First off, there is no way to back up your device and restore all your apps, saved games, and configurations on a new device. There is hints that Microsoft might be working on implementing this in a future release. But as of today, there is nothing. As such, before you head down this path, you should head over to Windows Phone Marketplace on your PC and see that it has an accurate list of the applications you’ve installed. This will serve as a handy way to recall what apps you want to reinstall on your new phone.

The next thing you’re going to run into is paid apps. What happens to all those apps you paid good money for on your old phone? You’ll quickly notice that the Marketplace on the phone does not have any indication that you’ve already purchased the app. There’s no indication that it’s free for you to re-download onto this new device. Rest assured, it is. Once you find the app, simply select “Buy” at this point, the marketplace figures out that you’ve already paid for it, and allows you to download it to the new phone for free. Not very intuitive if you ask me.

But hold on… all paid apps are not equal. Things are a little different if you picked up an application during a promotion where the developer was offering it for free. For example, I picked up Cocktail Flow during MIX 2011 when the developer had a free – during the MIX conference – promotion. It’s an awesome app, and I’ve used it many many times. Unfortunately, it’s not considered a paid app on my account. So when you tap the “Buy” button on your phone for these apps, you will actually be purchasing the app. It’s not a big deal for me, as Cocktail Flow is well worth the money. However, it’s very misleading for the consumer. If I acquired an app during a free period and at some point later it becomes paid, I should still be allowed to re-download it on another phone without having to pay for it.

Other than this gotcha with the free promotion apps, you’re good to tap the “Buy” button while re-downloading your apps on your new Windows Phone.

But why put down your phone and dust off your PC just to provide your suggestions about Windows Phone? You can do this right from your phone with an app called Suggestion Box. Suggestion Box allows you to view the "hot ideas", "newest", and "top ideas". You can also see any suggestions you have created and browse the entire list of suggestions by category. I had checked out the web site when it originally launched, but found it slow and awkward to navigate. The mobile app is fast and shows just what I’m interested in without any issues.

Currently, the top 2 suggestions are for adding support for Arabic and Persian. After that, you have a couple of the ones I’m backing – Custom sounds for SMS, Email, Notifications, and Enable all Bing features for non-US countries. And even a little further down the top ideas list, but still within the top 10, is my personal biggie – Screenshot support!

Microsoft can’t add that feature you so desperately want if they don’t know about it. So download the app and let them know what’s important to you.

It updates to show how many text messages you have received, as one would expect, but it also does a little more than just show the number. When there are no new text messages, the face is a standard smiley.    But get your first new text and it changes to a winky smiley.    Let the number of messages rise to 4 unread or more, and now you have a new surprise smiley.

Yes, it’s not a huge feature, but it’s a cute little extra that makes it fun to look at every day. I wonder if the smiley changes at some point after the I’ve had up to 12 messages unread and didn’t see any difference. I would be cool if it turned into a frown or something at 50.

Let’s start with how to turn on the speech feature. All you need to do, is open Settings and scroll down until you find "speech", and tap on it. This is where you can configure the speech engine for use. The first check box will enable the speech engine to work over the internet. This is important if you want to dictate text messages, as it needs to off load the processing of that audio to the powerful servers on the internet. They can rip through the audio and return accurate results quickly. If you’re are not going to send text messages, then you could leave this off. Personally, I would leave it on, even if you’re not using text messages. Who knows what other applications might start taking advantage of this in the future. It’s nice to have it on and ready, even if you never use it.

The second check box allows you to start the speech engine even if the phone is locked. This is a little confusing, as it’s not the regular screen lock that it’s talking about. It’s referring to the pin lock on the lock screen. If you have your phone protected by a pin code that has to be entered to unlock the screen, this feature will allow you to use some of the speech features even if the pin code has not been entered. However, you can’t do everything. It won’t launch applications, or search Bing. It will text your friends, or call contacts.

Turning on the Play audio confirmations feature will have the speech engine confirm things with you before taking action. For the first while, I think it’s best to use this feature. At least until you’re confident that the engine is accurate in listening to your words. I’ve been using speech for a while now, and I still have this turned on. I like having that confirmation, but that’s me.

The final option is when the speech engine should read out your text messages. By default, it’s set to Bluetooth only, but you can set this to Bluetooth and headsets, wired headsets only, always, and off. I have it set to always. When you get a text message, it will start by telling you who it’s from and ask if you want it to read the message. So you don’t have to worry that it will automatically start reading the message aloud. Also, you can quickly tap the volume button and it will cancel the speech engine. So it’s easy enough to stop if it’s not a good time to have it read out the message.

I wish that the Windows Phone team had given the speech engine a catchy name – like Apple did with Siri. Just think of how much cooler this article would have been if it was writing Jane instead of speech engine. It’s powered by Microsoft’s TellMe service, but you still can’t address it in the same way. Maybe in the future it will take on more natural feel and lose a little of the robot like instructions.

Now for some of the fun things you can do with the speech engine. I find it’s handy to use for launching FourSquare and doing quick searches on Bing. Another fun thing, is to set your buddy’s first name as "the" and last name as "devil". Then when you get a text message, your phone will say "New text message from the devil. You can say read it or ignore". Of course, you can do a lot more than just “The Devil”, but I’ll leave that up to you to play with. You can also use this service to update your Twitter status. Just make sure to setup Twitter for SMS support, then add it to your contacts, and you can now dictate your next status update!

There are a couple things you need to know before you can start loading your device with custom ringtones. First, the audio file must be 39 seconds long or less. So there’s no putting a 3 minute long clip as your ringtone. 39 seconds and then it will loop around and start over.

Next, the total size of this file must not be larger than 1MB in size. This is to ensure fast and responsive phone. If the file was too large, it could significantly slow the device as it loads when the phone rings and that’s not an experience that anyone is looking for.

Finally, the file needs to be in WMA or MP3 format, and can not have any DRM on it.

If you have a favorite song, but it’s too long, or you’re only looking for a certain part of the audio track, you can download a free tool like Audacity, and crop that song down to just the chunk you are looking for. Once you have everything the way you want it, you’re ready to copy it to the device. Here’s how you do that:

Add the audio file to your library of music and launch the Zune software. Find the track inside of the Zune client, right click the file and select edit. The only value that matters for sync’ing this to the device and making it a ringtone, is the Genre. So change the Genre to RINGTONE. Then right click the track and select Sync with device.

Basically, any audio file with a Genre of RINGTONE will be allowed to sync with the device, and it won’t show up in a playlist or while browsing the music on the device. The only place you will see this file is when you’re browsing the ringtones. To check that it sync’ed successfully to the device, you’ll want to browse to Settings / Ringtones + Sounds, and tap on Ringtone. The resulting list should be broken into 2 sections – Custom and Windows Phone. Any custom ringtones you have sync’ed to the phone will be listed under the custom section.

At this time, there is no support for custom alert or notification sounds. We’re all hopeful that this will be added in the next release. Also, there are app in the marketplace that allow you to download custom ringtones, in case you don’t want to go through the process of creating your own. Check out my review of Free Ringtones if you’re interested in going down that path instead. Or if you want to record something on the device and use that as your ringtone, check out Yivosoft Recorder.

Enter Ice Cream Sandwich. The latest revision of Android brings screen capture into the base OS. Hopefully this will bring standardization across the platform and going forward all devices will have the ability to do screen captures with a standard key combination.

On the Galaxy Nexus, you can do a screen capture by pressing the volume down button and the power button at the same time. Within a second or two, you will see the screen capture and then a notification in the top bar that it is being saved. Jump into the gallery and you can browse through all your screen captures on your device. From there it’s just a hop, skip, and jump to posting it on damnyouautocorrect, or sharing with your friends on Facebook and Twitter.

“Downloading information can verify your email address to a junk mail sender. Help Avoid junk mail by only downloading pictures and messages from senders you trust.”

Seems to make sense, and I fully agree with their stance on this being the default behaviour for emails. The real question, is how do I go about telling Windows Phone that this email is from someone I trust and I actually want to see these pictures. The logical step for me was to add the persons email address to my contacts. Seems to make sense, right? If you trust them, add them to your contacts, then Windows Phone should see them in the contacts and allow me to download the pictures. Guess what? That didn’t work.

The answer is actually really easy and it’s staring you in the face. Perhaps everyone has already figured this out and it’s just me that didn’t clue into it. I don’t know why I didn’t notice this before, but all you have to do is tap on the missing picture and it will download. Further, tapping on any one of the missing images will download all of the missing images in that email.

Apple has released v5.01 of iOS that addresses the battery problems that many have been reporting, along with improved voice recognition for Australian users, multitasking gestures for the iPad, and some bugs. The overall update was 45MB and the process was pretty smooth. My device was connected over WiFi and pulled the update in about 2 minutes. A quick install and reboot and it was all over.

The first thing you need to do, is have iOS 5 installed on your device. Version 5 adds support for Over-The-Air updates. If you don’t have iOS5, you’ll have to download and update using iTunes on your computer.

To kick off the update, simply launch Settings, and tap on General / Software Update. The phone will automatically check for any updates and walk you through the process of downloading and installing. As with any software update, you should make sure your device has been backed up – iCloud backup is great for this, and has a full charge on the battery, or at least plug it in. That’s all you have to do. Happy updating!

The first thing you need to be aware of, is that not everyone can load an application on their device that doesn’t come from the marketplace. In order to do this, the first thing you need to do is developer unlock the device. There are a ways to do this – the only official way is to signup for Microsoft’s developer program and along with that you will get the ability to developer unlock a few devices. To do this, you’ll need to pay a $100 registration fee to Microsoft. You can learn more about this, and sign up over at Create.MSDN.com.

So now you have a developer unlocked device, and you have your XAP file. Next, you’ll need the Windows Phone SDK too kit. This will provide you with the development environment needed to create new applications. While you may not be creating your own application, we need this SDK installed so we can gain access to the deployment tool. You can find the tools over on here. Download and install the SDK on your computer.

Now that you have the Windows Phone SDK installed, we can deploy that application to your device. First, connect your Windows Phone to your computer and allow the Zune software to do it’s thing. Once the sync is done, close the Zune application. Click Start and type “Application Deployment” (if you’re running Windows 7, otherwise it’s located under Start / Programs / Windows Phone Developer Tools / Application Deployment).

You will now be presented with the window above. Simply browse and select your XAP file. Make sure the Target is set to “Windows Phone Device” and not to the emulator. Then unlock your device by sliding up the lockscreen and entering your password – if you have a device password. Once unlocked, press the Deploy button and the XAP will be transferred to the device and installed. And – Presto! You’re off and running with your custom app on Windows Phone.

I’ve run into a couple issues with this procedure. It seems that Microsoft has a few bugs lingering in the software. If you do have any weird errors, try and correct whatever the error says is wrong. Also, try disconnecting the device, and then connect it again and allow the sync process to finish before closing Zune and launching the deployment tool. Finally, make sure the device is logged in and sitting at the Today / home screen.  Nothing major here – a little fiddling and you should be off to the races!

On Android, if you look under Settings / Privacy, you’ll find an option called “Backup my data”. The description on this says “Back up application data, Wi-Fi passwords, and other settings to Google servers”. I’ve seen devices where the Wi-Fi passwords part is left out, and other devices where there is no description at all. At first thought, this is a great option. Who doesn’t want their new Android device to automatically know all the settings of their old device?

There are 2 problems with this feature. The first issue is that Google is not clear as to what “other settings” are being backed up to the cloud. Are we talking email accounts? screen brightness? wallpaper? ringtones? etc..  If it’s my data that is being backed up, I should have some sort of indication as to what that data is.

The second problem is that this will automatically backup your WiFi networks encryption keys. This is great for personal home networks. But I’m pretty sure most enterprises would have a concern if they learned that the encryption keys for the corporate WiFi are being uploaded to the cloud. If someone hacks my GMAIL account, they would instantly have access to the corporate network. Since this feature is driven by the phone, there is no way for the enterprise to specify that a given encryption key should not be backed up.

Donovan Colbert might have jumped the gun a little when he first wrote about this on TechRepublic’s IT Security blog, as it’s not some automatic upload in the background without ever telling the consumer. It does ask you during the initial setup if you would like to backup to the cloud. But it doesn’t provide a means to back up some or part of your personal information.

While it sounds a little extreme, if you’re running a private corporate network and want to keep it secure, you might want to consider blocking Android devices from connecting to it, or step up the key rotation.

(Source = TechRepublic)