Steve Litchfield

Forgive a little rant, but.... the folks who man support lines at big companies and organisations are, I'm sure, nice people, but they're not always trained very well at diagnosing what's wrong when a customer phones in.... So I'm buying a used car (my first for a decade!), £7,000 or so. I contact the Nationwide during the preceding week: "When I arrive at the dealers (a 100 mile drive), will I be able to transfer the money from my account to the dealer using your phone app?" "Absolutely", the Nationwide man said, "as long as it's under £10,000 you'll be fine. Just have your Nationwide card reader to hand for authentication." I thanked him and now we move on to today. I drive the 100 miles and settle down to pay the car dealer. On the first try, following the usual steps and using the card reader, after the final 'Pay now' step I got an error message: "Transaction failed due to an unknown problem". Ah. Ho...

The question is a tantalising one. How would someone get on setting up a Windows 10 Mobile smartphone from scratch... in 2020? i.e. a starting point of up to date security but no more updates to come - ever, plus a patchy set of mainstream services. I keep the latter  tabulated and up to date here , but I also thought it worth documenting how everything comes together (or not) on a freshly factory reset Alcatel IDOL 4 Pro, certainly the slickest and shiniest (and boy, is it slippery) Windows phone ever made.