I've been playing with mine for a few hours. Some thoughts.
Really impressed with the responsiveness of the OS, the keyboard is very impressive and it's pretty.
Achievement/Avatar integration is quite nice, though all the avatar stuff is broken at the moment because of the proportion change.
State-saving is app dependant. Hopefully dev's will get a bit better at it. The free game Flowerz brings it back directly to a resume button to pick up where you left off, but other games go back to the main menu. It really depends on the app though. I'll give a quick run down of the trial games I got. The current state saving is also not perfect. The option to select which state you want to resume would be nice, as some games when you exit them they will clear the "back" cache, and there's no option to go forward through the states. So you could play some Uno, then some Monopoly, then back to Uno. But you wouldn't be able to go back-back to Monopoly again. But it is still functional as is, especially if you're just flicking back and forth between a game and calls or texting.
Loading times on The Harvest is absolutely crazy. Uno, Monopoly, Twin Blades and The Sims are a bit lengthy too.
Games:
Earthworm Jim HD : The exact point you left from and if you exit the app by accidently tapping the Search/Home buttons you can quickly go back to the game without having to reload (you can hear the music in the background until it goes into its hibernation state). If you are doing something else, it will save that state. If you have to go through the xbox hub to restart the game, it will start the game as if it was a fresh run. If you press back until you get to the game, it will resume from the save-state.
Monopoly: Game reloads to a a pause screen when going to home screen and back. Pretty much the same as EWJ.
Tetris: Says that it is resuming, but still requires a full load upon return. No state-save.
Uno: Same as EWJ and Monopoly.
Sims 3: It's the Sims, the game pretty much is state-saving. But for clarification it doesn't state-save like the other games. You have to reload the game and select your character, even when going back to the game. But your character is standing where you left them.
Twin Blades: State saved on a level basis. When you resume the game you will be on that level, but all the zombies will be respawned. Starting the game anew will take you to the menu.
The Harvest: Doesn't state save, coupled with massive load times (upwards of a minute) means you're gonna wanna be comfortable before you start playing. The game does pick up from where you quit last time though, so it's like the Sims 3 in that aspect. Try the demo.
Non-game Apps:
Youtube: This app literally just loads up internet explorer and points it to m.youtube.com...
I didn't see any other app that I would use. If you want me to test a specific one, let me know and I'll check it out.
Over all I'm super stoked with the phone. I love me some cheevos, and the phone functions are very slick.
I am happy to answer specific questions. If you want to know, post here or send me a private message.
judging from the reviews the lack of third party multitasking is a big problem
I can totally understand why MSFT went this route initially. If they just left it open, they would end up with customers inadvertently leave apps running that would drain the battery to nothing within an hour. Customers would say, "This phone sucks!" instead of recognizing that a) it's their fault or b) it's the fault of app developers for not gracefully handling the case when their app has been moved into the background. The only way to enforce good app behavior was to prevent bad app behavior from occurring at all. First/Second party developers are allowed to background their apps because they have direct accountability to MS for making sure their apps behave.
tl;dr - Customers would blame the phone for apps draining the battery if 3rd party apps could be multi-tasked.
The player integration stuff itself is great. To skip a track just tap the volume rocker and you'll get a last/play/next touch screen drop down from the top. You can also set your phone to vibrate/ring in that drop down. The Zune menu's are pretty tricky to work out coming from a iPod Touch, but I like the style of the player, and will hopefully have its workings down soon. My biggest complaint, as it is with all pmp's these days, there's no hardware next/previous, I either have to dig the device out of my pocket or fumble around blindly until I hit next.
I just bought a Zune pass to test this stuff out. I am having trouble streaming on my motzart. It tells me to try log into my account again, but I can download music fine. This could be because I live in Australia (which doesn't have its own Zune Pass service) and it wont let me stream. Or I might not have the phone set up right. I'm going to keep testing and get back to you guys.
EDIT:
Ignore that, it's streaming now. I think I was just out of reception range. I'm missing any sign of Smart DJ though, hopefully that will come in an update. Being able to stream new music like I do on my PC would top the experience.
I just bought a Zune pass to test this stuff out. I am having trouble streaming on my motzart. It tells me to try log into my account again, but I can download music fine. This could be because I live in Australia (which doesn't have its own Zune Pass service) and it wont let me stream. Or I might not have the phone set up right. I'm going to keep testing and get back to you guys.
EDIT:
Ignore that, it's streaming now. I think I was just out of reception range. I'm missing any sign of Smart DJ though, hopefully that will come in an update. Being able to stream new music like I do on my PC would top the experience.
This makes me really happy; I'm in Singapore but have a Zune Pass and got a bit worried that the demo devices on display had Marketplace missing.
I did change my phone settings before attempting any of this stuff, all my region's (except timezone) are set to the US. I'm not sure if it made a difference, I know you have to do that on the PC. It could explain why the demo unit's weren't showing the marketplace. So if you're having any troubles with your phone when you get it, try change the region settings and it should fix it up.
I had a feeling that would do the trick; I figured even if I couldn't get Marketplace, I'd be fine with just having my DRMed content on there (hell, that's all my Zune 80 does now, and I'm cool with that.)
Was worried that somehow it'd be running a build which didn't even have the bits of code that would let it playback Zune DRM, though; thanks for the information
Can't wait for one of these to come to Verizon. I'm also happy to see Zune get more love, because even though it didn't sell well, I've always thought it was a fantastic media player and service.
Ars Technica review was pretty interesting. From looking over the reviews, seems that most people say that MS has got a chance, but they're being very hesitant, which is to be expected. They're going up against a opponent who is heavily entrenched, has a huge mind-share, and their device is the Kleenex of smartphones. I think just the fact that people are saying they've got a chance is very telling. We'll have to see if developers will support it, but that's gonna be tricky. Spend time and money on developing for a solid and large userbase, or develop for a small and unknown. (Don't know if builds for iOS and WP7 are compatable in any way)
Just bout the only thing that could hurt Apple and get MS developers is their walled garden attitude. I can see a lot of developers willing to take a chance if they can get out of the rules of Apple...But it's hard to say no to that number of users. In any case, I think the smartphone wars have really started to heat up. Which is good for us :-D Competition means better products all around.
Ghostly Clockwork on
FTC: honk.
FTC: HONK.
PAX Prime 2014 Resistance Tournament Winner
Yeah, it looks like they really did a good job of making sure that whatever they released would be solid. It's tough since no one remembers the iPhone back before the App store (and to be honest, it doesn't entirely matter at this point), but it's good to see Microsoft take it seriously.
Given the support that Windows Mobile had from developers, and if they do Exchange and Office integration correctly, I could really see businesses move to these from RIM or Apple. We have a BES at work and we still have plenty of issues with our Blackberry connections, and Blackberry was (still is?) one of the best Exchange integrations available.
The biggest question is just going to be app developers. I don't know what MS requires to develop for the platform, but they really need to be open and available for them to try it out easily and give them a chance to see if it's worth adding it to development or switching.
As far as users, I think there's enough people who like the Zune integration, 360 integration, and Office integration without third party apps that they'll get a solid user base pretty quickly. It will help when they release on Verizon and Sprint though. I know a lot of companies (and government) still have Sprint/Nextel accounts for two-way, and won't switch to AT&T and give up stupid direct connect for it.
Just bout the only thing that could hurt Apple and get MS developers is their walled garden attitude. I can see a lot of developers willing to take a chance if they can get out of the rules of Apple...
Not really, Apple's rules aren't that unreasonable to begin with.
A walled garden helps keep quality stuff in, and crappy stuff out. Without the walled garden, the App store would be full of substantially more crap without much noticeable increase in quality apps.
Just bout the only thing that could hurt Apple and get MS developers is their walled garden attitude. I can see a lot of developers willing to take a chance if they can get out of the rules of Apple...
Not really, Apple's rules aren't that unreasonable to begin with.
A walled garden helps keep quality stuff in, and crappy stuff out. Without the walled garden, the App store would be full of substantially more crap without much noticeable increase in quality apps.
The preponderance of fart apps suggests that this is not the case. Apps are often kept out of the app store not for deficiencies in quality, but for competing with Apple's core functionalities or, worse, for no stated reasons at all.
WP7 apps are .NET affairs. Most of the dev tools are free (Visual Studio 2010 Express, the added phone compiler, Silverlight I think). Not sure about the back end. That said, the duo of Visual Studio 2010 and Expression Studio 4 is what Microsoft is aiming for, with Silverlight as the bridge between the two.
Devs don't NEED the two expensive programs to create apps, but it's smoother if they do, especially for the UI. Expression Studio 4 is Microsoft's Photoshop/Flash combo.
Still, there are ways around the costs with the BizSpark and WebsiteSpark programs. The latter gives access to Visual Studio 2010 Professional and Expression Studio 4 for three years for $100. There are some other caveats, but they're easy to work around.
Microsoft is really pushing the development side of the equation, at least internally. They gave just about all their employees free handsets this summer with the intention of having them write apps. Not sure what they've done for 3rd party devs, but I'm sure they're trying to entice them.
I'm happy to hear that copy & paste will be patched in early next year. I'd like to hear some news on the multiplayer gaming front. Having them all be RESTful only is kind of lame. They need real-time options.
The dev tools for WP7 have been out for almost a year, and that includes the free version of Visual Studio Express. The dev tools are all in .NET, specifically Silverlight and XNA, both of which are already widely used on other platforms. One of the big selling points to developers has been that they didn't have to learn a new language, if you were a C# progammer, you were already a WP7 developer. The big question is not how easy it will be for developers, because MS has removed that barrier, but it will be about customer acceptance of the phone itself that will help dive app sales.
No one wants to learn Objective C, except if they want to write apps for the iPhone. There's enough monetary incentive in potential app sales that people were willing to learn yet another (painful) variant of C to get in on the action.
MS hasn't been handing out money to devs, but it has been extremely proactive in making sure that there will be a huge community of developers ready to go at launch.
The main issue I had with the reviews is that they use iPhone as a standard to multitasking now and any phone that comes out without it is now behind the times. iPhone multitasking is just months old! The phone existed for years without it but now that 4.0 no phone can exist without this process and is a major detriment to the review.
In other news I will get one of these to test at work. I am looking forward to it.
The main issue I had with the reviews is that they use iPhone as a standard to multitasking now and any phone that comes out without it is now behind the times. iPhone multitasking is just months old! The phone existed for years without it but now that 4.0 no phone can exist without this process and is a major detriment to the review.
In other news I will get one of these to test at work. I am looking forward to it.
This. If people were buying iPhones in droves for years before they had multitasking, obviously the majority of the population won't know or care that these phones do not have it. They won't realize it either until they download Pandora and then leave the app to find out it doesn't keep playing. And if they never upgraded to iOS4, they won't care because their iPhone didn't work that way either.
We care, but the majority of the public probably doesn't. Just like the majority of the public probably doesn't care about copy/paste either.
Well, the public cares, because the news says, "And it can't Copy and paste!" They don't know/care/remember that the iPhone didn't have it either. On a personal note, I'm not sure why you need Pandora for iPhone or WP7, they both have built in media players, and WP7 even has the Zune stuff for streaming. Course, it could make you waffles for breakfast, and some people would still yell, "What? No strawberries? SUCKS, Way to go M$!"
God, I just died a little inside typeing that $....But yah, Looking forward to more people's thoughts on it, I'm gonna have to wait a while, India isn't great for getting new phones, at least where I am.
Ghostly Clockwork on
FTC: honk.
FTC: HONK.
PAX Prime 2014 Resistance Tournament Winner
Just bout the only thing that could hurt Apple and get MS developers is their walled garden attitude. I can see a lot of developers willing to take a chance if they can get out of the rules of Apple...
Not really, Apple's rules aren't that unreasonable to begin with.
A walled garden helps keep quality stuff in, and crappy stuff out. Without the walled garden, the App store would be full of substantially more crap without much noticeable increase in quality apps.
The preponderance of fart apps suggests that this is not the case. Apps are often kept out of the app store not for deficiencies in quality, but for competing with Apple's core functionalities or, worse, for no stated reasons at all.
Fallacy. Those fart apps flooded the store before Apple finally said one day "No more fucking fart apps" and then never approved another one again. Apple has not yet made a precedent for re-reviewing old apps like these and taking them down from the store. They should though.
And developers who are competing with Apple's core functionality know exactly what they are doing, and have no reason to be surprised when they get rejected, unless they happened to be working on the same exact thing as Apple in parallel, which is usually not the case.
And Apple has never rejected an App for "no reason". They always give a reason as to why your app was rejected.
The biggest problem is that Apple doesn't have an explicit set of guidelines for what apps are and are not allowed. App developers have found their apps rejected for all kinds of arbitrary reasons, only to have them accepted when there is enough of a media outcry over their rejection.
Worst of all, Apple does not always specify why an app was rejected. They still haven't explained why google voice is banned from the app store, for instance.
The point is, if you're going for a walled-garden approach for your ecosystem, it would be nice to spell out the list of rules. But enough about the iPhone, lets talk more about WP7.
One of the things I was thrilled about when I got my Blackberry Curve was the fact that Verizon couldn't lock out ringtones in an effort to nickel and dime me some more. I think I was more excited about that than being able to surf the web with my phone.
This is the kind of thing that will drive consumers away from a product.
Can confirm that there is no obvious way to make a personal ring tone. Which is pure insanity, as you can make custom ringtones for different people... who puts generic ringtones on specific people?
It's not a big deal to me, I generally use the ring like ringtones anyway. But it just seems strange that they wouldn't add it as an option.
As an aside: I say no "obvious way" because changing the background picture for the "Picture" hub confused me for a while too. You have to tap and hold the background of the hub to get a drop down option, but no other hub that I've seen has a tap and hold option.
The biggest problem is that Apple doesn't have an explicit set of guidelines for what apps are and are not allowed. App developers have found their apps rejected for all kinds of arbitrary reasons, only to have them accepted when there is enough of a media outcry over their rejection.
Yes, they do. And they tell you in pretty much no uncertain terms.
Another annoyance that I haven't figured out yet. Zune/ringer/alarm volumes are the same thing. I don't want to shred my ears while listening to music, but I also want to hear my phone and my alarm, especially in the morning.
EDIT: I'm dumb, yay for selecting edit, but typing in the Post Quick box.
The biggest problem is that Apple doesn't have an explicit set of guidelines for what apps are and are not allowed. App developers have found their apps rejected for all kinds of arbitrary reasons, only to have them accepted when there is enough of a media outcry over their rejection.
Yes, they do. And they tell you in pretty much no uncertain terms.
My mistake. I hadn't looked at the iPhone development environment for a few months. Still, this is not the place for this debate.
My point is, the "walled garden" argument for quality of applications isn't valid. What matters is how many good apps there are, not the total proportion of good apps to bad apps. Android has a lot of useful apps that simply aren't available to the iPhone because of this, and I hope WP7 tends more towards the former than the latter.
Another annoyance that I haven't figured out yet. Zune/ringer/alarm volumes are the same thing. I don't want to shred my ears while listening to music, but I also want to hear my phone and my alarm, especially in the morning.
EDIT: I'm dumb, yay for selecting edit, but typing in the Post Quick box.
Which model phone did you end up getting? Thinking of getting the HD7 as a secondary phone to my N900, though could also look at the HD2.
Another annoyance that I haven't figured out yet. Zune/ringer/alarm volumes are the same thing. I don't want to shred my ears while listening to music, but I also want to hear my phone and my alarm, especially in the morning.
EDIT: I'm dumb, yay for selecting edit, but typing in the Post Quick box.
Which model phone did you end up getting? Thinking of getting the HD7 as a secondary phone to my N900, though could also look at the HD2.
I grabbed a HTC 7 Motzart, though I am pretty sure that was my only option in Australia anyway. We are getting an LG soon, but the entire market is HTC's at launch.
Can confirm that there is no obvious way to make a personal ring tone. Which is pure insanity, as you can make custom ringtones for different people... who puts generic ringtones on specific people?
It's not a big deal to me, I generally use the ring like ringtones anyway. But it just seems strange that they wouldn't add it as an option.
As an aside: I say no "obvious way" because changing the background picture for the "Picture" hub confused me for a while too. You have to tap and hold the background of the hub to get a drop down option, but no other hub that I've seen has a tap and hold option.
I've got an iPhone here and I'm of the opinion that almost all ringtones are crap. I made a custom ringtone by ripping the music from Speedball 2 and my text message sound is "It's'a me, Mario!" from Mario 64. (currently have to jailbreak it to have custom text message sounds, supposedly changing in a future update)
I would hate having to be stuck with any of the default ringtones.
Another annoyance that I haven't figured out yet. Zune/ringer/alarm volumes are the same thing. I don't want to shred my ears while listening to music, but I also want to hear my phone and my alarm, especially in the morning.
EDIT: I'm dumb, yay for selecting edit, but typing in the Post Quick box.
Which model phone did you end up getting? Thinking of getting the HD7 as a secondary phone to my N900, though could also look at the HD2.
I grabbed a HTC 7 Motzart, though I am pretty sure that was my only option in Australia anyway. We are getting an LG soon, but the entire market is HTC's at launch.
I know the UK has the HD7, the Motzart, the LG optimus 7 and due soon is the Samsung Onima 7 (however its spelt)
I looked at the Motzart has very nice specs but the unit feels bit plastic compared to the HD 7. What do you think of the phone?
Seriously impressed at how quickly this thing boots.
EDIT: Brief impressions after playing with it for a while. For context, I'm coming from a HTC Hero and all my stuff is on a Google account. I have a Windows Live account using said Gmail as a login, and a Zune Pass.
I like the general responsiveness, and how everything's pretty snappy. The way it handles a lockscreen password is pretty neat - when you swipe the picture upwards, it drags in the keypad to let you enter it.
The calendar is nice, but as has been pointed out, it doesn't support multiple calendars from a single Google account for whatever reason (at least, I can't find how). This is my only annoyance with it, since I use two different calendars - one for work appointments, and one for personal. To work around it I just copied the work events into the personal one, but it's something I hope will get fixed.
Having Zune on here is great. My collection is still syncing, but I briefly tested the playback and it works as expected. Second overall annoyance (again, as has been brought up before): no independent volume control for headset/speaker. Quick experimentation shows I have to have the volume whilst unplugged at 25 to hear the ringtone, but while I have earbuds in, music is considered "loud" to me at 3/4. You can see where this might be a problem if you forget to change the volume before plugging in.
(At the very least, unplugging a headset will pause audio playback.)
Tried browsing to these forums using IE, which brought up another quirk: the font sizes are inconsistent. All the announcements appear wtfhuge, while the thread titles are in a smaller (yet still quite big) size. When viewing a topic, all the stuff that appears in a poster's identity (name, location, etc.) are one size, while the actual contents of the post are a much larger size - large enough to read (with a little squinting) when zoomed out all the way.
Hardware-wise, I like the overall design. Having physical buttons is nice, and the phone feels pretty great in the hand. Only two issues I found: the camera button is in a position that can be clicked pretty easily (although it's a two-step kind of deal, so I haven't actually triggered it by accident, just depressed it to the first step), and the speaker sounds kind of blurry in calls. Speakerphone works fine, though.
(Just realised this is pretty much all negative, but they're the only things that stand out. Still pretty happy with the phone.)
EDIT 2: Ahah, that's smart. If you have a PIN lock on the phone, and press and hold the camera button, you can still take pictures with the camera - when you try to hit the Windows key, though, it throws you into the lockscreen to enter the PIN.
Can you try something for me? I thought I read somewhere that if the phone is off, and you hit the camera button, it'll power quickly into camera mode and snap a picture without waiting for the phone to boot. Is that true?
Posts
Really impressed with the responsiveness of the OS, the keyboard is very impressive and it's pretty.
Achievement/Avatar integration is quite nice, though all the avatar stuff is broken at the moment because of the proportion change.
State-saving is app dependant. Hopefully dev's will get a bit better at it. The free game Flowerz brings it back directly to a resume button to pick up where you left off, but other games go back to the main menu. It really depends on the app though. I'll give a quick run down of the trial games I got. The current state saving is also not perfect. The option to select which state you want to resume would be nice, as some games when you exit them they will clear the "back" cache, and there's no option to go forward through the states. So you could play some Uno, then some Monopoly, then back to Uno. But you wouldn't be able to go back-back to Monopoly again. But it is still functional as is, especially if you're just flicking back and forth between a game and calls or texting.
Loading times on The Harvest is absolutely crazy. Uno, Monopoly, Twin Blades and The Sims are a bit lengthy too.
Games:
Earthworm Jim HD : The exact point you left from and if you exit the app by accidently tapping the Search/Home buttons you can quickly go back to the game without having to reload (you can hear the music in the background until it goes into its hibernation state). If you are doing something else, it will save that state. If you have to go through the xbox hub to restart the game, it will start the game as if it was a fresh run. If you press back until you get to the game, it will resume from the save-state.
Monopoly: Game reloads to a a pause screen when going to home screen and back. Pretty much the same as EWJ.
Tetris: Says that it is resuming, but still requires a full load upon return. No state-save.
Uno: Same as EWJ and Monopoly.
Sims 3: It's the Sims, the game pretty much is state-saving. But for clarification it doesn't state-save like the other games. You have to reload the game and select your character, even when going back to the game. But your character is standing where you left them.
Twin Blades: State saved on a level basis. When you resume the game you will be on that level, but all the zombies will be respawned. Starting the game anew will take you to the menu.
The Harvest: Doesn't state save, coupled with massive load times (upwards of a minute) means you're gonna wanna be comfortable before you start playing. The game does pick up from where you quit last time though, so it's like the Sims 3 in that aspect. Try the demo.
Non-game Apps:
Youtube: This app literally just loads up internet explorer and points it to m.youtube.com...
I didn't see any other app that I would use. If you want me to test a specific one, let me know and I'll check it out.
Over all I'm super stoked with the phone. I love me some cheevos, and the phone functions are very slick.
I am happy to answer specific questions. If you want to know, post here or send me a private message.
I can totally understand why MSFT went this route initially. If they just left it open, they would end up with customers inadvertently leave apps running that would drain the battery to nothing within an hour. Customers would say, "This phone sucks!" instead of recognizing that a) it's their fault or b) it's the fault of app developers for not gracefully handling the case when their app has been moved into the background. The only way to enforce good app behavior was to prevent bad app behavior from occurring at all. First/Second party developers are allowed to background their apps because they have direct accountability to MS for making sure their apps behave.
tl;dr - Customers would blame the phone for apps draining the battery if 3rd party apps could be multi-tasked.
1) MS wants you to use the Zune service. Which IMO is vastly superior to Pandora and worth paying for.
2) How many apps NEED to be running in the background beyond media? I'm having a hard time even thinking of one...
According to reviews you can stream directly over the air. Check about 2:10 on the second video for an example.
The player integration stuff itself is great. To skip a track just tap the volume rocker and you'll get a last/play/next touch screen drop down from the top. You can also set your phone to vibrate/ring in that drop down. The Zune menu's are pretty tricky to work out coming from a iPod Touch, but I like the style of the player, and will hopefully have its workings down soon. My biggest complaint, as it is with all pmp's these days, there's no hardware next/previous, I either have to dig the device out of my pocket or fumble around blindly until I hit next.
I just bought a Zune pass to test this stuff out. I am having trouble streaming on my motzart. It tells me to try log into my account again, but I can download music fine. This could be because I live in Australia (which doesn't have its own Zune Pass service) and it wont let me stream. Or I might not have the phone set up right. I'm going to keep testing and get back to you guys.
EDIT:
Ignore that, it's streaming now. I think I was just out of reception range. I'm missing any sign of Smart DJ though, hopefully that will come in an update. Being able to stream new music like I do on my PC would top the experience.
This makes me really happy; I'm in Singapore but have a Zune Pass and got a bit worried that the demo devices on display had Marketplace missing.
Got a LG Optimus 7 coming next week - can't wait
Was worried that somehow it'd be running a build which didn't even have the bits of code that would let it playback Zune DRM, though; thanks for the information
I've really enjoyed the Ars Technica review.
Haven't had a new phone in years and although I was leaning towards the Desire, the Windows OS looks fantastic.
Just bout the only thing that could hurt Apple and get MS developers is their walled garden attitude. I can see a lot of developers willing to take a chance if they can get out of the rules of Apple...But it's hard to say no to that number of users. In any case, I think the smartphone wars have really started to heat up. Which is good for us :-D Competition means better products all around.
FTC: HONK.
PAX Prime 2014 Resistance Tournament Winner
Given the support that Windows Mobile had from developers, and if they do Exchange and Office integration correctly, I could really see businesses move to these from RIM or Apple. We have a BES at work and we still have plenty of issues with our Blackberry connections, and Blackberry was (still is?) one of the best Exchange integrations available.
The biggest question is just going to be app developers. I don't know what MS requires to develop for the platform, but they really need to be open and available for them to try it out easily and give them a chance to see if it's worth adding it to development or switching.
As far as users, I think there's enough people who like the Zune integration, 360 integration, and Office integration without third party apps that they'll get a solid user base pretty quickly. It will help when they release on Verizon and Sprint though. I know a lot of companies (and government) still have Sprint/Nextel accounts for two-way, and won't switch to AT&T and give up stupid direct connect for it.
Not really, Apple's rules aren't that unreasonable to begin with.
A walled garden helps keep quality stuff in, and crappy stuff out. Without the walled garden, the App store would be full of substantially more crap without much noticeable increase in quality apps.
The preponderance of fart apps suggests that this is not the case. Apps are often kept out of the app store not for deficiencies in quality, but for competing with Apple's core functionalities or, worse, for no stated reasons at all.
GT: Tanky the Tank
Black: 1377 6749 7425
Devs don't NEED the two expensive programs to create apps, but it's smoother if they do, especially for the UI. Expression Studio 4 is Microsoft's Photoshop/Flash combo.
Still, there are ways around the costs with the BizSpark and WebsiteSpark programs. The latter gives access to Visual Studio 2010 Professional and Expression Studio 4 for three years for $100. There are some other caveats, but they're easy to work around.
Microsoft is really pushing the development side of the equation, at least internally. They gave just about all their employees free handsets this summer with the intention of having them write apps. Not sure what they've done for 3rd party devs, but I'm sure they're trying to entice them.
I'm happy to hear that copy & paste will be patched in early next year. I'd like to hear some news on the multiplayer gaming front. Having them all be RESTful only is kind of lame. They need real-time options.
No one wants to learn Objective C, except if they want to write apps for the iPhone. There's enough monetary incentive in potential app sales that people were willing to learn yet another (painful) variant of C to get in on the action.
MS hasn't been handing out money to devs, but it has been extremely proactive in making sure that there will be a huge community of developers ready to go at launch.
In other news I will get one of these to test at work. I am looking forward to it.
This. If people were buying iPhones in droves for years before they had multitasking, obviously the majority of the population won't know or care that these phones do not have it. They won't realize it either until they download Pandora and then leave the app to find out it doesn't keep playing. And if they never upgraded to iOS4, they won't care because their iPhone didn't work that way either.
We care, but the majority of the public probably doesn't. Just like the majority of the public probably doesn't care about copy/paste either.
God, I just died a little inside typeing that $....But yah, Looking forward to more people's thoughts on it, I'm gonna have to wait a while, India isn't great for getting new phones, at least where I am.
FTC: HONK.
PAX Prime 2014 Resistance Tournament Winner
Funny, because my own personal experience says it is.
Fallacy. Those fart apps flooded the store before Apple finally said one day "No more fucking fart apps" and then never approved another one again. Apple has not yet made a precedent for re-reviewing old apps like these and taking them down from the store. They should though.
And developers who are competing with Apple's core functionality know exactly what they are doing, and have no reason to be surprised when they get rejected, unless they happened to be working on the same exact thing as Apple in parallel, which is usually not the case.
And Apple has never rejected an App for "no reason". They always give a reason as to why your app was rejected.
I did. It was a piece of shit.
The biggest problem is that Apple doesn't have an explicit set of guidelines for what apps are and are not allowed. App developers have found their apps rejected for all kinds of arbitrary reasons, only to have them accepted when there is enough of a media outcry over their rejection.
Worst of all, Apple does not always specify why an app was rejected. They still haven't explained why google voice is banned from the app store, for instance.
The point is, if you're going for a walled-garden approach for your ecosystem, it would be nice to spell out the list of rules. But enough about the iPhone, lets talk more about WP7.
GT: Tanky the Tank
Black: 1377 6749 7425
I find this hard to believe, but we'll have to wait for confirmation or denial from Microsoft unless someone with one can say right or wrong about it.
edit: Microsoft has a page about finding ringtones in the Marketplace, but nothing about loading them yourself.
THAT BLOWS
One of the things I was thrilled about when I got my Blackberry Curve was the fact that Verizon couldn't lock out ringtones in an effort to nickel and dime me some more. I think I was more excited about that than being able to surf the web with my phone.
This is the kind of thing that will drive consumers away from a product.
It's not a big deal to me, I generally use the ring like ringtones anyway. But it just seems strange that they wouldn't add it as an option.
As an aside: I say no "obvious way" because changing the background picture for the "Picture" hub confused me for a while too. You have to tap and hold the background of the hub to get a drop down option, but no other hub that I've seen has a tap and hold option.
Yes, they do. And they tell you in pretty much no uncertain terms.
EDIT: I'm dumb, yay for selecting edit, but typing in the Post Quick box.
My mistake. I hadn't looked at the iPhone development environment for a few months. Still, this is not the place for this debate.
My point is, the "walled garden" argument for quality of applications isn't valid. What matters is how many good apps there are, not the total proportion of good apps to bad apps. Android has a lot of useful apps that simply aren't available to the iPhone because of this, and I hope WP7 tends more towards the former than the latter.
GT: Tanky the Tank
Black: 1377 6749 7425
Which model phone did you end up getting? Thinking of getting the HD7 as a secondary phone to my N900, though could also look at the HD2.
I grabbed a HTC 7 Motzart, though I am pretty sure that was my only option in Australia anyway. We are getting an LG soon, but the entire market is HTC's at launch.
I've got an iPhone here and I'm of the opinion that almost all ringtones are crap. I made a custom ringtone by ripping the music from Speedball 2 and my text message sound is "It's'a me, Mario!" from Mario 64. (currently have to jailbreak it to have custom text message sounds, supposedly changing in a future update)
I would hate having to be stuck with any of the default ringtones.
Speedball 2 music
Except without the initial character typing sound, straight into the music.
---
I've got a spare copy of Portal, if anyone wants it message me.
I know the UK has the HD7, the Motzart, the LG optimus 7 and due soon is the Samsung Onima 7 (however its spelt)
I looked at the Motzart has very nice specs but the unit feels bit plastic compared to the HD 7. What do you think of the phone?
Seriously impressed at how quickly this thing boots.
EDIT: Brief impressions after playing with it for a while. For context, I'm coming from a HTC Hero and all my stuff is on a Google account. I have a Windows Live account using said Gmail as a login, and a Zune Pass.
I like the general responsiveness, and how everything's pretty snappy. The way it handles a lockscreen password is pretty neat - when you swipe the picture upwards, it drags in the keypad to let you enter it.
The calendar is nice, but as has been pointed out, it doesn't support multiple calendars from a single Google account for whatever reason (at least, I can't find how). This is my only annoyance with it, since I use two different calendars - one for work appointments, and one for personal. To work around it I just copied the work events into the personal one, but it's something I hope will get fixed.
Having Zune on here is great. My collection is still syncing, but I briefly tested the playback and it works as expected. Second overall annoyance (again, as has been brought up before): no independent volume control for headset/speaker. Quick experimentation shows I have to have the volume whilst unplugged at 25 to hear the ringtone, but while I have earbuds in, music is considered "loud" to me at 3/4. You can see where this might be a problem if you forget to change the volume before plugging in.
(At the very least, unplugging a headset will pause audio playback.)
Tried browsing to these forums using IE, which brought up another quirk: the font sizes are inconsistent. All the announcements appear wtfhuge, while the thread titles are in a smaller (yet still quite big) size. When viewing a topic, all the stuff that appears in a poster's identity (name, location, etc.) are one size, while the actual contents of the post are a much larger size - large enough to read (with a little squinting) when zoomed out all the way.
Hardware-wise, I like the overall design. Having physical buttons is nice, and the phone feels pretty great in the hand. Only two issues I found: the camera button is in a position that can be clicked pretty easily (although it's a two-step kind of deal, so I haven't actually triggered it by accident, just depressed it to the first step), and the speaker sounds kind of blurry in calls. Speakerphone works fine, though.
(Just realised this is pretty much all negative, but they're the only things that stand out. Still pretty happy with the phone.)
EDIT 2: Ahah, that's smart. If you have a PIN lock on the phone, and press and hold the camera button, you can still take pictures with the camera - when you try to hit the Windows key, though, it throws you into the lockscreen to enter the PIN.