Got WP7 - Neowin wants to hear from you!


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Just too add a bit more of my experiences to this: I think Microsoft have missed some great opportunities here.

I'm going to start with Office:

  • You can't upload or download documents to Office Live skydrive. It's probably got far more use to the majority of users than Sharepoint integration, and a good way to everyday users to get documents too and from their phone, yet there's no mention of it at all.
  • You can't use the phone as a powerpoint remote, or view you're speaker notes on it whilst you're broadcasting a show on your PC.
  • Probably the thing I think would have been the coolest, and very useful : Local document sharing. Say I walked into a meeting with my team, I'd like to be able to just sit down, pull out my phone, and just press a button and quickly beam them over say a word document or a presentation to their phone via bluetooth. It's be amazingly useful - infact this very scenario would have been useful during my University project today - our team had a meeting, and many of us actually have WP7 devices (Student loan's being put to good use ;)), and I had a word document I'd just put the final touches on. But instead of just being a press a button and show it with everyone, I had to hand my phone around for people to see (I could have printed or emailed it to them, but those weren't ideal scenarios). A great missed opportunity. In fact, there's basically no support for local content sharing anywhere on the phone - not even sending photos over Bluetooth!

Heck, Office on the device is actually a dissapointment. It feels like they just ported over the Windows Mobile 6.5 office and basically made little to no changes - other than making it actually slower to format text and such (to fit in with the WP7 UI). Add to that the lack of Copy & Paste, and WM6.5's office is actually probably better >.<

Microsoft has a whole wealth of innovative technologies and cool projects, yet very few of them are available on the phone. It should really be a portable celebration of everything Microsoft, but instead we get a questionably implementation of Office & Xbox Live, with a cut down Zune player on the side, and some basic Windows Live integration. Messengers not there, Skydrives not really there, no XPS, no integration os some of their cool research projects like Photosynth or panoramic stitching (granted, they're processor intensive, but they'd be nice). I'd like to see some of the Microsoft Research groups bringing their work down and giving us some cool unique projects to play with.

I think, the core WP7 team have done a respectable job - but it would have been amazing if the rest of Microsoft's groups had pitched in and represented their own technologies on the phone. Feels like it's just the services and technologies that were part of and close too the core WP7 team in the EAD that are part of it (notably Zune & Xbox Live), and everyone else is just under represented or not there. I do hope the rest of Microsoft start supporting it, because it would give WP7 a massive advantage.

Hi Johnny, very constructive points you have written. Maybe you should write to Microsoft and tell them your ideas. With the software very new, 1st generation, I see a lot of upside here. Microsoft will only build on from what they have. Including word/ppt documents in the Office through Skydrive would be great and I'm sure Microsoft would put that in soon as a lot of people would find that more useful.

I myself, am waiting to see the Focus in person before I can purchase a device. I currently have the iPhone 3GS.

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It's not just the browser - colour banding is everywhere in the OS, if you can find enough colour to throw at it. Just a part of the OS it seems for now! Microsoft also suggest that you don't use gradient in your applications, because, well, they'll colour band :p

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I am writing an app for the phone and my gradients have color banding. It sucks.

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1) What device did you get?

- Samsung Focus

2) How long have you had it for?

- 1 Week

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

- Zune integration

- beautiful, consistent UI

- speedy

4) What are your top 3 'misses'?

- Email - mark all as read missing

- Marketplace search - please, only search music when I'm in the Zune app!

- Contacts list could use more options - it works, but it's not ideal

5) Anything else you want to say?

- Overall I'm impressed - the UI is fast and (in my opinion) beautiful, and there aren't a lot of things the phone doesn't do out of the box that I feel like I'm missing (and for those that I am, I've found good apps to add). The battery life on the Focus is far better than I got on my HTC Touch Pro it's replacing, doing basically the same amount of work (frankly more, with the facebook and windows live integration on WP7). Pretty much everyone who's looked at my phone has had the same impression I (still) have: it's beautiful, and it "makes sense". It has some flaws (and I do miss copy/paste, as I work with Office docs on this a lot already), but I will wait until January to get it. Otherwise, I really have zero complaints that would make me not want to keep this phone and it's OS for a long time.

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

- Zune or Netflix, it's a toss-up. The screen is so nice for watching movies, it's actually pretty comfortable to watch a movie I've saved into Zune or stream via Netflix, and it doesn't seem to kill the battery much to do so either.

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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

Hey Owen, how is the trophy? I'm considering purchasing it on the vodafone network in australia, but I'm not exactly sure how it stacks up against other phones that are available.

Can you give some insight? Thanks.

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Hey Owen, how is the trophy? I'm considering purchasing it on the vodafone network in australia, but I'm not exactly sure how it stacks up against other phones that are available.

Can you give some insight? Thanks.

I actually have the Trophy on Vodafone in Australia St4rOcean, and it's a very nice phone. The camera isn't brilliant, but the battery life is satisfactory and the phone performs very well. I've had no hardware issues, and only a few minor software glitches (which I hope will be patched up soon).

I work for Vodafone Australia, so I won't discuss network or competitors - but it is a good phone and I've already convinced four friends to go for it!

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Still waiting to hear about my Dell, at this rate I'll probably end up getting it AFTER the first WP7 update is out!

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  • 2 weeks later...

Just picked up the Samsung Focus over the weekend (my first smartphone). I like the home tiles and pics/video/music integration. Metro UI is awesome. So many little nice touches on the phone but the #1 seller is Live integration for me. Its really quite amazing. The display is pretty sharp too and the entire device is quite slim and lightweight for its size.

I'm upset none of the launch devices had a forward facing camera for 'face time' but am most upset about no custom ringtones. I really hope the rumors are true about the Jan update as that will be outside of my return period (yes, I think its that serious a flaw). I'm also disappointed that the UVerse app isn't exactly what was described to me by the store staff (that I could stream from my home DVR).

Apps are still a little slim but I'm not really stressing about that too much yet. They will come in time as I think MS can persuade developers to create for their platform, they always have. I'm also disappointed that Office is so Sharepoint centric, especially since OfficeLive users are being pushed back to Skydrive. I'm also missing an iTunes like remote for my home PC/sound system. Not a 3rd party app, but free and integrated like it should be.

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Still waiting to hear about my Dell, at this rate I'll probably end up getting it AFTER the first WP7 update is out!

Rumor is December 14th for 149 with mobile or 499 unlocked

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1) What device did you get? HTC Trophy

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

3) What are your top 3 features/'hits'? Zune, Office and clean interface

4) What are your top 3 'misses'? VPN, Remote Desktop, A Battery Bar percentage (unless this is available and I have nfi how to enable it)

5) Anything else you want to say? I like it and I know it is only in the early stages however the market place is slow

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

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Rumor is December 14th for 149 with mobile or 499 unlocked

In the US. I'm still hearing an unnanounced January ship date for the UK. I don't have the date, but my sauces say it's in the earlier part of January.

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Blergh... another little annoyance with the Omnia 7 - I don't know what glass it's using for it's touch screen but it is rubbish! I haven't even been out of the house for a few days, due to the snow, so I haven't even moved my phone much, and every time I have it's been a quick look and then back in it's protective case to keep the screen nice and safe. And yet still when I checked this morning, there's no a hairline scratch, and two little scratch marks that look like bits of dust, but are actually scratches (so quite annoying). How the bloomin' heck they appeared I have no idea.

Definetly not the same glass as the HTC Mozart either (which looks like gorilla to me), and I don't think it has an oleophobic coating either >.<. Regretting going with the Omnia 7 now, doesn't even look particularly nice >.< Optimus 7 or Mozart ftw :laugh: Damned shame Omnia 7 was the only one I could even find at the time... maybe I can convince the girlfriend to swap her Mozart for my Omnia :shifty:

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Definetly not the same glass as the HTC Mozart either (which looks like gorilla to me), and I don't think it has an oleophobic coating either >.<. Regretting going with the Omnia 7 now, doesn't even look particularly nice >.< Optimus 7 or Mozart ftw Damned shame Omnia 7 was the only one I could even find at the time... maybe I can convince the girlfriend to swap her Mozart for my Omnia

No HTC phone uses Gorilla Glass. Some do, however, use scratch resistant glass (ie the HD2 and the HD7, from what I know) but the GG is a lot stronger.

That sucks though :/

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No HTC phone uses Gorilla Glass. Some do, however, use scratch resistant glass (ie the HD2 and the HD7, from what I know) but the GG is a lot stronger.

That sucks though :/

The closest thing I would say the glass on the Mozart is too would be the glass I had on my Zune 80GB (which I never scratched for it's entire 2 years, despite it falling down a concrete staircase twice >.<), looks very similar, but far more smudgeproof :p . Not the same glass they used on HD2/HD7 though, but hey :p My contract is actually up for renewal in February anyway, so I might try for the HTC Pro 7 for about ?200 when I renew (or whatever the keyboard HTC one is called) and give the Omnia to my mother or just ebay it for at least ?300 :p No loss ^.^

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  • 2 weeks later...

1) What device did you get? Samsung Focus

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

3) What are your top 3 features/'hits'? People tab, Browser, Smooth UI

4) What are your top 3 'misses'? No barcode scanner, no LED flashlight app, no multitasking. I guess all 3 could be attributed to the limited nature of the WP7 API, which hopefully would improve in the next update.

5) Anything else you want to say? On the Samsung Focus, the 3 capacitative buttons are so easy to be pressed by accident, causing an app to quit. Hope there's a way to prevent that from happening...

6) What app is your favo(u)rite so far? Pageonce Finance. It keeps my bills straight ;)

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  • 2 weeks later...

Just got a quick question for those who have one already, I know the main Live ID you enter also cover Xbox and Zune, but what if your Zune ID isn't the same as your Xbox ID? I mean can they even be different or does it need to be the same for those 2 services?

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1) What device did you get? Samsung Focus

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

3) What are your top 3 features/'hits'? People tab, Browser, Smooth UI

4) What are your top 3 'misses'? No barcode scanner, no LED flashlight app, no multitasking. I guess all 3 could be attributed to the limited nature of the WP7 API, which hopefully would improve in the next update.

5) Anything else you want to say? On the Samsung Focus, the 3 capacitative buttons are so easy to be pressed by accident, causing an app to quit. Hope there's a way to prevent that from happening...

6) What app is your favo(u)rite so far? Pageonce Finance. It keeps my bills straight ;)

There are lots of LED flashlight apps on the marketplace. unless that only works on the htc's. but they shouldn't since I believe that's in the WP7 spec.

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There are lots of LED flashlight apps on the marketplace. unless that only works on the htc's. but they shouldn't since I believe that's in the WP7 spec.

THe flashlight apps on the main marketplace don't use the LED, they're basically just white screens. The flashlight apps in the HTC & LG marketplace are the only ones that actually use the LED flash lights, as they require access to native API's to do so. (And HTC's one doesn't work with the HTC Mozart seeing as it uses a Xenon flash). Samsung doesn't provide a flashlight app >.< (Most of Samsungs exclusive apps are total useless rubbish anyway).

@ GP007 - all the services work off the the single Windows Live ID you choose during setup, you it has to be hte same for all 3.

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1) What device did you get? LG Optimus 7 (LG-E900)

2) How long have you had it for? 3 Months

3) What are your top 3 features/'hits'? ScanSearch, Panorama Shot, Play This (via DLNA)

4) What are your top 3 'misses'? No multitasking, no Abode Flash Support, No copy/paste

5) Anything else you want to say? Slow, compared to HTC Desire HD

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

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That's what I figured, no point in migrating my Xbox account if I can't take Zune with me so I'll just have to hold out and wait for MS to bring the marketplace to my country sooner rather than later.

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1) What device did you get? HTC HD7

2) How long have you had it for? 2 hours :rofl:

3) What are your top 3 features/'hits'? Smooth UI, people tab, performance

4) What are your top 3 'misses'? Browser could be a lot better, custom ringtones and color banding

5) Anything else you want to say? I can't wait for the major update that's coming in Jan/Feb 11..should be awesome

6) What app is your favo(u)rite so far? Aviation weather / Jukefly (Can't decide between the two lol

--

Also I would like a Pandora app, but Jukefly + Last.fm seems to work quite well too so it's all good!

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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?

1) HTC HD7

2) 3 Weeks

3) Tiles, Speed of UI, Zune!

4) html5 / flash support, Buggy market, Camera app doesn't remember settings..

5) For a fresh start this is a great OS! Not looking back to android and i look forward to see what the updates bring!

6) Beezz for twitter, weatherbug

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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)

Wasn't there supposed to be a feature added during development to choose who in your Facebook Contacts list you wanted on the phone? I was pretty sure this feature was announced during development. I was rather excited about that feature myself. I am waiting for Verizon to get WP7 before I can upgrade.

As for the color banding, that's a rather big deal I would think. Hopefully that will be resolved in an update. As will some controls updates... I'm really curious to see what updates come to the development tools.

Also, I was wondering if there is support for MyPhone in WP7. I am using MyPhone with my WinMo device, so it would definitely be nice to be able to have all of my contacts imported over and backed up as they are now. Can anyone confirm that this is there or not for me?

Thanks Again,

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Also, I was wondering if there is support for MyPhone in WP7. I am using MyPhone with my WinMo device, so it would definitely be nice to be able to have all of my contacts imported over and backed up as they are now. Can anyone confirm that this is there or not for me?

There isn't MyPhone, but similar features exist:

- Contacts are synced through Windows live / facebook

- Find my phone can be configured through the options

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There isn't MyPhone, but similar features exist:

- Contacts are synced through Windows live / facebook

- Find my phone can be configured through the options

Really? Wow. I hadn't seen anything confirming that MyPhone was supported (Which is why I asked), but I always half expected that it worked with WP7 as well. So, when I get my WP7 device I'll have to manually enter in all of my contacts then? And if I use the Facebook features of the People Hub, I am able to tell it which people I want in my phone, right? I won't end up with all of the people on my Facebook in my phone?

I am really eager to purchase a WP7 device when it comes to Verizon, but some things regarding the setup I don't quite understand just yet.

Thanks, :)

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