Yesterday the Denim update finally popped up on my Lumia 925. As usual with phone updates I installed it pretty much right away. I cannot say that there was an enormous amount of features in it that I was waiting for. At last not that I knew of from reading about the update. Quite honestly the only thing that I was looking forward to was the ability to finally set quiet hours, a feature that it is frankly a disgrace that Microsoft have not provided until now.
Well, I have to say that I am not enormously impressed. Actually I am quite a bit disappointed. The first thing that happened is that I ran into a huge snag. A snag that is occurring all too often tanks to both ignorant and arrogant developers and decision makers at American companies that cannot get into their thick heads that the world might actually work differently outside of the US.
Despite the wet dreams of some deluded EU-politicians Europe is not one country. It is many and people move around between them. I am a Swedish citizen, I live in France, I work in Switzerland and my preferred language is English. Thus I have my phone’s region set to France to get the proper content but my display language set to English.
After having installed the update the first thing that happened was of course that I had to get into Cortana. Not because I really wanted but, for some illogical and stupid reason, in order to use quiet hours you have to have Cortana enabled. Cortana have yet another language setting. Why is beyond me but it has. However, I could not enable Cortana because it complained that my Cortana language and my display language was not the same. Why the hell have separate settings if they have to be the same anyway? Worse, I had already set them to the same setting!
After some messing around I found out that, not only do you have to have the Cortana language and display language set to the same value but you also have to have the region set to match the language. What the fuck Microsoft?! That is the dumbest piece of shit I have seen in a long time. It is also a major inconvenience at best. First I have to use Cortana, which I really do not care for at all, to use a setting that should be a standard setting on my phone and then I cannot use it because some totally dumbass restriction on region and language. This is just ignorance and arrogance from people that thinks that the world is centered around themselves.
Okay, once I got over my utter surprise, frustration and outright rage over this huge screw-up I started to look around to see if I could spot anything actually worthwhile with this update. I have to admit that I have not been playing around with it for very long but so far I have not really found much of interest. I fail to see why many people seems to be somewhat hyped up about it. One major change for me is that the update blocked Here Maps. Here Maps will no longer start but just sits there loading.
So Microsoft, I still like Windows Phone in general but really, thanks for screwing Here Maps and for nothing else really!
PG's Ramblings 