Comments on: Hate Microsoft – Love Windows Phone 7?

By: ilicco

ilicco — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 10:56:07 +0000

T, i liked it too – liked the idea – but think of it as v1 and not v7 of the OS… :)

By: dan

dan — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 09:02:05 +0000

Hey thanks you have convinced me to give windows phone 7 a whirl.

By: Terence Eden

Terence Eden — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 08:58:22 +0000

Hi Paul,
That’s one point I missed off. Some API functionality is *only* available to manufacturers and MNOs.
Compared to Android – where anyone can change anything – this is a most unwelcome development.
I understand that for a brand new mobile OS, MS might want to restrict some access on the grounds of security – but this does smack a little of “Only big companies can play”. Not a smart move.

Thanks for your comment.

By: Terence Eden

Terence Eden — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 08:55:58 +0000

Hi
They’ve said the browser is a mix of IE7 & 8. Not 6&7. Although I agree that shipping without HTML5 is a big mistake.
Given that a large number of sites are still touting IE6 compatibility, I don’t think the lack of a new browser will kill the device. But It will be interesting how well optimised the browser is for mobile.

Thanks for your comment.

By: Poppet Skips

Poppet Skips — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 13:49:32 +0000

I had a look at the interface and the functionality , and I have to agree, there’s nothing like it at the moment – I guess with their backs to wall, MS had to actually ‘innovate’!!!

But yeah, it’s miles ahead of IOSAndroidSybian – [you may aswell group them all together, afterall they're all derivatives of each other - and these OS' are looking decidedly dated now ] – Someone way back in the 80′s/90′s (god knows who – Nokia?) decided to copy the icon based – one-function per app model from the desktop pc and cart it to a mobile device. Bizarrely – this model has not evolved, yet alone been superseded!

The thing is, a mobile device is not a desktop pc – what the user requires out of a PC is different from a mobile. The same goes with it’s functionality, due to the constraints of the hardware and software (e.g. physical screen size and dimensions, processor, memory, battery etc)

I think MS realised that what you want and expect from a pc is different on a phone – this in turn led to it’s complete rethink of how a mobile OS and interface should function. I applaud this.

;)

By: Matthijs

Matthijs — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 08:51:51 +0000

As for Mail, it supports google, live, yahoo, outlook, pop and imap out of the box already.

By: alimbada

alimbada — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 16:35:06 +0000

You mentioned in your “Cons” that MS need to open things up. I think you’re forgetting that openness is a two-way road. First of all, they need to have documented APIs for WP7 developers to be able to develop apps for those platforms. Microsoft have shown what *can* be done with their gaming platform. Now it’s the responsibility of these other platforms to provide similar apps for WP7 or at the very least make sure an API is available for 3rd parties to do so.

In my opinion, the biggest failing of WP7 was with the browser. I was at the BizSpark event and when they said the browser was a “hybrid between IE6 and IE7″, I was in shock. Compared to the Android browser and Safari, which both have HTML5 capabilities, MS have put themselves at a severe disadvantage. I think it’s very appealing to developers to write mobile web apps that’ll run and behave the same across different mobile web browsers, but that means all of them must be on an equal footing. I know they said IE9 would be in a future release, but it seems to me like they may be shooting themselves in the foot.

By: Paul

Paul — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 15:45:04 +0000

Well, let me tell you that from a developer’s standpoint, this phone is a gigantic fail. You cannot even get to the mailing address of a Contact record, which renders the phone useless for programmatically choosing and entering a shipping address from your Contact list.

There is no developer access to events on the phone like Incoming Call. There are no background tasks. There is no Copy/Paste.

This is a Soviet phone, promising much but when you try to write a program to actually accomplish the most rudimentary tasks possible on other phones, you will fail. The most you can write are games and simple web information retrieval programs in C#.

E-Commerce is out, music and video are out, browsers are out, TV is out, native code is out, anything complex and useful is out. This phone will suck, because no 3d party ISV will be able to leverage it for anything.

So, enjoy your animated cats and beer fart programs. Enjoy your craptastic scrolling-required user interface.

Android, baby. That’s the future.