Nokia Lumia 900 hands-on: First encounter

Nokia's new Windows Phone flagship was unveiled at CES and we got to spend some quality time with it. The Nokia Lumia 900 builds on the 800's innovative design and offers improved specs (like the 4.3" ClearBlack AMOLED display) along with some new features.

Chris Weber, president of Nokia Americas, says "The Nokia Lumia 900 is designed specifically with the US in mind and the announcement of this collaboration with AT&T, in addition to other recent announcements, signifies a new dawn for Nokia in the US."

Nokia's presence in the US has been waning, but they are ready to make a strong comeback with the Lumia 900. We'll most likely be seeing it worldwide at some point, but any such plans aren't public knowledge yet.

Anyway, the first thing you'll notice about the new phone is the bigger screen. It has grown in size to 4.3", quite a jump from the 3.7" screen of the Lumia 800. The Lumia 900's body is bigger too, but the bezels have shrunk to partially make up for the increased screen size, so the actual difference in size isn't as big as you would expect.

The Nokia Lumia 900 supports LTE connectivity for AT&T's growing 4G network, which allows for blazing fast data of up to 50Mbps downlink and 25Mbps uplink. HSPA+ support is available too with download speeds of 21Mbps and 5.76Mbps for uploads in areas without LTE coverage.

The camera has familiar specs - 8MP stills, wide-angle lens (28mm), F2.2 aperture and 720p videos. Unlike the 800, the Lumia 900 has a video call camera too, a 1MP unit no less.

An agreement with Electronic Arts brings 20 hot games to the Windows Phone Marketplace and it's Nokia's Lumia range that will get them first. Of course, with the 900 you'll be getting those free Nokia Drive voice-guided navigation and Nokia Maps applications too

Wiping battery stats doesn't improve battery life, says Google engineer

As posted on Android Central, a Google engineer has explained exactly what the batterystats.bin file contains:

"This file is used to maintain, across reboots, low-level data about the kinds of operations the device and your apps are doing between battery changes. That is, it is solely used to compute the blame for battery usage shown in the "Battery Use" UI in settings.

That is, it has deeply significant things like "app X held a wake lock for 2 minutes" and "the screen was on at 60% brightness for 10 minutes."

It has no impact on the current battery level shown to you.

It has no impact on your battery life.

Deleting it is not going to do anything to make your more device more fantastic and wonderful... well, unless you have some deep hatred for seeing anything shown in the battery usage UI. And anyway, it is reset every time you unplug from power with a relatively full charge (thus why the battery usage UI data resets at that point), so this would be a much easier way to make it go away.

[GUIDE] Fix an unflashable or soft bricked GSII

Hello everyone!

This is a guide dedicated to noobs, so if you're not one, I would advise to stop reading now! (although feedback would be great! )

Yes, there have been quite a few threads about fixing a soft brick. But what I'm writting now is another solution to a different kind of problem : unflashable GSII (which also works with a soft brick of course ), which is a soft brick and a corrupted NAND rw (read/write) function.

Just in case you don't know, a soft brick occurs when you flash a ROM or Kernel, and it doesn't go your way, thus bricking the "soft part", aka Software, of your phone. Therefore, it is easy to recover from.

Now, regarding NAND rw (NAND's read and write functions being the corruption, it means that it is an issue deeper than a soft brick. It usually is obvious when you can't flash a ROM, but you can somehow flash a Kernel. It may either mean that the kernel you have is damaged, or that the NAND's read and write instructions were corrupted.

Let's start with the basic files, downloads and requirements


1) You have to know the basics of ODIN and flashing (duh )

2) Just to be safe, please uninstall Samsung KIES. It usually interferes when flashing with ODIN. You must have the USB drivers from your phone, so don't uninstall them. Only uninstall the program KIES.

3) Download ODIN, the tool that we'll use to flash all the things into our beloved Galaxy S II

4) Download the necessary files : the Kernel, the Recovery Package and the Bootloader (it's the old one, which you can easily use a USB JIG to reset the counter and remove the yellow triangle when having a custom kernel or OS)

5) You must have WinRAR to unRAR the Recovery Package and to unzip ODIN.

And that is it! Let's get down to business

If your GSII has the folowing symptoms :
Bootloop
Stuck on GSII logo, but already removed the battery to try to fix it
Enters Download mode and Recovery mode
It means that you are soft bricked and is easy to solve.

But if your symptoms are the mentioned above, PLUS the symptoms below
Enters Download mode but does NOT enter recovery mode (usually means a NAND rw corruption)
Doesn't flash
Bad flash in odin (FAIL after flashing, or the flashing suddenly stops)
Then it means that you have a bigger issue, such as the aforementioned NAND rw corruption.

It's time to open up ODIN and start reviving your phone!

First of all, let's just have a quick glance of how ODIN looks like, and where we should put the files :

As the picture clearly shows, the green rectangle is where you can tick. Those 2 which are ticked must remain that way. When recovering from a soft brick, it is recommended, not mandatory, to have Re-partition ticked with a .PIT file. So you must be extra careful when you are using a .PIT and Re-Partition.

And obviously, the red box is the one where you can't and don't want to mess with

But where are the files going, you say?

.PIT -> PIT
CODE -> PDA
MODEM -> PHONE
CSC -> CSC

There is only 1 way to recover a soft bricked phone. How to recover from a NAND corruption? We'll get on that later on

Recovering a soft bricked phone


1) Grab the Recovery Package, and you'll see a bunch of .tar files. Take a look at the names. You'll see CODE, MODEM, CSC and .PIT. Put each one in its place, and tick re-partition.

2) Turn off your phone. Enter Download mode by presing Vol. Down + Home + Power button.

3) Plug in your phone. It will show you, in a yellow box in ODIN, ID:COMx (x being the number displayed, sometimes displays 7, sometimes displays 9)

4) Once ready and done all your prayers, press Start. Wait patiently. It usually takes 5 minutes to flash.

Have you done everything correctly until now? Then...

Congratulations on recovering your phone!


You deserve some cake afterwards, and some rest

Now, if your problem is the NAND rw coruption, and wasn't fixed by the above fix, then follow these steps :

5) Download the Kernel. Flash it in PDA. Without ticking Re-Partitioning

6) Successful? Nice, hope is still present.

7) Flash the recovery package, following steps 1-4

This should fix your issue. If it does not, then :

WARNING : FLASHING A BOOTLOADER IS DANGEROUS. FLASH WITH EXTREME CAUTION.

8) Download the Bootloader. Flash it as PDA or Bootloader in ODIN. Without ticking Re-Partitioning

9) Flash the Kernel, as in step 5

10) Flash the recovery package, like in steps 1-4

And that will fix any of your issues

I hope that this guide was helpful, and if it was, hit the thanks button!

Credits mainly go to Intratech for having such a wonderful gallery of ROMs and files to choose from

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Disclaimer

All this information is to be taken as educational information, thus I am not liable for any damage that may occur to your device.