The Lost Digit

Feature wise, 8.1 has been a pleasure and joy to use. It looks great and feels great as you can see below. That is the end of the good.

Battery wise, there have been times where it drains randomly and slightly heats up on top and there are other times where it lasts decently at best. Last night, from 1:30 AM to 7:30 AM it drained from 100% to 91% while on wifi which is unacceptable for the so called GSM Arena battery king. The standby time has been cut significantly with this update and I really hope that with the official Nokia Firmware, things return to the way they were.

On top of random battery drains throughout the day where it would heat up and drain around 5% every time, performance has also taken a hit. The majority of apps run slightly slower after the update and the new Music and Videos apps are horrible too. I have faith that Microsoft will update these apps as they are standalone now but overall system performance needs to be fixed too. I am not sure if it is an optimization issue that Nokia can fix on their hardware or if it is a system wide issue that Microsoft needs to address, but while using the phone for extended periods of time, weird things begin to happen…

• The start screen gets stuck in a loading or resuming state
• The notification bar gets stuck and freezes the phone
• The phone heats above the camera on the back while in my pocket
• The UI lags sometimes which is unacceptable as a lag free experience is the reason I switched to Windows
• The Music, Videos and Games apps are slow and always loading something
• The volume would not get lower even though it showed it was getting lower
• The power button works when it feels like it, even when the device is already on and unlocked sometimes it doesn’t work
• Some apps such as viber barely work in the background
• Random reboots (very rare but they happen)

All in all, these are only a start to all of the issues there are in the current build of 8.1 on the Lumia 1520. I must say though, I am still enjoying it and I am still getting through a full day without charging it. I would however like to go back to reaching almost 2 days without charging it.