How to stop music on your Nokia Lumia 800

As we just said, Nokia Lumia 800 owners really do have an excellent device for listening to music on the go. For a start the device has ample storage and a fine music player that ensures your favourite tracks are always to hand. There there’s Nokia Music, which compiles all the tracks you’ve uploaded onto the device and adds a generous helping of free music mix radio stations. Zune lets you purchase and download tracks directly from and to your phone, too.

But if you’ve been casting your eyes around the smartphone scene recently, you’ll have noticed a fairly new smartphone music concept – cloud-based music. Certain services promise to let you store your music tracks on an online server and access them whenever your like, saving you storage space and ensuring access to your tracks even if you change your phone.

Now you can do the same on your Nokia Lumia 800 (or Nokia Lumia 710, for that matter), offering you an extra 25GB of free storage for your music and the ability to either stream or download tracks at will. Here’s how.

All you need is your Nokia Lumia 800 and a copy of Cloud Music – a new app on the Windows Phone Marketplace that can be had for 99p. This app essentially adds music to the list of things the default SkyDrive service (a cloud-based service you automatically sign up for when you set up your Windows Live ID on your Lumia) can handle.

First up you need to upload some music tracks to your SkyDrive account. Log in and create a new folder titled ‘Music’. Then, create a folder within Music with the artist’s name, then another within this with the album name. Drag and drop the music tracks (either MP3 or AAC) into this folder, ensuring that the track names are always preceded by the right track numbers (01, 02 etc.).

If you want a background artist image to show up in the Cloud Music app (just like in Zune and Nokia Music), add a relevant jpeg file to the artist folder. Likewise, if you want an album image, add the jpeg to the album folder.

Now open up the Cloud Music app and you’ll be asked to sign in to your Windows Live account. Do so and select Yes to allow access to your SkyDrive account. Select Continue to start searching your SkyDrive account for the tracks you’ve uploaded. There you have it – all your tracks pulled from the cloud!

Play any of these tracks now and they will, by default, stream over your network connection. You can also opt to download tracks as standard from the options menu, or you can download albums and tracks to your Lumia 800′s internal storage individually. It’s a great way to have access to a lot of music without eating up valuable internal storage.

Have you tried this cloud-based music method? Do you prefer it to storing the files locally, or do you prefer the immediacy of the default approach? Let us know in the comments section.

Nokia 700 hardware review

One of the great things about the Nokia 700 is its Nokia Belle operating system, and the ease of which it makes using your phone. Nokia Belle will soon be arriving on the Nokia N8, Nokia E7 and more handsets in future, making even more Nokia phones much more of a joy to use.

That includes setting up your social networks. Here we’re looking at how to get Facebook and Twitter working on your Nokia 700.

Setting up Twitter and Facebook

The Nokia 700 features a social widget that ties in both social networks. Hit the menu button on your phone and scroll through the icons until you see the blue social widget.

From here you will first be asked to sign into your Nokia account. If you do not have a Nokia account you can easily register one by providing an email address and password. It’s both quick and easy to set up. The rest is just as simple.

Once you have a Nokia account, you can set up your Twitter and Facebook profiles by entering your email address or username and password of either, or both. As soon as you’ve entered details of both, your accounts will show up in the homescreen widget that alternates between Twitter and Facebook on your homescreen.

Now whenever you need your next social fix, all you need to do is tap on the widget for all those latest Facebook status updates and tweets. Easy.

Check out our Nokia 700: How To Use Twitter and Facebook image gallery:

How to back up, update and restore your Nokia Lumia 800

More than 50,000 apps. That’s the current status of the Windows Phone Marketplace, and you can access each one of those applications through your Nokia Lumia 800. With the sheer range of compelling apps and games on offer, though, managing them all effectively can soon become an issue.

If you’re anything like me, you go through apps voraciously but like to keep your Nokia Lumia 800′s app menu relatively tidy. This means keeping a core of apps you really like or need, and deleting the ones that are no longer of immediate use to you.

The best thing about purchasing or downloading all these apps digitally is that they’re always on file and available to be redownloaded at any time. Rather than waste time and effort trying to remember which apps you’ve downloaded and trawling the Marketplace accordingly, simply follow this method:

Go to the Windows Phone website (the one where you can access the Marketplace on your computer) and select My Phone, logging in with your Windows Live ID if necessary. Now select Account. Below your Personal Information you’ll see your Application Purchase History.

This lists all of the apps you’ve ever downloaded  - whether purchased full versions or trials - along with the date you downloaded them and an image tile to help you identify them. Most importantly, each app has a Reinstall option alongside it, which will push the app to your phone (after you’ve done it the first time it’ll only take two clicks).

So there you go. You need never forget which apps you’ve previously downloaded onto your Nokia Lumia 800 again, and reinstalling previously deleted apps couldn’t be much easier either.

]]> http://www.noknok.tv/2012/01/10/nokia-lumia-800-driving-with-free-nokia-drive-free-satellite-navigation/feed/ 0 http://www.noknok.tv/2011/10/20/nokia-700-10-things-symbian-belle-makes-easier/ http://www.noknok.tv/2011/10/20/nokia-700-10-things-symbian-belle-makes-easier/#comments Thu, 20 Oct 2011 09:30:19 +0000 Mike Browne http://www.noknok.tv/?p=35923 The Nokia 700 is a great mix of hardware and an operating system that pretty much redefines what it means to be a Nokia fan, it’s that much easier to use. Here we look at the top 10 features Symbian Belle packs into the Nokia 700.

The Nokia 700 is a 3.2-inch smartphone with AMOLOED screen that uses ClearBlack display to give the best possible screen in any conditions. It also happens to be the slimmest smartphone in the world for this class of device but still packs a punch thanks to the Symbian Belle OS and 1GHz processor. Check out 10 features we’ve been loving of the new look and feel Symbian Belle.

1: Navigation design
The first thing you’ll notice when you start using Symbian Belle on your Nokia 700 is how the look and feel of the navigation has changed. The look fits in with the sharper context of Belle, with less emphasis on boxes and a more fluid feel, while the simple but intuitive icons mean you never need to wonder what action to make next.

2: Roll down connections screen  
Gone are the days of having to tap the top of the screen to see which connections are up and active. Now you can simply drag the top of the screen down and see status icons on the page. OK, once everything is up and running you may use it infrequently but it’s a neat little new addition we like.

3: Add Homescreens
Symbian^3 was limited to just three homescreens but with Symbian Belle you can have up to six home screens, each set up to your own look and feel. Adding a homescreen is simply a case of selecting the option from the main bar, along with adding widgets and shortcuts.

4: Deleting Homescreens
Think you’ve got too many homescreens? Then just in the same way you add them, you can easily get rid of one. If you’re a pretty old-school user you can delete up to five screens and simply have one homepage.

5: Changing Homescreen layouts
OK, so you’ve decided on the right number of homescreens you want and you’ll filled each one with the right shortcuts and icons. Symbian Belle pretty much does away with the rigid layout of Symbian Anna, so you can easily switch the position of shortcuts simply by holding it down and then moving it around the screen.

6: Menu layout
If you don’t want to slap all your apps on homescreens, or simply have too many to fit then you’ll find the Menu layout is still a tap away. However, gone are the multiple folders and pages and you’ll find everything in one giant list. Don’t worry, though as you can arrange them to suit your needs. Simply tap and hold down the icon and you can choose to add to a Homescreen, move to a folder or simple arrange elsewhere on the page. This works incredibly smoothly and allows you to make the Nokia 700 personalised to you.

7: Email widget
Email on the go is pretty important to most people these days, so Symbian Belle makes more of a feature of it. Gone is the tiny widget, replaced by a nice big panel that more than fills half a Homescreen so you can see more than just the headline. What’s more, the new update make setting up email clients so much easier, taking the fuss out of installation.

8: Music on the move
The music player on Symbian^3 smartphones has always been a pretty big feature but with Symbian Belle you’ll find that it gets the same treatment as email by having a bigger and easier to use front page presence.  

9: Wi-Fi
Switching off Wi-Fi to save on battery life when you’re out and about is a nice little tip. Symbian Belle makes it easier on the Nokia 700 by dropping a Wi-Fi switch as a widget onto one of the homescreens. Nice and easy to spot and to remind you to keep tabs on connections.

10: NFC on the Nokia 700
NFC is becoming an increasingly popular feature and will appear on all future Nokia Symbian handsets. It can be set up as a widget in exactly the same way as Wi-Fi, so you can switch it on and off as easily as flicking a switch.

Added bonus (tip 11)
NFC tutorials
Wondering what the fuss is with NFC (Near Field Technology)? Then look no further than this handy introduction to the technology pre-loaded and ready to view on your Nokia 700. There are three basic ways you can use NFC on your Nokia 700 – touch to pair, touch to share and touch to play and each one is described here.

Right, that’s what we think Symbian Belle brings to the Nokia 700 experience and we have to admit that if you’d kind of lost faith in Symbian then you’re in for a shock here as suddenly it feels and works like a completely new operating system.

How have you been getting on with Symbian Belle? Let us know your thoughts in the Comments below.

Nokia Windows Phone: thoughts on design

Microsoft’s always intended Windows Phone 7 purely as a smartphone operating system, and its big move into the rapidly expanding tablet market is set to come next year with the arrival of Windows 8.

Nokia is currently working closely with Microsoft on producing its first line of Windows Phone handsets, but with Microsoft having revealed some fresh info on Windows 8, let’s take a quick look at how the prospects for a Windows 8-powered Nokia tablet are developing.

As the image above shows, the look and feel of Windows 8 is very similar to the tiled layout and interface introduced by Windows Phone 7, which certainly meets with our approval considering the current Windows 7 generation of tablets are very much just PC desktops on a tablet form factor.

Delving a little further under the surface, Microsoft Windows boss Steven Sinofsky says Windows 8 will feature significantly reduced boot times too – again lending itself to a more mobile-like experience.

“We designed Windows 8 so that you shouldn’t have to boot all that often … but when you do boot we want it to be as fast as possible. This is a very deep topic and we have a lot of folks focused on it,” Sinofsky wrote on the Building Windows 8 blog.

Windows director of program management Gabe Aul revealed that by changing how Windows 8 manages the shutdown process to effectively hibernate large parts of the system, Microsoft has been able to improve bootup times by between 30 to 70 per cent.

What are your early impressions of Windows 8 – do you think it will power Nokia to tablet supremacy when it launches next year? Give us your impressions in the Comments below.

There are lots of ways to make Nokia smartphones last for longer – from dimming the screen to turning off Bluetooth – but you usually have to change all the settings manually. Things have changed a lot with the Nokia E7 and Symbian ^3, which includes its own Power Saving Mode. Simply click in the top right corner of the home screen, then press the battery icon, and click Power Saving Mode.

Check out our Nokia E7 Ultimate Guide

This automatically dims the screen on your Nokia E7, along with changing the network coverage from 3G to GSM. Using a 3G connection takes up lots of power, and unless you’re browsing the internet it’s not actually required. This should make a huge difference to the battery life of your Nokia E7. It’s also worth checking that both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are turned off.

You can do this using the Connectivity screen – again click the top right corner of the screen, but this time select the two arrows rather than the battery. If there’s something else you want to know about the Nokia E7, then head over to our Nokia E7 Ultimate Guide.

We’ll be bringing you comprehensive tutorials, offering all you need to know. Feel free to ask any questions, and we’ll try to let you know the answers.

Confused? Check out our Nokia E7: How to improve battery life photo gallery below:

Nokia has equipped the Nokia C5-03 with a decent helping of photographic smarts, and that extends to the editing features on board after you’ve taken your snaps.

Check out our Nokia C5-03 Camera Review

To take a run-through those features, you’ll first need a photo to work on. Press the Menu button, then tap Gallery, then Images & video. Tap on the photo you want to play around with, and it’ll load in full-screen mode. A further tap on the image will load some on-screen functions – tap Options, then Edit from the menu that appears.

The easiest way to bring up the full menu of editing features on screen is simply to tap the image again, but you can achieve the same result by tapping Options, then Add effect. There are a generous 15 different settings to adjust, so let’s take a quick run-through of what’s on offer.

The top row of three icons cover some photo-editing basics – Brightness, Contrast and Sharpness – and making changes is as simple as adjusting the slider that pops up on screen when you tap the icon. Usefully, the changes are previewed on your image in the background, so if you’re not happy, simply tap Cancel and you’ll revert to the image as it was. If you’re happy, however, tap OK.

The second row lets you resize, crop and rotate your image. The crop feature gives you the option to automatically trim your image to use as your Nokia C5-03′s wallpaper, or you can simply select Manual to drag the crop marks manually and cut the image to your exact requirements.

The third row of icons is devoted to having a bit of fun by adding speech bubbles, clip art images and text to your picture – to use these features, simply select the effect or type in the text you want to add, then tap where you want it to appear on screen.

Next up are more global visual effects – a one-touch posterise tool, the ability to add a choice of 30 frames and a red-eye reduction tool. The final tow of three tools enables you to convert your image instantly into black and white, sepia or negative form.

At any point, tapping the Options menu and selecting Undo will remove the most recent effect you’ve applied. You can save at any time, meanwhile, by going into the same Options menu and selecting Save – you’ll be given the choice of saving your image with a new name, or overwriting the original.

If you tap Back at any point while editing you’ll automatically be asked whether you want to save or not; select Yes and you’ll go through the process outlined above, while No will see you exit without further ado.

Check out our Nokia C5-03 photo-editing gallery:

The main culprit for using up your battery unnecessarily is leaving applications running in the background when you don’t need them. Did you know you can instantly see all the programs you’ve got running at any one time simply by pressing and holding the Menu button? It really is that simple.

Check out our Nokia N8 Ultimate User Guide

Another common cause of battery drain is leaving Bluetooth or Wi-Fi switched on all the time – again, it’s an easy situation to fix, and will help your Nokia N8 last longer between charges.

Nokia has set out these simple steps in a video tutorial, which you can check out below.

Check out the how to extend your Nokia N8′s battery life video:

Ovi Calendar

Nokia’s Ovi Suite impresses us more each time we use it, proving capable of handing everything you’ll need to get the very best out of your Nokia. Even if you don’t currently have a Nokia mobile phone, Ovi Suite has loads of offer users, with Ovi Calendar being a case in point.

You’ll need an Ovi account to use Ovi Calendar, but it’s easy and free to sign up. Once you’ve logged into your Ovi Account, using Ovi Calendars couldn’t be easier. If you do find it a bit confusing, however, then check back here throughout this week, as we’ll be bringing you a comprehensive tutorial on how to get the best out of Ovi Calendar.

As Ovi Calendar itself, there are plenty of reasons that you should use it as your main organiser. Aside from the ease of use, it offers a simple interface that avoids clutter, making it easier to see all of your appointments. There are a number of different views available, and other features include notes and detailed to-do lists.

What is Ovi Suite?

The main reason for using Ovi Calendar is the fact that it natively syncs with your Nokia, however. If you already have calendar entries on your phone, they’ll automatically be synced and saved when you use Ovi Calendar, and information entered into Ovi Calendar will also be uploaded to your phone when you sync it.

Not only does this keep all of your details as safe as possible, with multiple copies lessening the chance of losing valuable information, it also means you’ll always get prior warnings of upcoming meetings, so you need never be late again.