JClishe

The comment about the keyboard suprises me. I hate soft keyboards but the WP7 soft keyboard is the only that I even moderately like. I wonder if your experience is specific to the phones you tried?

Back in August there was a pre-season Carolina Panther football game, and at one point there was a contest on the jumbo tron where the first person to send a specific text message to a certain number would win a prize (I forget what the prize was, I think it was like a free pizza or something). Anyway the guy that won was using a pre-production WP7 phone. If you figure there were probably a few thousand people racing to bang out that text message on every phone imaginable and there was probably only 1 WP7 phone in the entire stadium, either the WP7 keyboard isn't *that* bad or the guy was incredibly lucky.

Jimmie76

Okay I have just had what I wrote deleted twice by the computer that I was writing on and so this review won't be as detailed. The keyboard may actually have a landscape mode I forgot to check or ask so I assume it is easier typing on it that way, or that I'm not that good on them. Something on my body either my watch or my skin seemed to hit the touch sensitive search button, or the home button, as I managed to end up staring at the Bing search screen far too often when I wasn't expecting it.

The phone I used has the odd distinction of having no email client, at all, although WP7 does offer Outlook it wasn't loaded on the unit, rather oddly. The girl was able to show me how to pin my webmail to the home (they call it start) screen, for easy access but it wasn't great. I can't understand why demo units haven't been loaded with it. There is all the Office suite usual stuff and they are all supposed to be (as near as damn it) full versions but then this is an MS phone so that is kind of expected. What I found really odd though was the tiles that whilst they seem a good idea are not being used to their full potential, they are able to show info about the application they relate to. However not all of them do, this is a limitation of the software as the girl said that this prevents having too many apps using the processor at once. I was told there is no Message catch all app though so SMS and Emails remain separate and according to the other demonstrator each email account appears on it's own tile which seems odd.

The People tile that contains contacts info that can and will be sucked in from Facebook (which is the MS social networking site of choice) does run in the background but doesn't show mini pictures of those who have just updated their status, it's just random. The phone and Text message (and I assume emails) tiles will give you a number on them, but no info about who has called or texted you, or indeed if they are missed calls/voicemails etc. Not really that great, and coming from a BlackBerry it just seems weird when that info can be on the home screen. The calendar tile does allow you to view the upcoming appointments but I was told this info also appears on the locked screen which is a worry. I don't want that info on my locked screen, I would rather it was private and invisible until I unlocked the phone. Also talking of the locked screen the camera can be activated whilst the phone is locked, which does seem rather handy as it would allow you to capture moments you might otherwise miss whilst unlocking it.

I didn't like the fact that there was no removable storage and this was apparently done to improve stability in the OS, which is worse on phones that have removable storage. However I've never noticed this as a problem on either of my BlackBerrys or indeed any of my phones. The girl was keen to stress that you are better off using the Zune pass service and use that to get music/movies. Although out of a wifi area that is coming out of your data allowance (which is small in my case) and no good abroad. I think I'll stick to my memory cards thanks all the same.

The browser is first rate and despite it being IE it was very quick at rendering and displaying pages. They do seem to come up as the full versions and not the mobile versions which would again worry me about the use of lots of data as a result. However that is the star attraction of the OS without a doubt. The GPS integration meant that when I searched for italian restaurants in the local setting it displayed lots of them close to my location and was able to guide me to them as well.

Being a BlackBerry user I found it too different for me and I'll be sticking to the Berry but it will appeal to some people, especially I suspect those who are new to smart phones.

My advice is still that you really should try before you buy.

Jimmie76

There are shortages of WP7 phones in the UK at the moment, one person told me that they had only got a limited number of handsets in their stores because that was what they could get out of the manufacturers.

Jimmie76

Okay so I have now used one of these phones in a mobile phone (cell phone) store and talked to someone in there who was seriously considering getting one. The Xbox live functionality wasn't something I had looked at or indeed considered as I don't do that, I'm much more a Wii person. However this was of interest to the other shopper as they said that they had an Xbox360 and fancy the idea of gaming on the phone far more than me.

The strange thing I hadn't noticed before was that some tiles don't take you to a screen sized app window, the window can be many times the width of the screen. For example the pictures app window (there must be an official name for these windows) is three or four times the width of the screen and this is slightly odd. When scrolling across the window you aren't moving in regimented steps, you can move as little or as much as you want. What this means that when you boot up the app, instead of the all the pictures on screen being visible in their entirety, some are only half visible and you have to scroll across to see them. I realise that this is just the inverse of a portrait layout and it would be possible to have pictures cut in half that way too. It's just that the phone is a portrait layout so I found it odd to be scrolling from left to right, with the lack of distinct delineated screens (or pages). To me anyway scrolling up and down would seem to make better use of the available screen space. See also Facebook below.

Talking of the available screen space, the home screen does not use the full available width of the screen for the tiles. At the top right hand corner you will see an arrow in a circle that takes you to the app list this means that a full 1-1.5cms is taken up with blank space on the right hand side. I say blank space because the back of the home screen stays black, there is no way to personalise it with a photo. So should you decide that you don't like the tiles and would just rather pick from the app list you have a black screen with the time at the very top and then the circled arrow beneath that. Very minimalist if you like that sort of thing.

The Calendar tile can only show your next (one) appointment, at least I could only get it to show one at a time. All the email accounts that you have are going to have a different tile each and there is no way of aggregating them together and for that reason you can't do the same with SMS or instant messaging and emails. Now if you want to sync your contacts from your email with Facebook then you'll probably love the fact that this will do it for you. Sadly there appears to be no way to sort contacts other than A-Z and when you sync with Facebook, everyone gets imported into the phonebook (contacts). So if you have 600 FB friends you are going to have all of them in your phonebook initially although after a bit of digging it appears that you can hide but not delete (on the phone) those that are only on FB and not already in your contacts. There is no way I would integrate my Facebook friends and contacts so that isn't a killer feature for me. Going back to the pictures app (I remembered from the original trial use of the phone) there is a bit of a weird one feature here in that it will automatically show your friends pictures as they upload them to facebook. Now if you do have 600+ and some of my friends have far more facebook friends, then that I suspect is going to get annoying. Especially after you find the umpteenth picture of their dog/child/walking holiday of Fresh Kills Landfill in NY on your pictures screen. Not to mention the data usage this will obviously take.

Not 100% sure but I don't think you can search the contacts for anything other than a name and that has to be in the name field. I added a fictional contact with a dummy corporation name and it didn't find the contact when I did a search. You can link contacts, but for the life of me I cannot remember anything else about that functionality.

I've been trying to find compelling reasons to switch from a BlackBerry to the WP7 (or failing that a reason to buy one to play with) and I just can't. Having one screen where all my messages (SMS, Emails, BBM etc) come into is very convenient and I just seem to prefer that.

The other shopper was actually talking to a sales assistant about gaming on the phones when I had to leave so I don't know if he was definitely going to get one.

I would be interested in knowing what other people think come the US launch on Monday.

wco81

Launch day sales are estimated to be only about 40,000.


http://www.thestreet.mobi/story/1091...-7-phones.html

ScottC

I'm getting my HD7 today

I'm giddy.

ScottC

Initial impression: Whoa.

Jimmie76

Good Whoa, or Bad Whoa?

ScottC

Very good whoa. Taken me completely by surprise. I'd seen the screenshots, but this is way better than any of them do it justice.

Also, a lot more apps in the marketplace than I had expected.

So far so good

Jimmie76

Have you let it access your Facebook to populate your contacts yet? If not I would hope you have read the warnings about that before attempting. I couldn't access the marketplace when I was playing with them so I have no idea how good that is. Glad you like it, the fact that there is no in built catch all application for all the messaging methods was a serious deal breaker for me.

ScottC

I don't use Facebook, so that won't be an issue...

I have noticed that my Gmail isn't push and I don't get my calendar synced with Google yet either. Time to tinker...

Jimmie76

Good Luck!

pseudoswede

What kind of warnings? Is that just for WP7 or also for Android phones, too? On my G2, I set up my Facebook account, then imported my contacts. I was surprised it was able to synchronize the Facebook profile photo to each contact so efficiently; however, it was a feature I really didn't care for.

ScottC

Was actually simple - email sync is set to default at 30 minutes, so I changed it to "as items arrive". In that same screen, I also found the calendar sync option.

So far so good

JClishe

I'm on Verizon so I won't have access to a WP7 phone for a few months, but I did swing by an AT&T store on Monday to play with the Focus. There was a sales rep talking to 4 customers crowded around the Focus. He had nothing but positive things to say, said that he even has an iPhone customer earlier in the day that exchanged his iPhone for the Focus. He also said that the staff at the AT&T store had been doing a bunch of performance tests with the Focus and the iPhone 4 side by side, and the Focus was faster for most functions.

I am seriously considering switching to AT&T for the Focus. VZW is only getting the HTC Trophy and the Focus is more appealing to me.