Those who follow me on Twitter may be aware that splashed out and I bought a Windows Phone last week (Nokia Lumia 800, unlocked, SIM-free). I’m planning a blog post about my first week with the phone (spoiler alert: some minor annoyances but, overall, I really like it) but one of the first items of confusion for me was how to (quickly) switch audio settings between ring, silent and vibrate. I could see it was possible in settings, but surely there is a quick way?

Yes, it seems there is (hit one of the volume rockers to bring up the volume bar at the top of the screen and then tap the icon on the right) but, bizarrely, you can either have vibrate or silent – not both…

My need for a silent phone was related to the fact that I use it as an alarm clock and don’t want to be woken by an assortment of messages in the night so I was concerned to read about “the Windows Phone alarm bug“. There’s even a Microsoft Answers post that says it’s not possible to set the volume to 0 and have the alarm sound.

Maybe this was a problem in earlier releases (that post is a year old) but it seems like a non-issue to me… I’ve set alarms with my phone on silent, vibrate, and with the ringer turned down to 0 and in all cases the alarm still works (thank goodness, after all, that’s what I would expect!).

[Updated 21:06 with screenshot of the volume bar]