I love the phone in many ways. The build quality is very high, the device looks good, the screen is gorgeous, the controls work well, processor feels snappy. All in all, the device has a place in my heart, but I’m just plain missing my iPhone right about now. Here’s the low down!
I’ll start with the good:
- The screen looks beautiful!
- Facebook, MSN and Gmail integration are stunning! Really well done. Contacts, Calendar, email, all synchronize without any weird setup steps.
- The email app, while missing some functions that I’ve come to rely on like thread view, is very very good. The search actually seems to work, the messages are easy to read and navigate.
- The device has horsepower to spare; the processing speed on the majority of tasks is superb.
- The tile updates work really well (when they are working). The commercials are right, I couldn’t live without this now.
- The Zune desktop app is a really fantastic piece of software. It’s made me realize just how bad iTunes is! Zune looks good, is easy to use, and performs very well on my hardware.
- Call quality is great.
- Battery life is astronomical compared to my iPhone 3GS.
As promised, on to the 10 things that bother me the most:
- The device is too big! Sure, it fits in my pocket easily; but I find myself at least a few times a day needing to switch to two hands because I’m finding it hard to type with only one thumb. Keep in mind, at 6’6, I have really big hands and long fingers that can cover a lot of space very quickly – as a developer, I type for a living. This never happened on my iPhone – not in landscape mode or in portrait mode.
- WP7 feels like a time warp sometimes. If the Office app, the People app, the WordPress app make me feel like I’m a character in the Jetsons, the Instant Messenger app, the Facebook app, the Twitter client all feel like I’m in the Flintstones! No Remote Desktop! No Mint! No Skype! No Meebo!
- Mioyoma Messenger crashes half the time I use it at least, and the other half of the time its slow.
- Often I’m finding that the mic stops working and I have to reboot to fix this. Weird.
- The search button is in the way. I keep hitting it when I’m trying to type, especially one handed. See #1.
- No cut and paste! Dying for this.
- The browser is a bit clunky. Going in to landscape mode you no longer have the address bar available to you, sites that are great on iPhone are unusable on WP7 IE8 …
- I don’t like the way selecting text works. You put your thumb down on the screen, and given a moment a selection cursor appears above your thumb.
- The Zune player in the phone doesn’t feel quite right with Podcasts – I find I’m starting them over from the beginning, perhaps on accident, if I don’t use the application just right.
- Not sure I am in love with the way the volume thing works. Is it controlling ringer volume? Phone call volume? MP3 volume? I don’t know!
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