Things I would like to see in WP8

[Silver47]

Duel Core! High Res screens! Better GPU! Bigger something else!

Generally this is what I see most of the time whenever Windows Phone 7 or 8 gets mentioned, and while yes such things would be appreciated, they don't bring anything new to the table. Windows Phone does indeed need something to set its self apart apart from the look and feel. Office, Xbox and Zune are good but still need work on to make them more compelling.

So first off I would like to see Windows Phone compatible docking stations and car stereos. I don't think I need to really go into depth on why this would be a good idea, as its worked out well for Apple in this regard. But again this is just playing catchup with Apple, it will still give it a edge over Android.

Building on the dock, it would be good to have mini hdmi support, ideally with a standised location in relation to the micro usb connection for at least a standard cable design and allowing a standalone usb cable to comply with EU laws. TV out for video is good but also allows for games to be played on the full screen which brings me to my next request, Xbox Controller support. That would help the Xbox side going a bit.

There are probably other things I'll like my Radar to do but can't really think of right now, but these are what I would like to see in the future

[greenwizard88]

I want NFC, and standardized "dock" support too. And bigger/better/faster/stronger, obviously.

[watchthisspace]

-Yes to higher resolution displays! Something to make Apple's retina look like yesterday.

-Broader hardware support for multiple core CPU's, GPU's would be nice, but as it is WP7.5 runs silky smooth on mid range hardware. I prefer efficient coding, utilization of hardware to just having beefy specs. Battery life goes up, phone costs go down, win-win for the consumer. Windows Phone needs to avoid Android's fragmentation of phones and having to cater to such a vast variety of hardware. This is where the iPhone looks like a superstar since it doesn't have to be coded to be efficient on so many different phone configurations.

- It'd be awesome to see an iMessage alternative for WP8. I have an iPhone and so do most of the friends I message on a daily basis. With me being within wireless 90% of the time, sending messages/pictures/videos for free is great! And if I slip out of wifi before a message is sent, not having to remember to make it send as a SMS because the OS does that for me is great! Must have feature IMO.

- I think the send button on WP8 could be an actual "Send" icon. More basic and user friendly than the current little icon in WP7.5

- NFC for all the people who want NFC. Where I live (New Zealand) NFC is more "NF..What?" than must have.

- Silver47 mentions being able to play music from a WP device to a car stereo. That is a brilliant idea! If Microsoft could perhaps fake the phone being an iPhone or able to be read as a simple USB device with music for headunits, this would be great. I love just hooking my iPhone up to my headunit and listening to my music.

- A better way of navigating through lots and lots and lots of apps. Or some form of folders. A lot of people have a lot of apps and scrolling through an alphabetical list just isn't as efficient when compared to Android and iOS's little icon design. Admittidly, out of the handful of apps I have, i do use 5 the most regularly, for the other apps I don't use a much, I'd rather a faster way of getting to them than scrolling down a list.

- USB3.0 support for faster data transfer rates so syncing is faster? Would be cool to have.

- WiFi syncing also please.

- I don't know if Windows Phone has this, but how about it's own form of iCloud? Microsoft has Skydrive, surely they could add functionality to sync important data to the "Sky" just like how iCloud works. And then with Wifi syncing and sky back ups, it would be amazing to be doing work on your WP device, come home, start up you Windows 8 PC and have all your Internet tabs awaiting, Office documents ready for viewing/editing etc..

- A faster Internet Explorer that can make mobile Safari look like a sloth.

- Perhaps using bluetooth your Windows Phone device can unlock your Windows 8 phone by pairing up, and then unlocking your windows 8 PC.

- Of course performance optimizations, stability etc

[Gaffney]

Ability to change the function of the bing button eg launch a website or app of your choice.

More Skydrive features, improve the image quality when uploading to skydrive.

Ability to play music via USB to the car or Xbox.

WP8 version of iMessage.

A notification hub.

Ability to make category's of apps. Move to the right once for the default app view then have custom pages when you swipe to the right again. So you can have the first page for general apps, second page for games, third for news and you can name each of these app pages. This would go great with the metro UI.

Background image options with more colours as well instead of just black and white.

More colour options for tiles etc.

[Muhammad Farrukh]

There is already a wishlist thread for Apollo :p

[jakem1]

-Yes to higher resolution displays! Something to make Apple's retina look like yesterday.

-Broader hardware support for multiple core CPU's, GPU's would be nice, but as it is WP7.5 runs silky smooth on mid range hardware. I prefer efficient coding, utilization of hardware to just having beefy specs. Battery life goes up, phone costs go down, win-win for the consumer. Windows Phone needs to avoid Android's fragmentation of phones and having to cater to such a vast variety of hardware. This is where the iPhone looks like a superstar since it doesn't have to be coded to be efficient on so many different phone configurations.

- It'd be awesome to see an iMessage alternative for WP8. I have an iPhone and so do most of the friends I message on a daily basis. With me being within wireless 90% of the time, sending messages/pictures/videos for free is great! And if I slip out of wifi before a message is sent, not having to remember to make it send as a SMS because the OS does that for me is great! Must have feature IMO.

- I think the send button on WP8 could be an actual "Send" icon. More basic and user friendly than the current little icon in WP7.5

- NFC for all the people who want NFC. Where I live (New Zealand) NFC is more "NF..What?" than must have.

- Silver47 mentions being able to play music from a WP device to a car stereo. That is a brilliant idea! If Microsoft could perhaps fake the phone being an iPhone or able to be read as a simple USB device with music for headunits, this would be great. I love just hooking my iPhone up to my headunit and listening to my music.

- A better way of navigating through lots and lots and lots of apps. Or some form of folders. A lot of people have a lot of apps and scrolling through an alphabetical list just isn't as efficient when compared to Android and iOS's little icon design. Admittidly, out of the handful of apps I have, i do use 5 the most regularly, for the other apps I don't use a much, I'd rather a faster way of getting to them than scrolling down a list.

- USB3.0 support for faster data transfer rates so syncing is faster? Would be cool to have.

- WiFi syncing also please.

- I don't know if Windows Phone has this, but how about it's own form of iCloud? Microsoft has Skydrive, surely they could add functionality to sync important data to the "Sky" just like how iCloud works. And then with Wifi syncing and sky back ups, it would be amazing to be doing work on your WP device, come home, start up you Windows 8 PC and have all your Internet tabs awaiting, Office documents ready for viewing/editing etc..

- A faster Internet Explorer that can make mobile Safari look like a sloth.

- Perhaps using bluetooth your Windows Phone device can unlock your Windows 8 phone by pairing up, and then unlocking your windows 8 PC.

- Of course performance optimizations, stability etc

Out of interest, have you actually used a Windows Phone because many of the things you ask for are already there. For instance:

iMessage alternative - WP7 allows you to send messages to Live Messenger (the most popular IM network in the world) and routes messages to Live Messenger or SMS depending on whether contacts are online or not.

App navigation - there's no need to scroll through the alphabetical list if you have many apps. You can click on a letter button which takes you to a list of letters that you can choose from to take you straight to the section of the list your app sits in. This is far more efficient than scrolling through lots of hidden screens.

Wifi syncing - this has always been present from the very first release and was inherited from Zune. Apple copied this when they implemented it on the iPhone.

iCloud - WP7 offered SkyDrive integration from the very start. Again, iCloud is a copy of this feature.

[Dirk]

What I would like to see is when I go back into internet explorer the back button works in the app, instead of taking me back to the start screen.

A notification hub would also be nice. Other than that I can't think of anything else at the moment. I got my Lumia on Tuesday and so far it's a dream to use.

[downhillrider]

a notification system and landscape mode in the homescreen.

oh and

apps apps apps apps

[KevinN206]

What I would like to see is when I go back into internet explorer the back button works in the app, instead of taking me back to the start screen.

A notification hub would also be nice. Other than that I can't think of anything else at the moment. I got my Lumia on Tuesday and so far it's a dream to use.

That's because you return to IE from the home screen instead of the app switching (hold down back button). If you return to IE by using app switching card, then the back button works normally. Having said that, I think the behavior for app switching is broken and needs a lot of improvement.

1. launching app from home screen & app list should resume NOT restart (they'll need to find a way to close app first though)

2. There's no reason why the app switch card would have two cards for Setting. For example: go to Setting then go to background. Click the home button and invoke the app switching cards. You'll see Settings (settings) and Settings (background) <- Ridiculous. IMO, "settings" should only take one card. Even WORST. Let's suppose I return to "background" from the app switching menu, which WP7 resumes perfectly. BUT the back button now takes you back to the home screen instead of the "applications" pivot.

[Dirk]

That's because you return to IE from the home screen instead of the app switching (hold down back button). If you return to IE by using app switching card, then the back button works normally. Having said that, I think the behavior for app switching is broken and needs a lot of improvement.

Thank you very much!

[watchthisspace]

Out of interest, have you actually used a Windows Phone because many of the things you ask for are already there. For instance:

iMessage alternative - WP7 allows you to send messages to Live Messenger (the most popular IM network in the world) and routes messages to Live Messenger or SMS depending on whether contacts are online or not.

App navigation - there's no need to scroll through the alphabetical list if you have many apps. You can click on a letter button which takes you to a list of letters that you can choose from to take you straight to the section of the list your app sits in. This is far more efficient than scrolling through lots of hidden screens.

Wifi syncing - this has always been present from the very first release and was inherited from Zune. Apple copied this when they implemented it on the iPhone.

iCloud - WP7 offered SkyDrive integration from the very start. Again, iCloud is a copy of this feature.

Yup I've used a WP7 phone a few times, just never knew these existed! Awesome.

[guru]

I want NFC, and standardized "dock" support too. And bigger/better/faster/stronger, obviously.

just in case someone from MS is reading

[George P Global Moderator]

NFC is already on the way before WP8, Nokia's 610 brings it with tango.

Broader hardware support is a given, no word on screen res etc but I think MS will probably support 1280x720 as the new high end for now but maybe if the screen is big enough they could support a higher res than that. They have to remember devs though and they don't want to make it harder for them when it comes to app support. So I think MS could just stick to two resolutions for now till 800x480 gets phased out and then they'll move to something higher than 720p, probably jump right to 1080p I guess. Probably not till sometime in 2014 though, or really, that sorta res on a 4" screen might be overkill.

A new notification screen should be coming, i'd be really surprised if it didn't. The rest should be UI tweaks and probably added suport for WinRT apps so we can have WP8 and Win8 cross-platform support for devs. Besides it's looking like Silverlight 5 is the end of the line and since that's the current app platform for Windows Phone, i'd say WinRT is the next logical move.

[Muhammad Farrukh]

I hope Microsoft moves beyond 720p. I mean it sounds good and all, but just like 480x800 became last to last to last year resolution, within a year, this might end up in the same way. Getting 480x800 onto Tango will be nice. And for the usual mainstream and high-end phones, something beyond 720p would be awesome.

Also, the grouping of tiles, custom colours for each one, or lets just say, custom colours, not just 10 or 12, background wallpapers would be nice, even if we have a limited number of images to choose from. White background looks absolutely gorgeous, but a bit customizations would be nice

Landscape mode for the homescreen. Not needed for the app menu

[rfirth]

WP8 version of iMessage.

- It'd be awesome to see an iMessage alternative for WP8. I have an iPhone and so do most of the friends I message on a daily basis. With me being within wireless 90% of the time, sending messages/pictures/videos for free is great! And if I slip out of wifi before a message is sent, not having to remember to make it send as a SMS because the OS does that for me is great! Must have feature IMO.

- A better way of navigating through lots and lots and lots of apps. Or some form of folders. A lot of people have a lot of apps and scrolling through an alphabetical list just isn't as efficient when compared to Android and iOS's little icon design. Admittidly, out of the handful of apps I have, i do use 5 the most regularly, for the other apps I don't use a much, I'd rather a faster way of getting to them than scrolling down a list.

- WiFi syncing also please.

- I don't know if Windows Phone has this, but how about it's own form of iCloud? Microsoft has Skydrive, surely they could add functionality to sync important data to the "Sky" just like how iCloud works. And then with Wifi syncing and sky back ups, it would be amazing to be doing work on your WP device, come home, start up you Windows 8 PC and have all your Internet tabs awaiting, Office documents ready for viewing/editing etc..

All already implemented.

I'm not sure why everyone misses that Microsoft already has an iMessage alternative. You can use either Facebook Chat or Windows Live Messenger. I use Facebook Chat because everyone uses it. Messages appear in the SMS message app just like any other message and they are all grouped together into one conversation.

No folders, but there is a solution already implemented that was described by "jakem1" earlier. Folders would still be nice, though.

WiFi syncing... old news. WP7 had that since launch.

All photos I take are already uploaded to Skydrive automatically. When I go home, my photos are also synced to my computer over wifi automatically. The MS Office app allows you to view and edit Office documents on Skydrive.

Windows Phone has a lot to offer.

[George P Global Moderator]

I honestly think 720p as the native res could stick around for quite some time actually, I think that anything higher on 4.5" and smaller screens could be overkill and most people wouldn't notice a difference. It's a different story if we're talking of DPI though, like what Apple does, you can keep the res the same and just bump the DPI to 300+ and have a difference that way.

I also want to see MS allow hub extensions. So far we've been waiting for MS to extend support in the different "hubs" like People and Message etc. It'd be great if the WP8 SDK had support for an API to let 3rd party sites, services add their own support to the hubs when you download the extension/add-on. Like some photo sharing site having an add-on for the pictures hub so you can support it like it does skydrive and facebook right now. That sort of thing would be huge and fit better into MS's idea behind using the hubs and not apps for every little thing.

[daniel_washere]

The ability to disable the search button in games.

[Dirk]

How do you do that app navigation you guys were talking about with the alphabet? I can't find out how to turn that on. I just have to scroll all the way through.

Also after using the phone for about a week I wish there was a faster way to change the ringer from vibrate to sound. I know I can tap the volume and click the icon but I wish that if I double tapped volume down or up it would change it without having to touch the screen. The only reason I say that is so I could do it in my pocket without having to take it out.

[George P Global Moderator]

How do you do that app navigation you guys were talking about with the alphabet? I can't find out how to turn that on. I just have to scroll all the way through.

Also after using the phone for about a week I wish there was a faster way to change the ringer from vibrate to sound. I know I can tap the volume and click the icon but I wish that if I double tapped volume down or up it would change it without having to touch the screen. The only reason I say that is so I could do it in my pocket without having to take it out.

Once you have a set ammount of apps installed (forget how many exactly) the letters will automatically show up for you in the app list. If I remember correctly it's probably 30 items, once you have 30 or more items in the list then you'll get it.

As for the vibrate thing, I dunno how good double tapping the volume down button would be, when I change the volume on my phone I don't just press and hold the button, and actually repeatedly tap down or up till it goes to where I want. There might be another way to do it that would work best, maybe just pressing volume down and holding it for a set period of time would work better.

[George P Global Moderator]

A lot of what I'd like is already on here.

Better way to organise apps, easier method to switch between ringer, silence and vibrate. Ability to manipulate tile size would be quite cool too. (sure this isn't possible yet)

Seeing how some Windows 8 apps have live tiles that can be single or double depending on how much info the user wants to see then maybe this could make it's way to WP8. But if it doesn't then it could simply be because of the smaller screen sizes compared to a 10" tablet or netbook etc.

[moloko]

Did MS just throw away the thought of a database file system that they wanted to put in Win 7 long long ago?

[DevilsNotDead]

remove all the annoyance in WP7

[psreloaded]

How do you do that app navigation you guys were talking about with the alphabet? I can't find out how to turn that on. I just have to scroll all the way through. Also after using the phone for about a week I wish there was a faster way to change the ringer from vibrate to sound. I know I can tap the volume and click the icon but I wish that if I double tapped volume down or up it would change it without having to touch the screen. The only reason I say that is so I could do it in my pocket without having to take it out.

The jump tiles should automatically appear once you have around 50 apps

[Muhammad Farrukh]

remove all the annoyance in WP7

There isn't any :p

Except for a few of course

[George P Global Moderator]

Did MS just throw away the thought of a database file system that they wanted to put in Win 7 long long ago?

Not really, WP7s FS is like that, you don't go around managing folders and stuff. Also Win8 uses the idea as well, to an extent. Folders and folder trees are there for desktop use in Win8 but if all you're doing is on the metro side of things then it's all metadata driven as to what shows up where and accessed by what program.

Hell, if you actually use the libraries in Win7 then you're using the "database" features of the file system. On a Windows 8 ARM tablet I don't expect anyone to actually go in and mess with folders and folder locations of files etc.