Alex Stone

A while back, when Microsoft announced Windows Phone 7, I said this.

Well, now the thing exists and I picked one up. Whether not this was a wise decision or not, time will tell.

Here’s what I’m liking

• Microsoft totally stuck to their guns and learned from Android’s mistakes and is forcing handset makers to stick to a set of guidelines to keep all of the devices the same at their core. This means that you can’t really buy a bad Windows Phone 7 phone and that even the low-end model (if there is one) will be a very nice handset that will likely last a while.
• The interface is incredibly slick. Much more so than what was originally shown. A lot of thought went into the animations and how things move around the screen. I can’t believe I’m saying this but Microsoft did an amazing job on the UI. The UI is not just different than Android and iOS for the sake of being different, but there is a great amount of thought put into the functionality of the UI. It works great for a phone.
• The commercials aren’t kidding. Because of the UI, you are literally in and out of the phone incredibly quick. Most of the information you need or want can be placed on the home screen, much like widgets, but much less ugly.
• Live Tiles! I’m loving Live Tiles. Live Tiles are these tiles on the home screen that update in real time to show you various information
• While there are few apps, the few apps that exist are very well done. If the Facebook for WP7 had Facebook Places, it’d be my favorite mobile client of all of the platforms.
• The integration is impressive. After plugging in my Facebook and Google accounts, I went to get a glass of tea and came back to find my phone completely set up and totally integrated, intelligently. The address book becomes so much more, as you can select a contact and see their recent updates, photos, etc. alongside their contact information.
• It’s fast. The whole thing feels incredibly responsive and snappy. This makes the overall usage experience much nicer than anticipated, after being on the Galaxy S (Captivate) for the last few months.

Here’s what I’m not liking at all:

• Not a lot of apps. This will likely change over the next few months, but right now, the selection is pretty sparse. On the upside, though, the apps that are there are very well done. Twitter and Facebook have apps, as well as other large companies like Netflix (who’s app is amazing, btw).
• No Multitasking. To be honest, I don’t really care about multitasking on my phone(s). You can only do one thing at a time, anyway, so what’s the rush in trying to run several processes at the same time. What you actually want is fast-switching with apps that can access each other’s systems. For example, you want Twitter to send YouTube links to the YouTube app rather than YouTube and Twitter running at the same time.
• No Copy & Paste. This isn’t really a deal breaker, but it’s a nice feature to have. Especially since there’s a mobile Office suite on the phone.
• Home screen tiles feel like I’m wasting a lot of space. On the home screen, tiles are shown 2x2 all the way down. There’s a huge gap of space on the right side that makes me feel like there should be something there. It makes sense visually, but starts to bug you after a while.
• Low customization. No home screen wallpaper, no custom ringtones, and no custom alerts (although it comes with a lot of really awesome stock sounds). You can re-arrange the home screen tiles and change the “theme” color, but that’s about it, for now.
• The Browser! The browser needs work. According to Wikipedia, the WP7 browser is “somewhere in between IE7 and IE8”. There doesn’t seem to be any location support, so using m.check.in or m.gowalla.com is out, for now. I tried loading several mobile web apps and they all managed to not load completely. Not happy about that.
• Not enough Live Tiles. Not sure if this is because of the SDK and the APIs currently available, or just developers not wanting to add Live Tiles to their app, but static tiles are kind of a bummer. Especially for apps like Foursquare, Twitter, or Facebook. Like other things, I expect this to change soon.

All in all, Windows Phone 7 is extremely nice. I can see it finding it’s place alongside Android and HP/Palm, but not quite an iPhone competitor, yet. Definitely more promising than RIM’s BlackBerry OS 6.

If you haven’t checked out Windows Phone 7, it’s definitely worth checking out next time you’re in a phone store. The Windows Phone 7 website does a pretty good job of telling you what’s what, as well.

I was going to write this huge blog about my first day with the Palm Pre but after I wrote it all, I realized it was boring and didn’t serve the purpose for the blog entry, which is to show that I like the phone. So I’ll sum it up.

I like the Palm Pre Plus.

No. I love the Palm Pre Plus.

Multitasking is amazing, the App Catalog is great (take note, Android - iPhone, you’re fine), the developer and WebOS community is incredibly welcoming, and the list goes on.

I love the way WebOS handles notifications and messages. I LOVE how it grabs all of my contacts from Facebook, Google, and AIM and merges them together without me asking it.

All in all, I can tell why Pre owners are so fanatical. They’re (I’m still feeling too n00b to say ‘we’) like Mac users in the 80s. There’s just so much positivity in the Palm/WebOS camp that you can’t help but get excited about the platform after you’ve acquired a Pre or Pixi.

Here’s what’s doubly-awesome: There’s still land left in the App Catalog. My intentions for webOS were originally just to bring Spenderbot over to it so I could get my Pe-owning friends to use my app. But now… now I think I’m going to try and fill as many niches as I can. It’s like it’s the App Store, circa 2008, all over again.

It’s truly exciting.

Splendid job, Palm. Good job HP. Not sure where you dropped the ball AT&T with the launch (seriously, not a single item in the AT&T corporate store mentioned the Pre launch).

Every. single. year. the same Verizon iPhone rumors surface and it’s like no one recalls the same “verified rumors” from the previous year.

The only thing that makes me highly skeptical of any of the Verizon iPhone rumors, is that Verizon still runs on CDMA, meaning that a Verizon iPhone would be useless in a year or so when everyone finally switches to their LTE networks.

Not only that, but the current network would heavily degrade the iPhone’s user experience. Being able to talk and use server-centric apps is kind of a major selling point of the iPhone. I don’t think I’ve ever been on the phone and not been multi-tasking at the same time. Checking Facebook, posting to Twitter, or looking up movie times, restaurants, directions, flight schedules, Wikipedia entries, etc.

That’s not just me, either. I don’t know anyone who has an iPhone that doesn’t do the same thing when on a call, especially when calling a business or customer service line.

Finally, the other reason Apple is waiting for that LTE network is that unless Verizon has been upgrading their network in secret over the last few years, there’s no way they’ll be able to handle the load of Verizon users itching for an iPhone. AT&T has about 20k customers, probably about 70% of those users on iPhones all pulling roughly 1-5GB of mobile data every month per user. You think Verizon’s network is ready to handle that much data being pushed around.

AT&T wasn’t ready for the iPhone and has managed to step it up and roll out more hotspots and 3G towers over the last 3 years. Verizon has not. Granted, they’ve been hard at work getting ready to roll out LTE, but that’s not going to happen until next year and you won’t see it in your area until late-2011 or or 2012.

That being said, when Verizon rolls out their LTE network, then, and only then, would I put any weight behind a rumor of a Verizon iPhone.

UPDATE: I’m not saying a new iPhone isn’t coming out this year. That’s almost definitely happening, as Apple has released a new handset every single year about the same time, in addition to an iPhone OS update. I’m just saying that it’s not likely we’ll see a Verizon-enabled handset.

Oh snap! Dare I say it, I think I have finally found a phone that looks more promising than the (current) iPhone.

Before I get into how awesome the Windows phone is, I want to point out that Microsoft dropped Flash support because of how horrible Flash is AND they use the similar multi-tasking setup that the iPhone uses (using notifications and only running the built-in apps simultaneously).

Moving along. What I’m loving about the Windows phone OS is how connected the thing is to “the cloud”. For example, viewing your contact list, you can select a person and it will give you the standard contact info, as well as their Facebook news, with plans to expand this to Flickr, Twitter, and other services.

Suddenly Google Buzz makes sense (that’s another blog, entirely).

This kind of connectedness is a big deal for end users. Instead of bouncing from app to app to get this information, it’s just inline with the contact list. I love it.

Even the photos and music is connected. Browsing your photos on the phone, pulls galleries from your Facebook account, Microsoft Live account, as well as albums synced with the desktop.

What’s really interesting is how much they’ve really “borrowed” from the iPhone. As with Windows 7 OS, they’ve taken the right things from Apple and tweaked them just right to fit into their Windows family and it works well, from what I can tell from the demonstration videos.

For example, the browser is fully multitouch with “all of the things users expect a mobile browser to do”. Double-tap to focus on portions of text, pinch-zoom, tap to scroll, etc. They even use the subpixel method to make text look really crisp when zoomed in.

Now here’s my favorite part: Microsoft has a hefty list of minimum requires for phone manufacters to be able to put out handsets running their new mobile OS. Things like multi-touch screen, fast CPUs, high-end capable GPUs, and the list goes on.