Smarter Geek

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…

Microsoft have now released Office 2010 to the public (via MDSN) and now they are starting to show off how the product will look on Windows Phone 7.

Charles Petzold has just released a draft preview of his MSPress eBook called “Programming Windows Phone 7 Series” for public download.

The chapters offered in the free download of the book are:

Part I   Getting Started

• Chapter 1   Phone Hardware + Your Software
• Chapter 2   Hello, Windows Phone

Part II   Silverlight

• Chapter 3   Code and XAML
• Chapter 4   Presentation and Layout

Part III   XNA

• Chapter 5   Principles of Movement
• Chapter 6   Textures and Sprites

I hope that this will help add some more advanced functionality to my first Windows Phone 7 application (see video below).

Download the book from Microsoft Press : Free ebook: Programming Windows Phone 7 Series (DRAFT Preview)

Someone needs to tell BNN that Windows 7 is not a phone operating system…

See it for yourself at http://watch.bnn.ca/the-close/february-2010/the-close-february-16-2010/#clip267305