Windows Phone and the story of its settings...
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While Windows Phone really is an easy to use mobile phone operating system, there is one thing bugging users since the beginning: The settings. They are sorted by (what Microsoft thinks) people use most, but everyone is different and therefore there cannot be “one solution”. The settings are clearly messed up and even I – a power user who can get the Lumia 1520’s battery empty within a day without playing video games – sometimes find myself searching ten or even more seconds for the needed settings.
It has been criticized since the beginning of Windows Phone and to date it has not been changed. With Windows Phone 8.1 the user can add four or five quick settings to the action center, which is nice, but still not what is required.
Recently it has been leaked that Nokia is planning to add the also long awaited screen brightness slider with Lumia Cyan. However, you will not find these in the screen brightness settings, but under “Display”, which is the Nokia -exclusive settings page to tweak things such as the color profile or the sunlight readability. Also, it is not going to be a slider which changes the actual brightness smoothly, but it is more like changing the variables of the three options “low”, “medium” and “high”. This does not really make things easier, does it? The same with other Nokia-exclusive settings currently available; besides the display settings there is also the device info and the calling and SMS settings which both have two pages.
With Nokia’s mobile team now being part of Microsoft we can only hope this is going to change! Everything needs to be in one place, nobody wants to have three sections for the screen of which two do something very similar. For power users this already is annoying, but users with their first smartphone or who are not technologically adept will surely find all this confusing. Microsoft really needs to improve stuff here!
The solution: The settings need to become categorized and/or sortable by the users themselves.
What do our readers think about all this – is the criticism justified or not? You know where we would like you to let us know!
