Got WP7 - Neowin wants to hear from you!

[Brody McKee]

Hello there,

With Windows Phone 7 launched in Europe and Australia (and NZ), we'd like to hear your thoughts on the platform. We'll publish the results as front page news in a few days time.

Here are the questions we want answered:

1) What device did you get?

2) How long have you had it for?

3) What are your top 3 features/'hits'?

4) What are your top 3 'misses'?

5) Anything else you want to say?

6) What app is your favo(u)rite so far?

As an incentive, we'll choose one person at random to receive a mystery prize... (nothing 'that' exciting).

Thanks,

Brody McKee

[Owen W Veteran]

1) What device did you get? HTC Trophy

2) How long have you had it for? 2 Weeks

3) What are your top 3 features/'hits'? Zune, Email, Speed

4) What are your top 3 'misses'? Zune Pass Missing, Weird Regional Stuff

5) Anything else you want to say? Not going back to Android anymore :)

6) What app is your favo(u)rite so far? Hard one... Alphajax

[kjx]

1) What device did you get? HTC 7 Trophy

2) How long have you had it for? 2 weeks

3) What are your top 3 features/'hits'? Populating 'People' from across networks (FB/WL), sheer simplicity/efficiency, Sound Enhancer from HTC (Dolby Mobile with headphones = awesome), (more..) being able to lock my phone remotely if the need arose (for free! no $99 subscription like from Apple)

4) What are your top 3 'misses'? Crazy text size in IE, Figuring out that I needed to press the camera button for 2 seconds to get focus (I thought it was stuck at 3.5mm for a week), [nothing else]

5) Anything else you want to say? I love the smooth scrolling. Maps are beautiful - GPS functionality is dead on.

6) What app is your favo(u)rite so far? HTC Lists.

[AnotherITguy]

Im a little po'd that Microsoft decided to shove us WIMO verizon owners into a cold dark room and forget about us...

Friggin microsoft! :angry:

[phunkymunky]

1) What device did you get? HTC 7 Trophy

2) How long have you had it for? 5 days

3) What are your top 3 features/'hits'? Email, People Hub, Speed/Fluidity of OS is IMPRESSIVE

4) What are your top 3 'misses'? Zune Pass, missing proxy config settings, Angry Birds

5) Anything else you want to say? I'll never go back to a BlackBerry, or switch to an iPhone

6) What app is your favo(u)rite so far? ummm...need more time to review that

[daniel_rh]

Soon!

[Brody McKee]

Interesting answers here so far guys! Keep them coming ;)

1) What device did you get? HTC 7 Trophy

2) How long have you had it for? 4 days

3) What are your top 3 features/'hits'? Social networking, speed, looks great.

4) What are your top 3 'misses'? No Zune Pass, bad regional support (Bing included), 'The Harvest' loads so slow that my phone sleeps before I get to play it (I tap the screen to keep it alive).

6) What app is your favo(u)rite so far? 'Flixter' (even though it tries to send me to US restaurants).

[Owen W Veteran]

'The Harvest' loads so slow that my phone sleeps before I get to play it (I tap the screen to keep it alive).

FYI there's a bug fix incoming for this

[andrewbares]

FYI there's a bug fix incoming for this

What's the fix for it?? All I heard is people think the slow load speeds are due to the crappy Class 2 SD cards HTC put in the phone.

[ApuBo]

i want one :cry:

[Mr. Gibs]

Im a little po'd that Microsoft decided to shove us WIMO verizon owners into a cold dark room and forget about us...

Friggin microsoft! :angry:

Um CDMA support is coming in early 2011. It was delayed because it requires different drivers, and when only like 2 countries of the world have major CDMA networks...not worth delaying the whole product because of it.

[Mattytommo]

Hello there,

With Windows Phone 7 launched in Europe and Australia (and NZ), we'd like to hear your thoughts on the platform. We'll publish the results as front page news in a few days time.

Here are the questions we want answered:

1) What device did you get?

2) How long have you had it for?

3) What are your top 3 features/'hits'?

4) What are your top 3 'misses'?

5) Anything else you want to say?

6) What app is your favo(u)rite so far?

As an incentive, we'll choose one person at random to receive a mystery prize... (nothing 'that' exciting).

Thanks,

Brody McKee

1) What device did you get? HTC Mozart

2) How long have you had it for? nearly 2 weeks?

3) What are your top 3 features/'hits'? Xbox Live, Performance, UI

4) What are your top 3 'misses'? Marketplace Search, App shortage (infant platform I know), Customisable ringtones (can you tell I'm digging deep to find misses?!!)

5) Anything else you want to say? Fantastic platform, beautifully presented and very well executed. Microsoft haven't just arrived into the present day, they've also shown us the building blocks for the future

6) What app is your favo(u)rite so far? Probably Flowerz as it's crazy addictive, free and comes with a possible 200 achievements! /achievementwhore

[~Johnny]

Here are the questions we want answered:

1) What device did you get? Omnia7, HTC Morzart

2) How long have you had it for? Omnia7, about a week, HTC Mozart, 4 days.

3) What are your top 3 features/'hits'?

• For the most part I like the Facebook integration (though there are bad things, I point out below) - if only because it's much faster and smoother than using the Facebook at itself.
• UI is gorgeous, both stylisticly and animation wise. There are a few areas where the animation is a miss, but they're still amazing fluid, regardless.
• Xbox Live. Achievements, 'nuff said :p

4) What are your top 3 'misses'?

• Contact syncing in the people hub. Some really annoying decisions here. If you hook up your Windows Live account (which you probably have), it downloads a syncs every single one of your contacts, which for me is just my entire Windows Live Messenger contact list. So that's about 100+ people, with only email address', many of whom I do not talk to on a regular basis, and certainly do not want to see on my phone. Then comes the Facebook sync malarkey. It syncs all your Facebook contacts, regardless of whether you choose to only show contacts who already exist on your phone of not. You'll then see Profile Pictures of Facebook contacts who aren't in your phone book appearing on your "Peoples" hub live tile on the home screen, and whenever you want to choose a contact to send an SMS or email too, it'll show ALL those Facebook contacts, regardless of whether you've chosen to show only contacts already on your phone or not. Very annoying.
• Limited colour depth on screens. Maybe it's just my two models (but I doubt it, I've noticed in on the HD7, so it's probably the same with the rest too. What this means is simple colour banding - and it's ugly. It's especially noticeable on smooth gradients and on picture of human skin, and it looks really bad. As an easy example for anyone with a phone right now in the UK - go to the music section of the marketplace, look at background Image of Cheryl Cole. Ignoring the crappy compression, there's a lot of colour banding. Games can also suffer pretty badly - especially Twin Blades. Comparing it to the iPod version just highlights how much worse off it really looks, and makes the WP7 version look positively ugly in comparison :/ Movies also take a noticeable hit too, which is a total shame seeing as how otherwise gorgeous they look on these screens.
• SMS Messaging app - it's nice, but it's missing some things... Can't view deleted texts, incase I accidentally delete some (these things happen :p ), can't save draft messages (if I accidentally hit back whilst writing a message - it's gone forever). No MMS Sent or received notifications, and a couple of other things I have forgetten right now >__<

Special mention goes to capacitive buttons (teamed with lack of multitasking) and having all your online photo albums show up in the Pictures hub with no choice of hiding them. Accidentally hitting the Bing search button, and then pressing back to go back into the app and wait for it to have to reload (especially games), gets tiresome.

5) Anything else you want to say?

They really need to work on improving their Silverlight framework to make it more phone oriented and include many of the controls as native to the platform. Many of the app controls, like ListPickers, Date&Time, page transitions, etc. are not part of the base platform, and are part of separately released Silverlight toolkit - meaning they are also not native controls and are actually written in normal Silverlight code - which unfortunately doesn't give the best performance and makes use of quite a few compromises along the way to get everything working. (LongListSelector doesn't even use the native listbox scrolling mechanism for example, as it wasn't possible. They wrote their own, funky scrolling which feels different and inconsistent, and provides noticeably odd behaviour at time, and kills any TiltControls you're using on it's items)

And of course the one area that a lot of apps fall down on is the Listbox scrolling & Virtualisation. Scrolling gets very bad when apps use it, and it seems like Microsoft can do more to improve it's performance, as it's used a lot. Virtualisation is a helpful technique, but a lot of use are having to avoid it or find workaround just to avoid bad scrolling performance. It also doesn't help that this is the default ListBox behaviour, and we have to go out of our own way to get things fixed. Android also uses Virtualisation, but manages to do it much smoother, even on weaker hardware.

BUT, it really is a unique looking phone. I look at the home screen and I keep thinking to myself, "Wow, this is actually a phone" or "I can't believe they were actually allowed to develop and release this, in Microsoft of all places!". It's very different from everything else, and very beautiful

6) What app is your favo(u)rite so far?

None of them particuarly stand out, but I'd say Orange Daily/Flixster/Springy/Facebook (once it's loaded and stopped performing rubbishly). Or just the camera app if that counts.

[neoxphuse]

If you guys haven't tried this yet,

Can someone let me know how this is? This is one of the big apps I am looking forward once I get my Focus (who knows when Rogers will release it)

http://codejoker.com/torrent-remote/

It's an app that lets you remotely control utorrent from your phone to your pc

[neoxphuse]

http://codejoker.com/torrent-remote/

can someone try this and see how it works?

[rfirth]

1) What device did you get?

LG GW910 (Pacific/Developer Device)

2) How long have you had it for?

Since August (just over 2 months)

3) What are your top 3 features/'hits'?

People hub (automatic contact import/sync with cloud), Zune, home screen (tiles)

4) What are your top 3 'misses'?

copy and paste (twice in the past 2 months have I needed it)

5) Anything else you want to say?

It's an amazing product and the software is very responsive. It is very well designed.

6) What app is your favo(u)rite so far?

The ones I have written for the platform myself :)

[MR_Candyman]

I have a question: Will it come up with a menu to select what you want to do if you're browsing the internet and you click on a phone number or address? (of course there's no copy and paste at this time I guess, so will it call or add to gps?)

[andrewbares]

I have a question: Will it come up with a menu to select what you want to do if you're browsing the internet and you click on a phone number or address? (of course there's no copy and paste at this time I guess, so will it call or add to gps?)

Yes.

Click on a phone number and you can save it/call.

Click on an address, and it'll open it in Bing Maps.

Microsoft put those "Smart Links" into the operating system so that Copy/Paste wouldn't be that necessary.

[MR_Candyman]

Yes.

Click on a phone number and you can save it/call.

Click on an address, and it'll open it in Bing Maps.

Microsoft put those "Smart Links" into the operating system so that Copy/Paste wouldn't be that necessary.

Sweet. That's a feature I use constantly on my BB, and would hate to lose it if I went for a WP7 phone

[Xav]

1) What device did you get? HTC HD7

2) How long have you had it for? Since 21/10

3) What are your top 3 features/'hits'? Live Tiles, Zune App, WiFi Sync

4) What are your top 3 'misses'? Lack of additional live tiles at launch, lack of twitter integration, calendaring support

5) Anything else you want to say? Great first spin from MS, needs to see regular updates to fill in the gaps. Marketplace 'new apps' section is horribly broken, needs fixing!

6) What app is your favo(u)rite so far? WinMilk

[Owen W Veteran]

• Limited colour depth on screens. Maybe it's just my two models (but I doubt it, I've noticed in on the HD7, so it's probably the same with the rest too. What this means is simple colour banding - and it's ugly. It's especially noticeable on smooth gradients and on picture of human skin, and it looks really bad. As an easy example for anyone with a phone right now in the UK - go to the music section of the marketplace, look at background Image of Cheryl Cole. Ignoring the crappy compression, there's a lot of colour banding. Games can also suffer pretty badly - especially Twin Blades. Comparing it to the iPod version just highlights how much worse off it really looks, and makes the WP7 version look positively ugly in comparison :/ Movies also take a noticeable hit too, which is a total shame seeing as how otherwise gorgeous they look on these screens.

Seriously? I don't have this problem. Perhaps the devices are faulty? Colors look beautiful here on the HTC Trophy 7, much better than the AMOLED equipped Android I had too!

• SMS Messaging app - it's nice, but it's missing some things... Can't view deleted texts, incase I accidentally delete some (these things happen :p ), can't save draft messages (if I accidentally hit back whilst writing a message - it's gone forever). No MMS Sent or received notifications, and a couple of other things I have forgetten right now >__<

Drafts seem to work for me...

4) What are your top 3 'misses'? Lack of additional live tiles at launch, lack of twitter integration, calendaring support

a) There are heaps of third party live tiles, just got to go looking. Check out AlphaJax in the market.

b) I'm not sure this is necessarily a bad thing. Twitter would rape battery and be annoying to update.

c) The calendar support is brilliant, much better than Android out of the box..?

Sweet. That's a feature I use constantly on my BB, and would hate to lose it if I went for a WP7 phone

(Y) Someone with their head on right :)

[Xav]

a) There are heaps of third party live tiles, just got to go looking. Check out AlphaJax in the market.

So, that's two counting it and WeatherBug? Live Tiles were one of the big pushes from MS, are there any a-list apps which support them?

b) I'm not sure this is necessarily a bad thing. Twitter would rape battery and be annoying to update.

You're suggesting that updating twitter is somehow more intensive than updating FaceBook? If it's going to 'rape battery and be annoying to update' why are MS talking about it as part of a future update?

c) The calendar support is brilliant, much better than Android out of the box..?

But horribly inferior to the iPhone... for example:

- I can't sync ics sources, so things such as my RTM calendar are useless (I've had to use Spanning Sync to sync to a google calendar)

- I can't sync more than once calendar per mailbox - some of my accounts have three or four, all of which work fine on my iPhone 4. I can't choose which is synced either, it's up to which the phone decides is the default. Hard to understand how MS missed this one, it's been part of EAS since 2.0 (Exchange 2003 era).

[Prince Charming]

Twitter support isn't there for a very simple reason - legal problems between Microsoft and Twitter. MS are working on resolving it, but at the moment, Twitter are blocking MS doing it, not MS themselves. There's also issues about having every person you follow in your contact list, which would be irritating. I'm sure it will happen, and it will come, but for now the myriad of twitter apps are more than sufficient.

[former1]

Hmm tough one.

1) What device did you get?

HTC Mozart

2) How long have you had it for?

2 Weeks

3) What are your top 3 features/'hits'?

Zune Music Player

Speed of OS

Social Network Integration

4) What are your top 3 'misses'?

Zune's actual music store is lacking

Browser (could be a lot better)

No VPN support... :o

5) Anything else you want to say?

I love the OS but lack of apps / some settings tempts me to go back to my N1 at times...

6) What app is your favo(u)rite so far?

Winmilk.

[Xav]

Twitter support isn't there for a very simple reason - legal problems between Microsoft and Twitter. MS are working on resolving it, but at the moment, Twitter are blocking MS doing it, not MS themselves. There's also issues about having every person you follow in your contact list, which would be irritating. I'm sure it will happen, and it will come, but for now the myriad of twitter apps are more than sufficient.

Where did you read that? Can't spot anything from a quick google.