Kernel Confusion

One of the Windows Phone 7 devices

After all the reviews on the internet I finally could get my hands on a Windows Phone 7 and try it out myself. I owned Windows driven phones for six years now and also have some experience with its competitors, including Android, Blackberry and iPhone. So I got my share of the “torture”. Especially when it comes to a smooth interface, Apple got it right first and pretty much polished this up to perfection. When it comes to a professional usage on the other hand, Blackberry and Windows Mobile were the operating systems to go with.

So let’s take a look and start with my negative thoughts:

Incomplete synchronization options! When Windows Mobile 6.5 hit my phone and the Exchange 2010 sent me that neat little e-mail where it told me I could now send SMS via Outlook, I was so happy! Finally, writing SMS with my PC and free backup of my messages in my Exchange account. And now? Gone! Didn’t make it into the final release, no reasons given. Exchange tasks share this fate as well, no option to synchronize them! And why? I talked with a MVP and the reason seems simple enough: US users don’t use these techniques frequently enough to be important for a release. Let’s see if this changes with the first major update in the first quarter of 2011.

Also, in a session about the phone the speaker told us about the OneNote implementation. I am a frequent user of its big brother in the Office suite and use it to its full extend: notes, pictures, drawings and even files get imbedded. It enables me to be very creative when it comes to taking notes and putting my ideas to “paper”. Windows Phone 7 also has OneNote and can sync all its data between different services, which is nice. But: You cannot limit what gets synched and what doesn’t. You can only disable synch completely. So if you are like me and pile up a lot of data in those notes, you will need a good data plan to cope with that!

And yes, no copy & paste (do I really need that? Context sensitive menus do wonders!) and no weekly overview in the calendar. I’d call it a minor annoyance.

That’s all the negative points I could make out in this little time. Now let’s turn around and look at the bright side!

Responsiveness! Yes, it IS great. It feels perfect, fast and does exactly what you want. Program switching is fast and nice to look at, animations and transitions are fluid. Big thumbs up there! Awesome e-mail support! You can even use the Microsoft ActiveSync with Google Mail! And finally you have the option to have more than one Exchange servers configured (really? This is more often used than short messages or tasks?). It really combines all the data you have in a very cool way. Contacts from all services get merged into one, but you can always see where the telephone number you are just looking at in the contact sheet is coming from. If you have several calendars, you can assign colors or hide them. The phones calendar shows all the appointments at once, each with the right color, so you can easily see if it is e. g. private or business.

I can’t really say much about third party applications. I had access to the marketplace and it was full with stuff, both free and commercial. I don’t think there will be a lack of use(-less) apps to download.

Overall: I cannot wait to throw my HTC Touch Diamond 2 into the dustbin and start playing with one of HTC’s Phone 7 models! It is a cool step in the right direction, they surely didn’t invent something new, but I like it very, very much. If you are planning on a new phone and don’t want to be one of Apple’s Zombies, you really should check it out!