A Short Windows Phone 7 Review (on a mac site)

[Rodimus Prime]

What are the nuances you find in it?
I ask because I am starting to follow WP7 because in 6 months or so I will be replacing my blackberry and right now an Android phone is the leading replacement for it but WP7 has gotten my attention and may make it on my list as possible phones I will look at.

 

[thejadedmonkey]

nuance was probably the wrong word, but it is different from other phones where the main screen is the center/focus point. It's quite nice like that. Honestly, if the app store takes off, it will be a great platform.

 

[Mike225]

nuance was probably the wrong word, but it is different from other phones where the main screen is the center/focus point. It's quite nice like that. Honestly, if the app store takes off, it will be a great platform.

Do you use Zune Pass? I was thinking of essentially going all Microsoft/Zune with XBOX, Windows 7, and Windows Phone 7 and getting a Zune pass.

 

[maflynn]

if the app store takes off, it will be a great platform.

I think the app store will take off. Microsoft always cultivated a good relationship with developers and many developers who think the iOS platform is too crowded may see an opportunity here.

 

[ComputersaysNo]

Microsoft is giving phones away for free now: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsphone/en-us/cmpn/bogo.aspx

 

[*LTD*]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/8C148)

The giveaway has begun, and the phones have barely hit the market. So the situation is *that* bad.

 

[vw2xb]

Is anyone experiencing crappy video quality when syncing with Windows Phone 7 Connector for OSX? When I dual boot into Windows and sync the same movie with the Zune software the videos look much better. I was going to dual boot into Windows 7 to sync just videos but that doesn't work...once I plug it back up into osx windows phone connector, it takes the video off.

Any thoughts? I don't want to keep up with two different libraries...in 2 different OS's.

 

[shingi70]

Its buy one get one free. allot of stores are ding this this time of year.

 

[thejadedmonkey]

Do you use Zune Pass? I was thinking of essentially going all Microsoft/Zune with XBOX, Windows 7, and Windows Phone 7 and getting a Zune pass.

I don't use zune pass, mainly because I'm a broke *** college student, and while I can get my employer to pick up the data plan, an extra $15/month isn't going to fly right now (and I'd rather play wow ).

Having said that, I have a 360, Windows Phone 7, and my primary computer is a custom rig running Windows 7, and the complete integration works very well. Dare I say it, but it's almost as good as Apple.

If MS can come out with an airprint and airtunes like feature set for WP7, I'll put them on the same level of integration.

 

[zap2]

The iPhone didn't have customizable ringtones when it first came out either. Hard to imagine, right?

Sorry, that was a while ago. iPhone's UI was world ahead, so things missing like that while annoying, we're as big of an issue because if you wanted the slick UI, it was Apple or nothing. (Yes, WinMo 5, Symbian, PalmOS had these things, but their UIs were from a different time)

Now between iOS, Android, WebOS, WinPhone 7 needs to brings its A game.

 

[ComputersaysNo]

(Google translate)

"Windows 7 Phone 3G data consumed needlessly '
Published: January 10, 2011 24:50
Last Modified: January 10, 2011 24:53

LONDON - Phone Windows 7, Microsoft's mobile operating system, wasting data even when the phone is actually used large amounts of bandwidth.
© AFP

Conclude that several American media based on complaints from users on various forums. Microsoft has not yet responded.

As a result of the consumption of WP7, the customer bill may be greater than expected. Some users have reported a consumption of two to five MB per hour. That is in addition to the data usage of the customer.

According to PC World is not known what application, or any other part of WP7 is responsible for consumption.

Paul Thurrot, a tech journalist who also writes for Windows IT Pro Magazine and a website has around Windows, writes: "This is a remarkable problem and I am shocked that Microsoft has given no response."

Dutch

Monday, Microsoft also announced that the Dutch version of WP 7 in the second half of 2011 is expected. For now, users in our country do with the English version of the system

 

[ComputersaysNo]

(Google Translate)

LONDON - Microsoft has an investigation into reports that mobile phones equipped with operating system Windows 7 Phone needlessly consume data.
© AFP

A Microsoft company spokesman confirmed to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The investigation follows reports that Windows 7 Phone devices even when the phone is not really used large amounts of bandwidth would swallow.

Also, the apparatus in some cases uses the 3G connection instead of a wifi connection, even if the latter is available. Some users reported a "ghost" data usage "of two to five megabytes per hour.

That would be unpleasant surprises for users to place. Many mobile Internet subscriptions have a data limit: subscribers who use more data than their contract allows, they are often substantially pay.

 

[Dr McKay]

Doesnt the model you bought seem really cheap and plasticky? I didnt like the look of it in pictures, I wouldnt mind a nice HTC running WP7 if I couldnt have my iPhone.

 

[thejadedmonkey]

I knew I didn't want a phone with a keyboard or speaker, so the focus was my only choice. I didn't even look at pictures before I purchased it. Once I got it, yes, it's much much less hefty than my w300i was, or the iPhone is... but it was the only choice I had.

I was a little worried about it, it's the same thickness as the iPhone 4 (within .5mm I think) and the back is slippery... but I got a rubber case for it, and it's fantastic now. the case provides some heft/grip to the phone, and I find I'm rather attached to it now. I even went as far as to register for a developer account through dreamspark and write a program for it (currently pending approval).

 

[neiltc13]

I have a new Samsung Omnia 7 coming tomorrow to replace my iPhone 3GS. Looking forward to trying something totally different and I will post my impressions once I have had time to get used to it.

 

[Consultant]

I don't use zune pass, mainly because I'm a broke *** college student, and while I can get my employer to pick up the data plan, an extra $15/month isn't going to fly right now (and I'd rather play wow ).

Having said that, I have a 360, Windows Phone 7, and my primary computer is a custom rig running Windows 7, and the complete integration works very well. Dare I say it, but it's almost as good as Apple.

If MS can come out with an airprint and airtunes like feature set for WP7, I'll put them on the same level of integration.

Wait a second, so you don't own Apple products. Maybe you have no idea where windows rumors is located?

 

[roadbloc]

Wait a second, so you don't own Apple products. Maybe you have no idea where windows rumors is located?

Oh, yeah, I'm sorry. I forgot you must have an Apple product to be a member of this forum.

 

[neiltc13]

I've now been using my new Samsung Omnia 7 (which I bought to replace an iPhone 3GS) for over a day now. So here's what I think of it:

Hardware wise, it feels very well made. The unit feels solid in hand and there isn't any creak or flex anywhere I can see. The metal back feels really nice in hand and gives it a true feeling of quality. All of the buttons are usable and there isn't any doubt as to whether you've pressed something as there was on my previous Samsung phone. The one flaw I can see is that it's a little TOO easy to press the touch-sensitive buttons (Back and Search) on the front of the device, but the fact that it actually has these is a huge bonus over iPhone. The frustrating thing for Apple must be that they can't now engineer a hardware back button into their phones, as it would make any software incompatible with the previous devices.

The screen is amazing. I've compared it with my iPhone 3GS and it's simply no contest. I've also compared it with a friend's iPhone 4, and while his is a higher resolution, I actually find text is much easier to read on my phone and the colours on mine are also much, much more vibrant.

One of the reasons for this is the Windows Phone 7 OS itself. It's almost like they looked at the benefits of making things as stark a contrast as possible (white text on a black background or vice-versa) and then designed the entire thing around that. It's awesome. The blacks on my phone are extremely black, so when the phone is on and I'm looking at something like my phone book, it's almost as if the white text is etched there and the rest of the screen is off. It's just so insanely vibrant.

The rest of the Windows 7 OS has also impressed me. The keyboard is at least as good as iPhone (I don't have any of the problems getting it to register keys that I did on my Android HTC Desire) and I certainly like the word suggestions thing better than the offering in iPhone. The whole thing is extremely slick - everything has a nice animation, but unlike iPhone, none of the animations feel too long or forced. I really, really like that they've tried something different here and it's paid off. The scrolling from side to side thing is awesome, and all the things I've read on Apple fansites about it being crazy for them to "cut off" text on the right side of the screen now seems totally ridiculous. The UI looks great, and I'd actually go as far as saying that in many areas it has iOS beat.

I've had two things stand out for me that really made me like the OS so far. The first is that you can choose exactly what appears on the home screen and then the rest of the applications are listed in alphabetical order in a menu you access by swiping to the right on the home screen. It's great because I always know where to find an application now, and it does all the sorting for me but also gives me the bonus that I can have my most used things where I need them.

The other thing that has made me smile are the "live tiles" on the homepage. I've got one there for my alarm clock, and when the alarm is set it shows that it is set and it shows what time it is set for. This is always on my home screen, so I no longer need to launch the application to check if I've set the alarm for the correct time as I did on iPhone. I'm really excited about what developers might do with this in future.

I also like that when I get a notification, it doesn't interrupt everything I'm doing. It simply slides in from the top of the phone, shows me the contents of the SMS or whatever and then slides away again. So much more useful than seeing my game or video pause or quit just because I got an SMS.

Internet Explorer is very fast at rendering pages, and responds extremely smoothly once you're on the page. Again this is a step up for me from the default Android browser, and at least on a par with the performance of the iPhone browser. I absolutely love having a dedicated Xbox Live application on my phone and it was a great feeling to unlock my first achievement in a Windows Phone game. I've also enjoyed using Microsoft Office - particularly OneNote. I like knowing that the notes I make are being automatically saved to the cloud.

Disappointments so far have to include the Facebook application being completely broken (crashing, locking up etc) and the web browser not having the same support from web developers as iPhone's does. The user agent isn't taken into account by many sites, so one of my most visited, BBC.co.uk, sends me to the desktop home page when on iPhone I'd get diverted to the mobile site automatically. There are also a number of iPhone-specific sites that don't work in the browser, but I'm assuming that this is because it's based on code from IE7 and IE8 and once the IE9 update comes in a few months everything should be fully supported as it is in the desktop version of IE9.

Overall though, this is a great phone. I love that everything is different to iPhone. I didn't want to buy iPhone 4 because frankly, I'm bored of that OS and I'm bored of the flaws it has. I wanted a change and so far I'm not regretting getting this phone one bit, especially as it was £160 cheaper than iPhone 4.

 

[/Moke]

I've now been using my new Samsung Omnia 7 (which I bought to replace an iPhone 3GS) for over a day now. So here's what I think of it:

Hardware wise, it feels very well made. The unit feels solid in hand and there isn't any creak or flex anywhere I can see. The metal back feels really nice in hand and gives it a true feeling of quality. All of the buttons are usable and there isn't any doubt as to whether you've pressed something as there was on my previous Samsung phone. The one flaw I can see is that it's a little TOO easy to press the touch-sensitive buttons (Back and Search) on the front of the device, but the fact that it actually has these is a huge bonus over iPhone. The frustrating thing for Apple must be that they can't now engineer a hardware back button into their phones, as it would make any software incompatible with the previous devices.

The screen is amazing. I've compared it with my iPhone 3GS and it's simply no contest. I've also compared it with a friend's iPhone 4, and while his is a higher resolution, I actually find text is much easier to read on my phone and the colours on mine are also much, much more vibrant.

One of the reasons for this is the Windows Phone 7 OS itself. It's almost like they looked at the benefits of making things as stark a contrast as possible (white text on a black background or vice-versa) and then designed the entire thing around that. It's awesome. The blacks on my phone are extremely black, so when the phone is on and I'm looking at something like my phone book, it's almost as if the white text is etched there and the rest of the screen is off. It's just so insanely vibrant.

The rest of the Windows 7 OS has also impressed me. The keyboard is at least as good as iPhone (I don't have any of the problems getting it to register keys that I did on my Android HTC Desire) and I certainly like the word suggestions thing better than the offering in iPhone. The whole thing is extremely slick - everything has a nice animation, but unlike iPhone, none of the animations feel too long or forced. I really, really like that they've tried something different here and it's paid off. The scrolling from side to side thing is awesome, and all the things I've read on Apple fansites about it being crazy for them to "cut off" text on the right side of the screen now seems totally ridiculous. The UI looks great, and I'd actually go as far as saying that in many areas it has iOS beat.

I've had two things stand out for me that really made me like the OS so far. The first is that you can choose exactly what appears on the home screen and then the rest of the applications are listed in alphabetical order in a menu you access by swiping to the right on the home screen. It's great because I always know where to find an application now, and it does all the sorting for me but also gives me the bonus that I can have my most used things where I need them.

The other thing that has made me smile are the "live tiles" on the homepage. I've got one there for my alarm clock, and when the alarm is set it shows that it is set and it shows what time it is set for. This is always on my home screen, so I no longer need to launch the application to check if I've set the alarm for the correct time as I did on iPhone. I'm really excited about what developers might do with this in future.

I also like that when I get a notification, it doesn't interrupt everything I'm doing. It simply slides in from the top of the phone, shows me the contents of the SMS or whatever and then slides away again. So much more useful than seeing my game or video pause or quit just because I got an SMS.

Internet Explorer is very fast at rendering pages, and responds extremely smoothly once you're on the page. Again this is a step up for me from the default Android browser, and at least on a par with the performance of the iPhone browser. I absolutely love having a dedicated Xbox Live application on my phone and it was a great feeling to unlock my first achievement in a Windows Phone game. I've also enjoyed using Microsoft Office - particularly OneNote. I like knowing that the notes I make are being automatically saved to the cloud.

Disappointments so far have to include the Facebook application being completely broken (crashing, locking up etc) and the web browser not having the same support from web developers as iPhone's does. The user agent isn't taken into account by many sites, so one of my most visited, BBC.co.uk, sends me to the desktop home page when on iPhone I'd get diverted to the mobile site automatically. There are also a number of iPhone-specific sites that don't work in the browser, but I'm assuming that this is because it's based on code from IE7 and IE8 and once the IE9 update comes in a few months everything should be fully supported as it is in the desktop version of IE9.

Overall though, this is a great phone. I love that everything is different to iPhone. I didn't want to buy iPhone 4 because frankly, I'm bored of that OS and I'm bored of the flaws it has. I wanted a change and so far I'm not regretting getting this phone one bit, especially as it was £160 cheaper than iPhone 4.

Nice. After having an Android phone and an iPhone Im looking to switch to WP7 soon. I just need to know Microsoft is fully backing the OS before I jump when it hits VZW. I want MSFT to give better access to the phone sensor APIs and for them to sort out some performance in Silverlight apps. Do you feel the app scroling is laggy or apps are slow ever?

 

[ChazUK]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.3.3; en-gb; Blade Build/FRG83) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1)

Great read neiltc13. It's very interesting to see how people adapt to a new (and different) platform such as WP7.

 

[thejadedmonkey]

Back in November, I wrote about my brand new Focus, running the just-released Windows Phone 7 OS. Six months later, as a follow up... (in case anyone cares )

The NoDo rollout was - although late to the party - quite painless. The Zune software told me I had an update. Did I want to apply it? 15 minutes later I had applied 2 updates and was back in business. The NoDo update seemed to speed up the OS slightly, and fix the marketplace.


What I've noticed:
There's no slowdown yet. the GUI is just as slick as ever.
The music playback software needs to be updated.
The apps are still lacking anything that requires socket support.
I'm still bemoaning over the alarm that doesn't really wake me up.
Having all of your apps in a list can get unwieldy.
I wish I could customize the highlight color.

Otherwise I absolutely love the phone, 6 months and going. Battery life is about a day of heavy usage, but I can get 3 days of usage if I turn the phone off at night and use it lightly during the day.

The live tiles aren't really... up to snuff yet, but I have a feeling the situation will improve dramatically with Mango. Also, because of the ability to tombstone (suspend and resume apps), the lack of multi-tasking hardly bothers me.

The other thing that NoDo did was update the data detectors to make them more useful. This creates the awkward situation of, while I can copy and paste now, I have almost no reason to at all-- Data detectors do all the work.

Overall, I'm glad I got the phone, and have no regrets with it. It's also dead easy to program for.

 

[TheSideshow]

Back in November, I wrote about my brand new Focus, running the just-released Windows Phone 7 OS. Six months later, as a follow up... (in case anyone cares )

The NoDo rollout was - although late to the party - quite painless. The Zune software told me I had an update. Did I want to apply it? 15 minutes later I had applied 2 updates and was back in business. The NoDo update seemed to speed up the OS slightly, and fix the marketplace.


What I've noticed:
There's no slowdown yet. the GUI is just as slick as ever.
The music playback software needs to be updated.
The apps are still lacking anything that requires socket support.
I'm still bemoaning over the alarm that doesn't really wake me up.
Having all of your apps in a list can get unwieldy.
I wish I could customize the highlight color.

Otherwise I absolutely love the phone, 6 months and going. Battery life is about a day of heavy usage, but I can get 3 days of usage if I turn the phone off at night and use it lightly during the day.

The live tiles aren't really... up to snuff yet, but I have a feeling the situation will improve dramatically with Mango. Also, because of the ability to tombstone (suspend and resume apps), the lack of multi-tasking hardly bothers me.

The other thing that NoDo did was update the data detectors to make them more useful. This creates the awkward situation of, while I can copy and paste now, I have almost no reason to at all-- Data detectors do all the work.

Overall, I'm glad I got the phone, and have no regrets with it. It's also dead easy to program for.

Im still debating a Trophy on Verizon or waiting until Mango devices to get one.
Ive been using "Launcher 7" on my Droid X and love the UI. It does a pretty good job of replicating WP7's feel. I dont use many apps so everything I use on the regular can be found with the live tiles.

Mango is looking like it will bring WP (feature wise) ahead of or equal to the other OS's.

 

[KingCrimson]

Things like

* lack of magnifying glass
* quality problems(power button not working????)
* copy/paste not fully implemented

are show-stoppers for me. I want to love the Metro UI, but come on MSFT.

 

[*LTD*]

Things like

* lack of magnifying glass
* quality problems(power button not working????)
* copy/paste not fully implemented

are show-stoppers for me. I want to love the Metro UI, but come on MSFT.

Just dump 'em. Don't force it. This entire WP7 project is for the birds. It'll be canned in less than two years due to extremely poor sales. It's currently a non-performing asset for a reason: consumers don't care about it. And why should they, when we already have Android and Apple occupying the low-end commodity and the premium positions, respectively. And both are doing very well in their market segments (yes, I'm giving Google credit here.)

Baldmer laughed off the whole idea in 2007 instead of getting down to work on something comparable immediately. MS, in its own bloat and hubris continued to flog the dead WinMo horse, and then they panicked, copied Apple (but came up with something totally lopsided to avoid infringement) and then panicked again because no one gave a **** on launch day, and then they hit up Nokia because they were out of ideas (and so was Nokia.)

The icing on the cake was them having to buy off developers from Apple's platform. Because successful developers obviously didn't want to be involved with a loser. When you can't attract them with the strength of your product, throw money at them.

 

[neiltc13]

The icing on the cake was them having to buy off developers from Apple's platform. Because successful developers obviously didn't want to be involved with a loser. When you can't attract them with the strength of your product, throw money at them.

You mean like when Apple arranged iFund to get developers to start making software for iPhone?