I don't entirely agree. Netbooks shot way up and then they were suddenly replaced by something better, the iPad. Improvements happen all the time. I am not sure what the improvement to the iPad will be, but lighter, with better input (pen please) etc. I would not be surprised if tablets overtake laptops at some point in time for the home market. Not yet, they are not good enough, but...
One month cost less than this book, and then you get access to all the books you could possibly digest. Sure, it is a monthly fee, but I would normally purchase more books than this... the fact that they are all online all the time also makes it great.
Does that apply globally to all phones running WP7
I thought it was pretty well known that providers are not allowed to do any modifications to the WP7 UI. Universally. If you didn't know this, how do you expect anyone to take your comments on WP7 seriously. It's one of the most discussed aspects of WP7 compared to older WinMo phones. It is also one of the things that has been debated in the Nokia deal.
Do I believe you when you say you have tested a WP7 phone? No, I don't, since you claim that it suffers in areas where everybody else says it shines. Why would your, and only your, experience be different? -- that is, unless the only thing you tested on the phone was the Twitter client (which isn't shipped with the phone, so I don't see how that could be). The official Twitter client for WP7 has performance issues for sure.
Botched customization of OS/UI: Not possible, customization not allowed.
Laden with bloatware: None of the distributors do, see the first point
Settings messed up: No settings could in any particular way impact the phone in the way you describe
It is safe to say that you were "saying about something that isn't that it is" as lying was once defined as. There is also another item that strongly indicates lying, this sentence fragment: each of the dozen or so. Yeah right. Lying indeed.
Well done, you've completely failed to address anything I said in my post
You didn't actually say anything in your post. You just threw out dumb accusations. No, I am not a shill, and I am certainly not paid by anyone to say what I think about WP7.
If you want to know why I like WP7 you could read any of the reviews of the product. They cover the basics. Here are some things though.
When I sit in my living room, my WP7 phone and my Galaxy Tab are on my Wi-Fi fine, with full coverage. The iPhone says there is no wi-fi to be found. That is one major issue.
When I drive from work to home talking to my wife, the iPhone will drop the conversation in three specific spots, without fail, my WP7 phone never hickups. The iPhone generally has significantly worse call quality throughout the trip. The two phones are not only on the same carrier, they are on the same subscriptions (you can have multiple phones with duplicate SIMs on my carrier).
The WP7 phone is well integrated with gmail and gmail contacts, which is my primary storage for contact info. If I add a contact to my phone, it will ask me where to create the contact, Google, Exchange, Windows Live. The iPhone doesn't sync with any of these (or Facebook) it just downloads (which is not enough).
Same integration level for images as for contacts and email. iPhone and Android offer nothing comparable.
The WP7 user experience is integrated and similar across the spectrum. Each iPhone app I have is different from the other. None are integrated with the OS in any meaningful way. Android is even worse.
Without unlocking my phone I can see, not only what time it is, but how many unread emails I have, when my next appointment is, how many SMSs I have etc. On the iPhone I can check what time it is and look at that pic of my wife yet another time.
Those are some of the things I like as a user.
As a developer i like the following. The WP7 phone has the best developer experience of any phone. With an enormous margin. It lacks a few things, it would be really odd if a V 1.0 product didn't, but even with what it lacks, I can put together a full cloud-enabled business application on the WP7 an order of magnitude faster than I can on any competing product. For enterprise app development, that is crucial.
Yes, and I used to own an Apple II, which I hated, and have therefore completely rejected OS X as an OS. If they couldn't make it work on the II, why would I think the Macintosh 20 years later was any different. Please, keep your mouth closed until it stops spewing nonsense. Seriously dude, if you are using HTC and Win Mo to judge WP7 you are just dumb.
As for integration - what do you want to integrate with? Google and gmail? WP7 does that better than the iPhone, but not better than Android (huge surprise). Facebook (WP7 does that better than anyone)? Which consumer problems are you needing to fix?
I went to college in the 1980s, so no, I am not that young. Is the WP7 experience perfect? Not even close. Are there badly designed apps out there? Sure. What you are describing sounds like someone using the Pivot view and not enabling wrapping where they (the software developer making the app that is) should have enabled wrapping. I saw some of that in early test versions of one of my apps, and I fixed it.
I wouldn't blame the phone or the OS for bad developer choices however.
I have no idea what phone you tried with WP7. As I mentioned, I am a developer and I work in the mobile space as well. I got the first WP7 phone that became available in my marked, the LG. It is widely considered the worst WP7 phone out there, and it beats the iPhone in almost every way. Connectivity and responsiveness being two of the more notable.
Sigh. So everybody who doesn't agree with you have to be part of a coordinated, presumably paid, campaign? Did it ever occur to you that you actually do not have all the answers. Moron.
Since you're being paid do endorse the product, maybe you could at least try to give your employers value for their money. This, for example, is an obvious shill comment, and will be disregarded on Slashdot:
Wow, so everybody who doesn't agree with your limited view of the world are paid shills? I must say, you are recovering quite remarkably from your brain-removal surgery, apart from that rather silly religious attitude you have acquired.
In the facebook app for an iPhone you can tell it to sync infomation with your contacts,
Who cares? I don't want an app to sync my Facebook contacts, another to sync my gmail contacts, a third to sync my Exchange contacts etc. I want my contacts, you know, all the ones I have on my phone, not in specific applications, to sync. This is one of the new aspects of the WP7 phone, you deal with data and entities. Not apps.
Compared to the WP7 phone, the iPhone looks like it was invented some time in the 1980s.
I would probably go so far as to say: Everybody who has used one. I switched from iPhone to WP7 for my primary mobile use simply because WP7 is a delight to use making the iPhone look like it was hacked together sometime in the mid 1980s.
Connectivity. With the same provider I have coverage with my WP7 phone where iPhone has nothing.
Integration, when I update a contact that is attached to my gmail account, the account gets updated on the phone and in gmail (not so with iPhone) and when I change info on a Facebook contact the facebook data for that contact gets updated (iPhone, Google: "face book contact? Huh?").
Programming environment. VS2010 and SL for WP7 is several years ahead of anything for iPhone or Android. I can put together connected cloud applications in a fraction of the time I can do the same on iPhone and Andriod. Important to me since I do enterprise app dev,
UI, it has some things that MS needs to change, but it leaves Android and iPhone in the 1980s.
Easy to answer: Anyone who has actually tried one. As a mobile developer (enterprise only) I have had an iPhone since the 3G and my main living room entertainment center is a Galaxy Tab. I also got the WP7 phone for an in-house project where I was required to evaluate it. After a couple of weeks of using it it replaced my iPhone as my primary mobile device. It is heads and shoulders above the iPhone in almost any respect.
Eh, let's see if your "logic" holds up. The winner wins $15,000 AND the machine they hack. So, what would a rational person do, hack the easiest in an attempt to win $15,000 AND a $2,000 laptop, or hack the hardest in an effort to (most likely) ONLY win the $2,000 laptop.
I am certain that a Mac fanboi would go straight for the "un-hackable" Apple iron, any rational person would go straight for the box he figured he could hack the fastest though. I think these guys are relatively rational.
Sure it is, Apple turned into the Evil Empire long ago. The only question is how many orders of magnitude more evil than Microsoft the religious Apple Fanbois are going to allow Apple to become before actually admitting that Jobs is in fact not God.
Sigh. Why is it that whenever someone says something that brainless Apple fanbois don't like, it has to be paid for by MS or something?
I own an iPhone 3G and a 3GS. I was planning on getting a new one this year as my contract expires, I still might do that. I got a WP7 phone because I need to keep an eye on what goes on in all markets, and I also needed to look into what programming for WP7 was like. Just in case it took off. I therefore bought the cheapest (and incidentally the only one available on my carrier) WP7 handset out there, the LG. As a developer, keeping an eye on other platforms and options is paramount, and honestly, in my opinion, if you are mobile developer and you are not investigating WP7 development are just being irresponsible. This is why, in addition to my two iPhones, the WP7 phone I also own a Galaxy Tab.
I have quite a few apps on my iPhone, mostly productivity stuff, and also, very important I have Amazon Kindle with all my books. It is crucial for travel.
Once Amazon delivered Kindle for WP7, I had all the mandatory functionality I needed for WP7, and, to what would have been a huge surprise to me before getting the WP7 phone, this is now the handset I carry on a day-to-day basis. Honestly, it blows my 3GS out of the water when it comes to usability.
I have also spent a little time developing for WP7. Having done Java for large-scale commercial apps (at IBM among other companies) the move to C# was trivial, and held a number of very, very pleasant surprises. C# is clearly an improvement over Java for app development, and with the work that has gone into LINQ and the new features in 4, doing enterprise apps in C# has significantly higher productivity than in Java. Particularly if you are prevented from using Spring, but even with Spring, Java lags behind.Net right now, except for of course cross-platform features. For anything that needs to run cross-platform, Java is still king. Obviously
Now, back to developing for WP7. The first app I created is basically a standard enterprise offering. Relational DB store, app with a SOAP interface, HTML component, and in this case, a WP7 client. I had never worked with Azure before, and I had never worked with WP7 development prior to sitting down. I started after driving my wife to the airport Sunday at 5. I had the cloud services, the SOAP interface and the web interface, plus the WP7 app, fully done before going to bed. I went to bed early enough not to fall asleep in meetings the next morning. The app displays data, does statistical calculations on the data, allows creation and storage of new data to the cloud from the phone, etc.
There is not a single platform in the world where I could have done this as fast. The.Net infrastructure, with Azure, SQL storage, WP7 etc, enabled the putting together of a real enterprise app in a few hours, without knowing the platform beforehand. Honestly, for business apps, this combo is several orders of magnitude more efficient than any competition right now.
As an enterprise app developer this is crucial. I am asked to put together meaningful solutions involving a number of data sources all the time. There is currently nothing that comes close to supporting this like the MS stack does at the moment.
BTW, I used to be a serious critic of MS in the 1990s and later on. I was an avid user of OS2 from Warp on. The majority of my work has been on Sun and HP servers using Java, and later on, on Linux using Java. I am not, and have never been, an MS fanboi. I do know what works for whatever situation I am in, and for ad-hoc enterprise apps where mobile is a requirement, the closest you get to MS productivity is probably Ruby on Rails. My second favorite at the moment. Rails doesn't do cloud like Azure does though. Not yet.
Could you elaborate on this one or are you just making stuff up as you go? For the record, I have been using iPhones for a few years, and am now on WP7. It was a significant step forward in almost all areas - excepting the obvious and well reported ones.
Slashdot Mirror
1984
I don't entirely agree. Netbooks shot way up and then they were suddenly replaced by something better, the iPad. Improvements happen all the time. I am not sure what the improvement to the iPad will be, but lighter, with better input (pen please) etc. I would not be surprised if tablets overtake laptops at some point in time for the home market. Not yet, they are not good enough, but...
'nuf said.
One month cost less than this book, and then you get access to all the books you could possibly digest. Sure, it is a monthly fee, but I would normally purchase more books than this... the fact that they are all online all the time also makes it great.
You are absolutely correct, Facebook contact data can not be changed.
Does that apply globally to all phones running WP7
I thought it was pretty well known that providers are not allowed to do any modifications to the WP7 UI. Universally. If you didn't know this, how do you expect anyone to take your comments on WP7 seriously. It's one of the most discussed aspects of WP7 compared to older WinMo phones. It is also one of the things that has been debated in the Nokia deal.
Do I believe you when you say you have tested a WP7 phone? No, I don't, since you claim that it suffers in areas where everybody else says it shines. Why would your, and only your, experience be different? -- that is, unless the only thing you tested on the phone was the Twitter client (which isn't shipped with the phone, so I don't see how that could be). The official Twitter client for WP7 has performance issues for sure.
Let's look at your possibilities:
It is safe to say that you were "saying about something that isn't that it is" as lying was once defined as. There is also another item that strongly indicates lying, this sentence fragment: each of the dozen or so. Yeah right. Lying indeed.
Well done, you've completely failed to address anything I said in my post
You didn't actually say anything in your post. You just threw out dumb accusations. No, I am not a shill, and I am certainly not paid by anyone to say what I think about WP7.
If you want to know why I like WP7 you could read any of the reviews of the product. They cover the basics. Here are some things though.
Those are some of the things I like as a user.
As a developer i like the following. The WP7 phone has the best developer experience of any phone. With an enormous margin. It lacks a few things, it would be really odd if a V 1.0 product didn't, but even with what it lacks, I can put together a full cloud-enabled business application on the WP7 an order of magnitude faster than I can on any competing product. For enterprise app development, that is crucial.
Win Mobile 6
Yes, and I used to own an Apple II, which I hated, and have therefore completely rejected OS X as an OS. If they couldn't make it work on the II, why would I think the Macintosh 20 years later was any different. Please, keep your mouth closed until it stops spewing nonsense. Seriously dude, if you are using HTC and Win Mo to judge WP7 you are just dumb.
As for integration - what do you want to integrate with? Google and gmail? WP7 does that better than the iPhone, but not better than Android (huge surprise). Facebook (WP7 does that better than anyone)? Which consumer problems are you needing to fix?
Funny thing, I have never heard anyone say that the WP7 UI is slow, so I have to assume the poster who claimed it was sluggish is simply lying.
Better, how? Be specific if you can.
I went to college in the 1980s, so no, I am not that young. Is the WP7 experience perfect? Not even close. Are there badly designed apps out there? Sure. What you are describing sounds like someone using the Pivot view and not enabling wrapping where they (the software developer making the app that is) should have enabled wrapping. I saw some of that in early test versions of one of my apps, and I fixed it.
I wouldn't blame the phone or the OS for bad developer choices however.
I have no idea what phone you tried with WP7. As I mentioned, I am a developer and I work in the mobile space as well. I got the first WP7 phone that became available in my marked, the LG. It is widely considered the worst WP7 phone out there, and it beats the iPhone in almost every way. Connectivity and responsiveness being two of the more notable.
Sigh. So everybody who doesn't agree with you have to be part of a coordinated, presumably paid, campaign? Did it ever occur to you that you actually do not have all the answers. Moron.
Since you're being paid do endorse the product, maybe you could at least try to give your employers value for their money. This, for example, is an obvious shill comment, and will be disregarded on Slashdot:
Wow, so everybody who doesn't agree with your limited view of the world are paid shills? I must say, you are recovering quite remarkably from your brain-removal surgery, apart from that rather silly religious attitude you have acquired.
In the facebook app for an iPhone you can tell it to sync infomation with your contacts,
Who cares? I don't want an app to sync my Facebook contacts, another to sync my gmail contacts, a third to sync my Exchange contacts etc. I want my contacts, you know, all the ones I have on my phone, not in specific applications, to sync. This is one of the new aspects of the WP7 phone, you deal with data and entities. Not apps.
Compared to the WP7 phone, the iPhone looks like it was invented some time in the 1980s.
I would probably go so far as to say: Everybody who has used one. I switched from iPhone to WP7 for my primary mobile use simply because WP7 is a delight to use making the iPhone look like it was hacked together sometime in the mid 1980s.
Wow. I don't drive cars, since I once tried to ride a horse and it shat all over the road when you were "driving" it. Moron.
Easy to answer: Anyone who has actually tried one. As a mobile developer (enterprise only) I have had an iPhone since the 3G and my main living room entertainment center is a Galaxy Tab. I also got the WP7 phone for an in-house project where I was required to evaluate it. After a couple of weeks of using it it replaced my iPhone as my primary mobile device. It is heads and shoulders above the iPhone in almost any respect.
Eh, let's see if your "logic" holds up. The winner wins $15,000 AND the machine they hack. So, what would a rational person do, hack the easiest in an attempt to win $15,000 AND a $2,000 laptop, or hack the hardest in an effort to (most likely) ONLY win the $2,000 laptop.
I am certain that a Mac fanboi would go straight for the "un-hackable" Apple iron, any rational person would go straight for the box he figured he could hack the fastest though. I think these guys are relatively rational.
Sure it is, Apple turned into the Evil Empire long ago. The only question is how many orders of magnitude more evil than Microsoft the religious Apple Fanbois are going to allow Apple to become before actually admitting that Jobs is in fact not God.
This is absurd, insane and stupid. What on earth would this accomplish. Just create a better JIT will you, and develop in Java.
How much does MS pay you?
Sigh. Why is it that whenever someone says something that brainless Apple fanbois don't like, it has to be paid for by MS or something?
I own an iPhone 3G and a 3GS. I was planning on getting a new one this year as my contract expires, I still might do that. I got a WP7 phone because I need to keep an eye on what goes on in all markets, and I also needed to look into what programming for WP7 was like. Just in case it took off. I therefore bought the cheapest (and incidentally the only one available on my carrier) WP7 handset out there, the LG. As a developer, keeping an eye on other platforms and options is paramount, and honestly, in my opinion, if you are mobile developer and you are not investigating WP7 development are just being irresponsible. This is why, in addition to my two iPhones, the WP7 phone I also own a Galaxy Tab.
I have quite a few apps on my iPhone, mostly productivity stuff, and also, very important I have Amazon Kindle with all my books. It is crucial for travel.
Once Amazon delivered Kindle for WP7, I had all the mandatory functionality I needed for WP7, and, to what would have been a huge surprise to me before getting the WP7 phone, this is now the handset I carry on a day-to-day basis. Honestly, it blows my 3GS out of the water when it comes to usability.
I have also spent a little time developing for WP7. Having done Java for large-scale commercial apps (at IBM among other companies) the move to C# was trivial, and held a number of very, very pleasant surprises. C# is clearly an improvement over Java for app development, and with the work that has gone into LINQ and the new features in 4, doing enterprise apps in C# has significantly higher productivity than in Java. Particularly if you are prevented from using Spring, but even with Spring, Java lags behind .Net right now, except for of course cross-platform features. For anything that needs to run cross-platform, Java is still king. Obviously
Now, back to developing for WP7. The first app I created is basically a standard enterprise offering. Relational DB store, app with a SOAP interface, HTML component, and in this case, a WP7 client. I had never worked with Azure before, and I had never worked with WP7 development prior to sitting down. I started after driving my wife to the airport Sunday at 5. I had the cloud services, the SOAP interface and the web interface, plus the WP7 app, fully done before going to bed. I went to bed early enough not to fall asleep in meetings the next morning. The app displays data, does statistical calculations on the data, allows creation and storage of new data to the cloud from the phone, etc.
There is not a single platform in the world where I could have done this as fast. The .Net infrastructure, with Azure, SQL storage, WP7 etc, enabled the putting together of a real enterprise app in a few hours, without knowing the platform beforehand. Honestly, for business apps, this combo is several orders of magnitude more efficient than any competition right now.
As an enterprise app developer this is crucial. I am asked to put together meaningful solutions involving a number of data sources all the time. There is currently nothing that comes close to supporting this like the MS stack does at the moment.
BTW, I used to be a serious critic of MS in the 1990s and later on. I was an avid user of OS2 from Warp on. The majority of my work has been on Sun and HP servers using Java, and later on, on Linux using Java. I am not, and have never been, an MS fanboi. I do know what works for whatever situation I am in, and for ad-hoc enterprise apps where mobile is a requirement, the closest you get to MS productivity is probably Ruby on Rails. My second favorite at the moment. Rails doesn't do cloud like Azure does though. Not yet.
with a half baked failure like Win phone 7
Could you elaborate on this one or are you just making stuff up as you go? For the record, I have been using iPhones for a few years, and am now on WP7. It was a significant step forward in almost all areas - excepting the obvious and well reported ones.