I've been using Windows Phone 7 for just over two months now and I thought it time to share some thoughts. To date I've handled the Samsung Taylor (the pre-release device that will never see production), the Samsung Omnia 7, the HTC Trophy 7 and the LG Optimus 7. Despite the LG having the largest storage capacity (it's a 16GB device compared to 8GB in all the others) the Samsung Omnia 7 is my favourite. Why? Well it's the small details. The Sammy is the only WP7 device I've used to date that allows you to wake the phone by pressing the 'Windows key' on the front of the device. Both the LG and the HTC need to be woken by pressing the power buttons on the top of the respective devices. It is a small thing, but it's how the ubiquitous iPhone works. The Omnia 7 has a great AMOLED screen, crisp and responsive. All in all it feels like a quality device with a metal finish. All of the phones are responsive and capacitive screens are just what the doctor ordered.
The Windows Phone 7 OS is slick. Microsoft have done a pretty good job of distilling the key things that many of us do down and presenting them on the home screen tiles. So you get an at a glance screen that means you can look at the number of unread messages, unread emails, missed calls etc. But crucially what your next appointment is and not just the notification that it's going to happen within the period that a reminder has been set. Windows Mobile 6.5 always had a pretty good home screen - a dashboard on your day. Windows Phone 7 has taken certain aspects of that and has kept them on the home screen. The four tiles at the top of the home screen - I'm told - will always be the same on all devices. So the phone tile, the People tile, the messages tile and the email tile with always be the four at the top. You can still move them if you wish, but coupled with the calendar tile (a double width tile) they comprise what most people will need for business and personal needs. Simply put the people tile is your contacts list, your phone numbers, your Facebook friends, your Windows Live contacts and any other contacts you might have from other services all in one place. Having Facebook integration without necessarily having to have a Facebook app is a nice feature to have. Of the apps that come out of the box on Windows Phone 7 I'd have to single out the email app. Filtering your mailbox is as simple as swiping left and right. Default filters are unread and important emails (as defined in Outlook if you're using MS Exchange for email). This does make it pretty quick to skin through unread mails and emails marked as priority. The calendar app is not so good. It has a good standard view, but the month view is almost unusable - the text is just too small. It serves only as letting you know you've got 'some kind of meeting' on a particular day - not much more than that. My only beef with the email app is that the names of people who have sent you email, if particularly long, get cropped by the UI and you can't actually see the whole name until you open the email. Internet Explorer on Windows Phone 7 is very responsive. Pages load quickly and pretty much all sites I've visited render correctly. The thing that bugs me about IE on WP7 comes when you enter landscape mode. The URL box disappears and you can only get it back by tilting the phone back to portrait. I don't get it. Most of the browsing I've done on device since the invention of accelerometer driven screen orientation has been in landscape. This is the case on iPhone and iPad. So why is Windows Phone 7 different? I don't know. But, for me, it's the single biggest feature missing. None of the other apps really stand out. The Xbox Live integration is neat. I need to get some cross-over game titles with their Xbox brethren to really get much out of that though. Having another device that I can earn Gamerscore on is cool, but I want a Fallout New Vegas mini-game that contributes gambling cash to my character in my Xbox 360 game. I was looking forward to the Fable III game that would reward you for cash in the full Fable III game, but it never materialised. Pants. So far I've only played Monopoly on WP7. It's actually not that bad (it's by EA so I'll never afford them a positive review because I despise the company with a passion for the abomination that is the FIFA series) and I suppose I'd need to compare it to the iPhone version. BUt I'm not buying more than one copy of Monopoly. The camera app is ok too. It has a nice feature whereby when you've taken a photo it slides to the left of the screen and the current shot appears in on the screen viewfinder. This creates the illusion of having a 'live' photograph waiting to be captured along side the pictures you've taken. It doesn't add anything to the experience for creating better photographs but it's a neat way of presenting your film roll. So what is there not to like? Unfortunately, as of the current version of Windows Phone 7, quite a bit. And it's critical stuff as far as I'm concerned. The phone's use of it's data connection is simply not as slick as other devices I've used. By this I mean the amount of 'dead time' you get while an application talks to the network, gets it's data and then presents it back to you. Much the same way that Windows has had issues with waking up from a period of not being used and then struggling to connect to data without an enormous pause, Windows Phone 7 suffers from the dreaded 'thinking' bug that plagues many Microsoft products. The classic example of this is Facebook. When using the Facebook app (the full app not the native integration) should you leave the device while the app is running and it goes into a sleep state it'll take a good while to wake the app back up. Upon hitting the Windows key (or the power button on the HTC and LG) you're presented with a 'white screen of nothingness' for a good few seconds while the device yawns, stretches then thinks "ahh.. I need to get some data and refresh don't I?" This isn't something that's limited to the Facebook app. Many of the apps I've downloaded suffer from this. The Xbox app suffers from this. But the email app doesn't seem to suffer from this. Infact the email app is super responsive. So why can't they all work like that? Which brings me on to what I'd want to see in January's update. Here goes: 1. All devices need the ability to be woken from sleep state by pressing the central Windows key.
2. Something needs to be done about performance of applications when the device is woken up.
3. Internet Explorer needs the URL box to be accessible when in landscape mode.
4. Cut and paste. Yes I miss it in emails
5. Being able to edit the text in a forwarded email.
6. The onscreen keyboard, when in landscape, should fill the available width on the screen.
7. 'Cropped' text, namely long sender's name in the email app, needs to be viewable by scrolling the name left and right.
8. Better Bluetooth support. I've tried to use a Bluetooth keyboard once with the phone but it failed.
9. errr... other things. I'm not impressed with the Zune app. As far as apps go I'm waiting for Skype, WhatsApp Messenger, a proper Microsoft Windows Live Messenger app, a decent series of news apps like BBC and Sky News, and some better games. :-) Not much to ask for is it?
The Windows Phone 7 OS is slick. Microsoft have done a pretty good job of distilling the key things that many of us do down and presenting them on the home screen tiles. So you get an at a glance screen that means you can look at the number of unread messages, unread emails, missed calls etc. But crucially what your next appointment is and not just the notification that it's going to happen within the period that a reminder has been set. Windows Mobile 6.5 always had a pretty good home screen - a dashboard on your day. Windows Phone 7 has taken certain aspects of that and has kept them on the home screen. The four tiles at the top of the home screen - I'm told - will always be the same on all devices. So the phone tile, the People tile, the messages tile and the email tile with always be the four at the top. You can still move them if you wish, but coupled with the calendar tile (a double width tile) they comprise what most people will need for business and personal needs. Simply put the people tile is your contacts list, your phone numbers, your Facebook friends, your Windows Live contacts and any other contacts you might have from other services all in one place. Having Facebook integration without necessarily having to have a Facebook app is a nice feature to have. Of the apps that come out of the box on Windows Phone 7 I'd have to single out the email app. Filtering your mailbox is as simple as swiping left and right. Default filters are unread and important emails (as defined in Outlook if you're using MS Exchange for email). This does make it pretty quick to skin through unread mails and emails marked as priority. The calendar app is not so good. It has a good standard view, but the month view is almost unusable - the text is just too small. It serves only as letting you know you've got 'some kind of meeting' on a particular day - not much more than that. My only beef with the email app is that the names of people who have sent you email, if particularly long, get cropped by the UI and you can't actually see the whole name until you open the email. Internet Explorer on Windows Phone 7 is very responsive. Pages load quickly and pretty much all sites I've visited render correctly. The thing that bugs me about IE on WP7 comes when you enter landscape mode. The URL box disappears and you can only get it back by tilting the phone back to portrait. I don't get it. Most of the browsing I've done on device since the invention of accelerometer driven screen orientation has been in landscape. This is the case on iPhone and iPad. So why is Windows Phone 7 different? I don't know. But, for me, it's the single biggest feature missing. None of the other apps really stand out. The Xbox Live integration is neat. I need to get some cross-over game titles with their Xbox brethren to really get much out of that though. Having another device that I can earn Gamerscore on is cool, but I want a Fallout New Vegas mini-game that contributes gambling cash to my character in my Xbox 360 game. I was looking forward to the Fable III game that would reward you for cash in the full Fable III game, but it never materialised. Pants. So far I've only played Monopoly on WP7. It's actually not that bad (it's by EA so I'll never afford them a positive review because I despise the company with a passion for the abomination that is the FIFA series) and I suppose I'd need to compare it to the iPhone version. BUt I'm not buying more than one copy of Monopoly. The camera app is ok too. It has a nice feature whereby when you've taken a photo it slides to the left of the screen and the current shot appears in on the screen viewfinder. This creates the illusion of having a 'live' photograph waiting to be captured along side the pictures you've taken. It doesn't add anything to the experience for creating better photographs but it's a neat way of presenting your film roll. So what is there not to like? Unfortunately, as of the current version of Windows Phone 7, quite a bit. And it's critical stuff as far as I'm concerned. The phone's use of it's data connection is simply not as slick as other devices I've used. By this I mean the amount of 'dead time' you get while an application talks to the network, gets it's data and then presents it back to you. Much the same way that Windows has had issues with waking up from a period of not being used and then struggling to connect to data without an enormous pause, Windows Phone 7 suffers from the dreaded 'thinking' bug that plagues many Microsoft products. The classic example of this is Facebook. When using the Facebook app (the full app not the native integration) should you leave the device while the app is running and it goes into a sleep state it'll take a good while to wake the app back up. Upon hitting the Windows key (or the power button on the HTC and LG) you're presented with a 'white screen of nothingness' for a good few seconds while the device yawns, stretches then thinks "ahh.. I need to get some data and refresh don't I?" This isn't something that's limited to the Facebook app. Many of the apps I've downloaded suffer from this. The Xbox app suffers from this. But the email app doesn't seem to suffer from this. Infact the email app is super responsive. So why can't they all work like that? Which brings me on to what I'd want to see in January's update. Here goes: 1. All devices need the ability to be woken from sleep state by pressing the central Windows key.
2. Something needs to be done about performance of applications when the device is woken up.
3. Internet Explorer needs the URL box to be accessible when in landscape mode.
4. Cut and paste. Yes I miss it in emails
5. Being able to edit the text in a forwarded email.
6. The onscreen keyboard, when in landscape, should fill the available width on the screen.
7. 'Cropped' text, namely long sender's name in the email app, needs to be viewable by scrolling the name left and right.
8. Better Bluetooth support. I've tried to use a Bluetooth keyboard once with the phone but it failed.
9. errr... other things. I'm not impressed with the Zune app. As far as apps go I'm waiting for Skype, WhatsApp Messenger, a proper Microsoft Windows Live Messenger app, a decent series of news apps like BBC and Sky News, and some better games. :-) Not much to ask for is it?
Posted via email from gazcoop
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