All upgraded to the Windows Phone 8.1 Update

My Nokia 820 phone is now updated to 8.1 with the developer preview.

The actual upgrade was straight forward, the only issue was that the Store was down last night so updating apps could not be done until this morning. This was made more of an issue by the fact I had had to remove all my Nokia Maps and the iPodcast application (and downloaded podcasts) to free up space on the phone to allow the upgrade. Both these apps could only store data on the phone (not the SDcard) thus blocked the upgrade. This lack of space on the actual phone has been a constant issue for me on the Nokia 820.

So what is new and immediately useful to me?

• You can now store virtually anything on an SDCard, not just music and images
• The notification bar is great, no need for the connectivity shortcuts, but it does so much more
• And at last podcasting is built back in, only issue is I am not sure I want the hassle of re-entering all my subscriptions, iPodcast does such a great job storing them in the cloud making re-installation or device swaps so easy – time will tell on that one if I move or not.

At this point I decided to leave my phone on UK settings, so did not get Cortana enable, just letting others in the office map out any issues that may occur with playing with region settings and the Store.

So now to see what WP8.1 is like to live with…