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List of biggests fuckups in Microsoft Lumias

I was forced to change my phone to Microsoft Lumia 535. It was my first Windows Phone based device. The phone is generally a good pick (better in many aspects than all my Android-based phones used before). But, since it is (now) designed and produced by Microsoft, it would be impossible for it, to not have some serious fuckups. Here you'll find a list of biggest ones, that I found so far. Most of them are not too closely tight to Lumia 535 and there is a high chances of possibility, that you will find similar or the same in any other Lumia phone.

The really big shits

1. You have completely no control over hanged-up application. You may forget about some kind of application list (so well know and so fucken useful in Android), which you could use to locate damn app and kill it from there. If any of your application hang or start doing some stupid things, you're virtually screwed. You may tap Back or Home and try to restart application from there, but stupid Windows will continue to bring you back that in-memory, yet completely unusable instance of hanged application. With not way to kill it and start fresh new copy. The only way to deal with hanged application is to perform full phone restart!

2. If you purchased a Microsoft Lumia mode with replaceable battery (or low-price one with on-board battery), then you're going to replace it after 3-4 months on your own cost. Or you going to buy a new phone after 1 year at most. It is a well know "mistery", that Microsoft puts really good batteries to their phones only, if their price is high enough. And a complete junk to the other ones. You may be more than sure that after just few months your battery starts running so weakly, that you're going to charge it after every 8-12 hours. Sending phone to service brings nothing, as they'll give it back to you saying, that they have upgraded firmware and everything is good. They're going to play this game with you every time until you replace the battery on your own or until six months battery warranty period is over.

Simply add bill for new, good battery if you're considering to purchase Microsoft Lumia phone with replaceable battery, because it is as certain, that you're going to replace it, as it is, that two plus two gives four. And never, ever purchase low-priced Lumia with fixed battery, because you're going to replace whole phone after a year or start charging it each 8-12 months.

3. If you have enabled Battery Saver then you may forget about "being in touch" with recent changes once your battery gets to 20% or lower. Microsoft politics is that when phone runs in Battery Saver mode then checking for new email or syncing calendar is reduced to... once per 12 hours (!). Yes, you've heard it correctly. My phone got into Battery Saver mode early in night and when I got up next morning I found all my calendar items as they were during previous evening. Using mobile phone synced once per twelve hours is a joke nowadays, but apparently they don't understand this joke at Microsoft.

4. Windows Phone on Lumias is virtually full of stupid things, that happens only on single phone and are completely untraceable with not way to fix them. For example, I have over dozen of mobile devices in my house, including two Lumias (535 and 735). One of these Lumias is unable to connect to my home WiFi network. I've tried to solve problem from both WiFi configuration and Lumia configuration side. No luck. I've sent phone to service, but of course (see above) they did absolutely nothing, except for upgrading phone's firmware. And just like that, because of some stupid bug, in stupid Windows Phone, which creators are too stupid to find and fix, one of my devices is unable to use home WiFi (while it can access all other kinds and brands of WiFis elsewhere) while all other devices use it without problems for years.

5. Did I just say stupid things happening on single device only? Well, the other Lumia (the one, that actually can connect my home WiFi) is unable to use Backup service offered by Microsoft. It was able to use it for first three months and then simply stopped. Every damn month my stupid phone reminds me that it so month or more since I backed it up, I then start the backup process, it goes up to 99% and then, after about 10 minutes, it says, that due to some internal error, it failed this time. And the whole story repeat very next month, every month. You know... I could send that phone to service, but (see above), I think, that one firmware update per half a year is enough for this phone. Especially that it solves nothing.

6. For reasons beyond my imagination, everything that appears on notification bar is a message for Microsoft. So no matter, if you have unread email, SMS message, missed call or some 3rd party app notification, you will always see that stupid envelope icon. I don't know like others, but for me this is so wrong. For my past four years, using Android, I was picking up SMS messages only on my phone and I read my mail always on my computer. So, it was very handy for me to have separate notification icons for each kind of reminder and to be able to see, what kind of message or notification I have actually received. It doesn't work that way on Lumia anymore. I can't count how many times I had to slide down notification area only to see, that this is not a new SMS but an old email message, that I have already read on my computer. Given above mentioned strange troubles and long times with syncing accounts, and you certainly get the whole picture, how this little thing is stupidly wasted on Microsoft phones.

Let's be honest, after all. You're must be a dumb idiot to design interface the way, that both SMS messages, email messages and missed phones are reported with the same notification icon.

7. My Lumia 535 has some weird problems with sound volume from time to time. It happened to me not once and not twice, that I heard absolutely nothing over my headphones even though loudness settings claimed that media volume is set to 10/30. It also happened to me few times that I couldn't heard phone ringer at all even though notification volume was set to 5/10. As with all stupid things mentioned above, there was no help for these problems except to completely restart the phone.

8. Similar problems, as with getting good battery replacement, you'll have with getting good spare charger, because Lumias in general (and Lumia 535 in particular) are extremely sensitive to charging voltage and current. If you use only slightly different, then your phone may charge very, very slowly, may stop charging at all or -- worst case scenario -- may start acting like complete wako. Including not being able to unlock screen or acting like some mysterious alien force would be touching your screen in random places and with random frequency. It may sound hard to believe, but I experienced this myself. I tried to charge my Lumia 535 with some cheap Chinese USB-like crap charger and to my extreme surprise phone started running some random apps, moving home screen there and back and generally have become completely unresponsive. Until I have disconnected that damn charger. Immediately it got back to normal.

9. No non-DHCP network support. If you're network requires your devices to use static IP addressing, then your Lumia will not be able to use that WiFi network at all!

10. Lumia designers completely wasted synchronization between call, phone orientation and turning off the screen. Most smartphones can detect, that you have started your call (phone orientation changes to "by the ear" and call is active) then screen is turned off. When you end your call (phone orientation changes to "back into hand" and call is inactive) then screen is turned on. And in case of emergency (screen remaining black after ending call), you can use Power button to unlock the screen.

Well... not on Lumia. Here after ending your calls out of five your phone gets completely wako and even having it in hand it screen will still remain black. Morons, who designed these phones, added an extra surprise for you -- Power button is completely not responsive during call. So... you end your call and you have your phone in your hand completely dead. Screen remains black, pressing Power button brings no effect. You can only wait until your caller end call, because only then your Lumia starts reacting and its screen becomes responsive again.

And, if someone on the other side forget about ending your call? Then you're completely deeply in ass and the only thing you can do, is to remove battery to force phone reset. And if your phone hasn't got replaceable battery then the only thing you're left with is smash the phone and go to shop to get a better one.

11. If you unplug USB cable during copy process then it will be, of course, interrupted in the middle, right? Well... not on Lumia and not always. If you use i.e. Windows to copy or move files between folders in phone memory or between phone memory and SD card (i.e. when USB cable is used only for controlling process, not for actual file copy) then such process will be continued even after unplugging USB cable.

Phone will become not accessible via MTP process during that and your Windows Explorer will be showing completely empty contents of your device.

Former Google users fuckup

1. Invalidating user account password after removing SIM card works system-wide only for Microsoft accounts and for Google accounts depends on phone manufacturer branding. Thus, it works like a charm on all Nokias and fails completely on HTC Windows 8X. When your phone gets stolen, first thing thief is doing is to throw away your SIM card to avoid phone location by police force. This invalidates password to all accounts and avoid thief to access your account from just stolen device. This works... in theory. On HTC Windows 8X phone this doesn't work at all and when your phone gets stolen, you're double-screwed. Not only you're loosing your phone, but thief has also a full access to your Google account and all connected services. This is the biggest security fuckup among all mobile devices, that I know, for past few years.

2. If you're Google account user and want to keep using it, be prepared, that you will waste a lot of time on importing contacts. You'll be forced to put all contacts to My contacts group, to recreate manually all your contact groups on your phone and to change all custom labels of all fields in all contacts to non-custom one. You will also need to manually re-enter all URLs for all your contacts, as Lumia simply ignores these. Here you'll find much more details and some workarounds.

3. If you're using Google account on your Lumia phone, everything seems to be syncing correctly, except for the lock-screen. By default it should show nearest calendar event, but it refreshes itself at a very strange times and often shows a completely outdated entry, some ghost event or an event you have deleted hours or days ago.

4. Syncing of non-Microsoft accounts is generally as weak as possible. Syncing often takes more than 10 minutes, items gets synced in a random order and sometimes in can take more than half an hour or more util things like mails in mailbox or items in calendar gets synced correctly.

5. Feature for some, big security fuckup for most others. If you have two (or more) devices using the same Google account then you'll be able to see mails coming to your account on both devices. This is obvious. Each mail is sent you your Gmail account, not to a particular device, and each is fetched by both devices. If you do the same with Windows devices and Microsoft account then all your devices using the same account will also share... all SMS messages! Even though this kind of message is always sent to particular device (phone number), Microsoft idiots found out, that it will be so cool to share them among all devices with the same account. One day I left my private mobile at home and was more than shocked to find out, that I can actually read all my private SMSes on my company phone. Both phones were using the same Microsoft account and were simply sharing messages sent to both devices between each other.

6. There is no cancel option on syncing operation. When your account gets synced, its item in accounts list gets grayed and you can't do anything. Syncing Microsoft account is lightning fast, while syncing Google account can take anything from seconds, through 15-30 minutes even up to hours. And you can't cancel that. The only way to break sync process is to force-restart your phone.

7. If you forward a message with an attachment, received by your Lumia from your Google account, then such message will be forwarded without attachment. And you even won't be notified about this fact. It may be understandable, that Lumia is not automatically downloading all attachments and thus is unable to forward message with them. But, there must be some kind of question, whether you want to download all attachments before forwarding particular message! Or at least a warning that you're forwarding message without any attachment (when source message has one).

Medium and small craps

1. There is absolutely no "edit-before-dial" option in dial pad / speed dial. If you make any mistake in manually entered number, you have no option to correct it and must enter entire number again.

2. There are also certain, hopefully smaller, fuckups with using custom ringtones on Lumia phones. Be prepared for a little randez-vous with them and to waste another bit of your precious time.

3. I have never seen GPS icon on my Android phone's notification bar, when I had GPS communication disabled. But, it does happened to me on Lumia a few times. I don't know, if that wasn't part of some strange bug and if phone really was seeking GPS location, but the fact remains -- I've seen geolocation icon many times even though I have this kind of functionality disabled on my phone for many times:

Enabled GPS

(here you have it. GPS is (should be) completely disabled, but your Lumia doesn't give a damn shit about this)

4. If you add new dictionary in phone's language settings, you will not be able to remove it (Remove option disabled in context menu) until you actually download that dictionary. You must download file to remove it. Dicks at Microsoft are getting warmer.

5. Turns out, that the same, as above, goes for applications pre-installed by your phone vendor. If you backup your phone and then restore it from backup, then all such applications, previously removed by you (before making backup) will be installed again after restoring your phone from backup. And you can keep selecting Cancel download for each such application until hell gets frozen, all for nothing. You must actually download all this, once removed, shit to remove it again. And after next backup+restore whole story will happen again.

6. Lumias are unable to match phone number with and without country code. If you dial a new number first, without country code and directly from dial pad (i.e. 123 456 789), and then add it to your contacts, this time with country code (i.e. +48 123 456 789) then you won't see that contact in your dialing history. Your Lumia will continue to claim that both numbers are completely unrelated even though both numbers are in fact exactly the same.

7. If you phone must be rebooted then it must be restarted immediately and nobody gives a damn shit, whether you like this or not or what you're currently doing on your device. You see a message, that phone must be restarted, with just the Restart button. Back button is not working and even if you hit Home (assuming you want to cancel) your phone will be restarted within next 2-3 seconds.

8. If you make a photo or capture a screenshot, while your Lumia is connected via USB to your computer, you won't be able to access this new file until you re-connect the cable again. This isn't actually a Lumia fuckup, as it happens on all devices thanks to Microsoft designed stupidity called MTP protocol.

9. From time to time Lumia gets crazy and starts playing mono audio (one of speakers silenced) even though cable is correctly connected to your earphones and everything is operational.

Unplugging cable from the phone and plugging it back usually solves this problem. Sometimes you may need to restart your player and in very rare occasions -- restart entire phone.

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