Smarter Geek

Its now been 6 months since the release of Windows Phone and Microsoft have finally started to push out update to the phone. However even with all the hoopla around the delays of getting updated out to the phone I have to admit I still really like using my Windows Phone (so much so I have bought a seconds one). Therefore I thought I would explain some of the reasons why I think Windows Phone is still a great phone to use everyday.

Fast Sync

I love how it takes only seconds to sync the contents of my phone with the Zune software on my PC. The ability to quickly sync my phone when running out the door to catch a buss with a full two hours of public transport travel ahead of me is wonderful. This is way better than the number of time I plugged my iPhone in to sync before leavening for work only to have the process take forever (many minutes) or even totally stall.

Audio Controls 

I mainly listen to podcast on my Windows Phone and I like how tapping the Next button makes it jump ahead 30 seconds which makes it very easy to find what I am looking for or to just jump over an add that I don’t want to hear. What is also nice is that when I press the Previous button it only goes back 7 seconds meaning I can quickly listen again to something I have missed.

Pictures

The Pictures Hub is also really great and being able to show your friends photos in film strip mode is a really nice way to quickly scan your photos. What is also nice about the Pictures Hub is the Facebook integration that means that my Facebook photo’s automatically re-appeared in my pictures hub. This was a real time save as after I changed over my phone from a HTC Mozart to a HTC HD7 as all i had to do is type in my Facebook credentials to get my photos back on the phone.

Another nice feature about the Pictures Hub is that now that Yahoo has released the “Flickr for Windows Phone 7” App so you can easily upload any photo  my phone to Flickr. All this while still preserving the meta information on the picture such as geo-location without having to launch a separate upload App.

Xbox Live

I really like my Xbox and being able to earn Xbox Live gamer points has its very nice. This makes playing games such as as Flight Control, Fruit Ninja and soon Angry Birds all the more fun buy getting more points. The added geek factor by show people that I have Xbox on my phone and how it makes them extremely envious is also pretty cool…

Find my phone

While I have not had a need to use it yet it is very re-asuring that I can go to http://windowsphone.live.com Find, Lock, Beep or even Wipe should anything happen. 

Incremental Update

While my new HTC HD7 already came with the NoDo (copy and paste) update out of the box my HTC Mozart has only just got the February update (in April). While it was agonising to wait for the update to be delivered when it was FINALLY pushed out to the phone the update process was quick and and it did NOT need to flash the entire firmware for a minor update.

Note that even the the screenshot below said 20 minutes the whole process including download and flashing took about 5 minutes to complete.

Contact Integration

Another nice thing about having Facebook and Windows Live integration with the phone is that it sync the contact details on my phone with the “Cloud”. Again this made the transition from my Mozart to the HD7 a lot less painful and it meant that I did not have to manually transfer any contact details back into my phone.

Sidenote: My wife just started to use my HTC Mozart which did required us to manually type in some contact details that was save to her old phone (not on the SIM). This was a real paint but when I pointed out that now she has these contact details in the cloud she will never have to do this again she could see the point it what we were doing.

Dedicated Camera Button

With the proliferation of SmartPhone cameras many people have been able to capture those special moment that they would other wise been able to capture because they did not have a phone at hands reach. Having two daughters under five I can really appreciate how having a dedicated camera button will allow you to quickly take a picture or video before the moment has passed.

Auto Upload to SkyDrive

As I mentioned before I have two daughters and the photos I take of them are just priceless (even the bad one’s). Therefore I have great confidence that I will never lose a photo taken with my phone as I know that almost as soon as I take a photo it is automatically uploaded to the cloud in my own private folder on SkyDrive.

The Size I Want

As I have mentioned before I now own two Windows Phone’s, the HTC HD7 with a 4.3” screen and a HTC Mozart with a 3.8” screen. I mainly bought the HD7 due to the bigger screen and the larger on board storage as compared to the HD7 and while I am not 100% certain that having a larger screen is better it is nice that I have the choice of screen sizes.

Live Tiles

A lot can be said about personal preference with the Windows Phone UI however one feature of the UI I really like is the live tiles feature. Normally I have my home screen configured with 7 live tiles on my start menu and 2 of which are third party programs (Twit and Beeze). While a lot of people scoffed at the “Really” adds saying that the same can be said for Windows Phone it is very true that having the live tile support makes it much quicker and easier to just glance at your phone to see if there is anything new.

Pinned Contacts

Pinning a contact is not something I initially thought was all that great a feature and normally I only have one pinned contacts on my phone (my wife). What was interesting is that my wife has now pinned 5 people (her friend’s, her mum and me) on the start screen as she find it really nice how she can quickly call or SMS anyone of us.

Micro USB

Another feature that you don’t think much about but now that Micro USB is becoming more a defacto standard for peripherals I find that I never have to think much about making sure I have a cable to charge or sync my phone. It is also nice to know that if i don’t have a cable on me that easily pick one up for under $10 or I use it as an excuse to buy another pocket USB hard drive which has the same cable.

Future Features

While the current NoDo update is still being rolled out to phones around the world that lets people use much wanted “copy and paste” feature on Windows Phone what I really am looking forward to is some of the new features that have been announced that will be delivered to the phone by the the end of the year.

These include:

• IE9 with HTML5 support and hardware acceleration
• Multi-Tasking or better described as quick pause and resume
• Twitter integration with contact

Granted they will have to actually deliver these feature in the “Mango” update to Windows Phone I hold out great hope that these features (and possibly others) will make the phone even greater going into the future.

I have previously blogged about the things I liked and hated about the iPhone so I thought it would be only fair if I started a same post about my new Windows Phone 7 HTC Mozart phone.

I have now had this phone for 4 day’s so this review is still very preliminarily so I fully expect that this list will change over time. My comments will cover both the hardware and software on the device as Microsoft have been all about the “experience” of the device and therefore I need to cover all aspects of the phone.

In addition to the Good and Bad i have also put in a Wish List at the bottom that has all the little features that I thought would be nice for the phone to have.

Good

• Camera with Flash is good for those low light situations. (see image below)

• Camera 8mbit / 720p video. I have not used an iPhone 4 camera so i can’t make the obvious comparisons however having a high resolution camera on hand all the time is nice. (see image below)

• Camera that I can use without having to unlock the phone and then launch the application is nice to quickly capture those special unplanned moments.
• Camera that automatically uploads every photo I take to SkyDrive so I will never lose a photo is awesome.
• Dedicated camera button is very nice so I don’t have to find the camera app even when then phone is unlocked.
• Hardware is solid the back is mostly aluminium… clearly an iPhone styled device.
• Screen is very nice with 800×480 is much higher res than the iPhone 3g… but not as good as iPhone 4. Still having a screen with such high resolution is very nice. I find that even going bad to the iPad with it lower DPI makes a lot of the text and image look somewhat fuzzy.
• Find,Lock,Beep,Wipe my phone but just going to http://windowsphone.live.com and login and then select the option want to use (see below). This is very similar to Apple Mobile Me except without the $99 price tag.

• User Interface is smooth and responsive to use.
• Home screen is really nice as I have pinned all my commonly used apps ,people and podcasts to the start screen making it really easy to access the stuff I use most of the time.
• Wireless Sync is OMG fantastic. I used to have to sync my iPhone/iPad to my computer each morning before going to work… Now I just wake up and my phone is all synced for my days listening.
• Internet Explorer is very good. Just like safari on the iPhone…
• Xbox live is cool as now I am earning points for my Xbox live accounts on my phone (like playing Flight Control)… very cool…
• Lock screen information is really nice as it actually give me useful information such as time, day, date and upcoming appointments.
• Compatible with Apple ear buds with remote clicker. Only the play pause button works however it is still nice to be able to use the apple ear buds with i prefer.
• Remote App install is a nice feature that lets you purchase an application on your computer and have it appear on your phone with connecting the two devices.
• Voice commands works as well on this as it did on the iPhone. Will be useful when in a car and you don’t want to touch the phone to make a phone call.
• Micro USB connector is really nice to have as I can use any micro USB cable to charge the phone. These are also really cheap and you can pick them on on eBay for about $6 as opposed to $35 for Apple phone data leads.
• Key Applications that any good smartphone should have are mostly there… Below is a list of key apps that I have installed.
  • Foursquare
  • Shazam
  • Facebook
  • Adobe Reader
  • Ebay
  • Flickr Manager
  • Feed Reader (Google reader app)
  • Twitter (Official app))
  • YouTube
  • Windows Messenger
  • Flight Control

Bad

• No microSD card support means the phone is limited to 8gb storage. This is a phone specific restriction as other phone do have microSD cards for future storage upgrades.
• No case’s means that i am very paranoid that I will drop or scratch the phone.
• Battery life is poor. I am getting only 12 hours out of my phone with fairly light usage. I suspect this is due to keeping one of the push service turned on in the background so I have turned these off to see if it makes a difference.
• I have had the OS crash on me two times now when running the Facebook applications.
• HTC Apps are broken. After trying to run an application update on the HTC applications they have now stopped working. Apparently this is due to a certificate issues and updates are coming. See http://twitter.com/#!/Windows7AU/status/28073132075
• App store still has only a few applications. This number is growing and it does have a key number of applications however it is still no where near the Apple of Android app store. Notable missing application:
  • Angry Birds
• Capacitive buttons are a totally pain in the ass… I have accidently touch the buttons at least a dozen time when typing on the phone. Positing the space bar just above the star button really sucks and accidently pressing the search button when play a game in landscape is also rally annoying. Update: I really wish the 3 buttons could be locked out when playing a full screen game/app. This would make this a LOT better… even if it just asked… are you sure when you press the button in the middle of the game.
• You can pin a podcast to the home screen (which is nice). But when you are listening to the podcast and then you click on the pinned tile the track stops and then starts again. Annoying!

Wish List

• 2x play speed when playing podcasts would be really nice. They have this in Windows Media player and in the iPhone so having it in the Zune software would be a great time saver as I would (literally) be able to listen to all my podcasts quicker.
• Scrub bar for playing podcasts and music would be nice to be able to jump to certain parts of audio track really quickly. You can do something similar by pressing and holding the back/forward button but this is not as good.
• Schedule for email sync so that i don’t get email notification at 1am in the morning…
• New: Percentage indicator for the battery remaining…
• New: Folders for the application launcher so that I can group my similar application. This could be automatically based on the categorisation of the application in the app store.
• New: Internet Tethering… This was something that was mentioned as possible on the Windows Weekly podcast but was then later revealed as not correct for the release. I suspect this will be coming in a v1.1 update…
• New: Flash and Silverlight in browser support. I am not saying I love Flash and Silverlight however having the option would be nice…

This is just a start for now… I will definitely be adding more as time goes by…

With the HTC HD2 just released in Australia and an souped up versions will soon be on T-Mobile in the USA so of course now is the time to leak the specs of the next version of the phone the HTC HD3. This phone is set to be released on November 2010 which would be the perfect time to make this a Windows Mobile 7 device. Below is a summary of the specs:

• 1.5 ghz Snapdragon (Uber Fast)
• 1gb Ram (Same as my netbook)
• 1gb Rom
• 16gb Internal Flash
• microSD Card (16 internal and 32gb SD = 46gb storage)
• 4.5” 1280×800 (that’s greater than 720p HD)
• Front Camera (enables video chat)
• 4G radio (will this matter in Australia)
• Wi-Fi and Bluetooth (no word on 802.11n)
• HDMI (presumably via dock like Zune HD)
• USB 2.0 and 3.5mm audio jack (Disappointingly not USB 3.0)

These specs are impressive but considering the specs of the current HD2 it actually seem likely seeing it will not be released for at least another 10 months.

Source: Specs for the HTC HD3? We Wish!

The firmware update for the HTC Snap from Telstra is now out on the HTC Australian support website Here . The firmware update process is straight forward and it take about 10 minutes to flash the device. As this device is only Windows Mobile standard the look and feel of the phone actually has not changed much and the UI with Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard already had the horizontal and vertical home screen. Two noticeable additions to the phone is that it now has myPhone and Windows Mobile Marketplace programs included with the OS. MyPhone enable users to backup the phone over the air and also find and/or wipe the device remotely if they were to ever lose the phone. The Windows Mobile Market place applications allows users to download applications over the air much like the iPhone App Store however right now there are not many applications that are support on the Windows Mobile Standard OS.

For those of you who won a HTC Snap at TechEd Australia 2009 (like me) or for anyone else who has bough one, HTC has now released the Windows Mobile 6.5 ROM upgrade. Kudos to HTC and Telstra for taking a little over two weeks to release the custom ROM for the device. In conjunction to Windows Mobile 6.5 Microsoft has now released the Windows Mobile Marketplace that allows user to purchase application on the phone and download them directly to the device. Microsoft has also released new features in myPhone that allows users to remotely find and/or wipe their phones without having to pay for a really expensive annual subscription.

Will start to review the upgrade process and the new features in the coming days….

Download it now from: ROM upgrade (WM6.5) for HTC Snap (Telstra)