s a perfect little package for shooting HDR images on any Windows Phone.
For anyone with a PureView camera or a higher quality shooter on a Windows Phone device, you should take a peak at 4Blend HDR. You probably won’t replace your everyday camera with it, but for those sunset shots, or when you need a bit of an effect on a great portrait, it can certainly rise to the occasion.

Domino’s Delivers A Good App

One of the things about living in a semi-small town is that your food takeout choices are somewhat limited. In Monroe, there happens to be 3 pizza places that deliver and Domino’s just offers a better price that then other two. Until recently, all our orders were placed online, which involved tying up the computer long enough to get through all the crazy menus, ordering process and payment screens. It was easier than calling, but not as easy as the Apps for Android and iPhone made it.

Fast forward to 2014 and the new Domino’s App in the Windows Phone Store. The small size made it a quick 2 second download over Wi-Fi. Within 5 more seconds, I had entered my email address and password for my existing Domino’s website account. With just those two little steps, my account was current and I was ready to order.

I swiped over to the coupon section, found the 2 medium pizzas for $5.99 each deal and selected it. It then let me touch the first item, create my first pizza and moved me along to the second. The order screens were quick and easy to use and the touch navigation was remarkably good. Within a few minutes, the order was placed and the order tracker screen popped up.

A short time later, the pizza arrived and dinner was served. I do recommend checking all the addresses that are imported though, as it did miss our unit number when the order was placed. Just make sure that all your information is up to date and current before placing an order.

The App is definitely worth the download if you are a fan of Domino’s Pizza. It makes ordering quick, easy and honestly, a bit more fun. Having the order tracker pinned to your home screen is nice for getting that update on timing as well. If you are ordering for dinner, you can have the table set right when the order arrives if you are watching. That said, the small size and limited data usage makes this a great App for anyone that orders Domino’s Pizza. Plus if you let your favorite pizza shop know that you like Domino’s App, maybe they will jump on the Windows Phone bandwagon as well.

Getting To Know Nokia Cam Beta

If there is something that Nokia has been killing the competition on in the last year, it’s the quality of their camera hardware and the software that makes it shoot. I want to give you a quick walk through of the Nokia Cam software on my Lumia 925, and show you just how powerful this camera can be.

We will start out looking at the home screen of the camera. To the top, you have buttons for gallery view and review the last image taken. Then you have your settings bar that has controls for the flash, white balance, focus, ISO, shutter speed and exposure. To the right hand side of the screen, you will see the menu button and controls to switch to video mode, photo mode or smart sequence.

A drag of the camera button to the left reveals the setting menu that will give you about as much control over your camera as you would find on most DSLR cameras. The simple sliders slide along the arcs and can be set to any values you need to achieve your optimal exposure. If you want to go fully manual, you can do that by moving each slider into a preset position and not leaving any in the auto setting.

Once you set your sliders, you simply swipe back to the right to get out of the camera settings.

The camera menu that is found by pressing the three dot in the corner of the screen will reveal a lenses menu, access to the front facing camera, a shutter timer, a bracketing setting, the camera settings menu and a tutorial of how everything works.

Using features like the timer setting will allow you to take photos of yourself with the front camera and not have to worry about pressing the shutter button while you do it. Simply set the timer to 2 seconds, press the ok button, and snap your photo. It will give you plenty of time to get your finger away from the camera button before it snaps the image.

Going a bit deeper into the settings, bracketing is very useful for taking images when you are having trouble with exposure settings. It will take 3 images with steps in between them. This will give you hopefully an underexposed image, an over exposed image and one in the middle that is perfect. If not, perhaps the lighter or darker image will be right and the others can be discarded.

The camera settings menu will reveal the options for setting up images, videos and even smart sequence. You can adjust the focus assist light, framing grids and even the aspect ratio of the images with this simple drop down menu setup.

Finally, if you are one that just doesn’t want to play with you camera at all, you might just want to enter auto mode. This is done by selecting the arrow in the camera settings bar at the top of the screen. By selecting this arrow, all the camera settings are returned to auto and the camera is ready to shoot just about anything. Note to self though, this does not re-engage the flash setting, so make sure you turn that on if you want it back on.

In the next camera post, I’ll take a more in-depth look at how you can take better images with the tricks I have learned with my Nokia Lumia 810 and Nokia Lumia 925.

Game Review: Asphalt 8: Airborne

If there is something better than driving games, I’m not entirely sure what it is. The Asphalt series from Gameloft is one of the longest lasting mobile racing series around and the 8th installment doesn’t disappoint. Of course, giving away a game isn’t a way to make money, so if you jump on this download, be prepared for some IAP to get all the way through it.

The game starts out simple enough with a menu that makes most video games themselves seem boring. Multiplayer, Facebook play, exclusive cars and more greet you on the opening menu. Once you figure out how to scroll down the right side of the screen to start, you can get rolling pretty quickly.

Game play itself is tremendously fun and well worth the 1.5GB install size. Unfortunately, you need almost double this to download and install it. Rumors pin the needed storage at 3.2GB to get the install package down and install it before it deletes the temporary files and clears the excess space. Loosely translated – don’t do it on a device with less than 16GB of storage.

Overall, Asphalt 8: Airborne is a thrill to play and should be snagged even if you don’t have a device worthy of using it right now. The $.99 savings over the regular price is worth the purchase right now, if only to future proof your gaming on you next device.

Download it here: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/asphalt-8-airborne/3a9e6a13-433b-495d-879e-d4704fb40703