Solving Nokia Lumia 920 battery problems

Symptoms: 

  • Your phone occasionally gets very hot, just below the camera
  • The battery drains with about 20% an hour, so your phone is dead in about 4 hours

Solutions:
None for the moment. I sent my phone back for repair, no solution. The only consolation: you are not alone: see Nokia Support Discussions

Workaround:
I “solved” this by limiting the highest connection speed for the Mobile network to 2G. I can easily use my phone with one battery charge for two days now, with wifi, bluetooth and location services enabled. OK, surfing is a bit slower.

lumia_tn

I sincerely hope that the WP8 “Amber” update is going to solve the issue.

A “do it yourself” alternative to Google Reader

rss_iconI am a huge fan of Google Reader. Well, used to be, because the service is shutting down on July 1.

There is plenty of alternatives, but I like the fact that there is a central web application that stores all your feeds (and keeps track of read/unread). It needs to be accessible and optimized for iPad also.

After a lot of testing and comparing, I went for the following solution:

  • I purchased and installed Fever (one-time fee of 30$). You have to host the application yourself (requires php-mysql-apache hosting); the license is tied to your domain name. 
  • I installed Sunstroke for iPad. Can be used on iPhone too.

The two work nicely together, but even the web interface alone is already quite usable on an iPad. I am really happy with the alternative, there are no specific functions of Google Reader that I am missing.

Update: Sunstroke is no longer available. Fiery Feeds is a valid alternative on iPad, even works much faster.