My Windows Phone 7 and I
If you follow me on twitter, you already know I have a Windows Phone 7. You also probably know that I’m mostly pleased with it. For the record, I chose the HTC HD7 partially because I wanted to stay with T-Mobile but mostly because it’s the biggest frackin’ screen available for the platform. I’m not yet past the honeymoon phase with the phone but I can give some early impressions on the device itself, and Windows Phone 7 in general.
The Good
First off, the platform is delightful and inspiring to me as a developer. Starting with the little things like the way my Xbox live avatar playfully peeks around in the games hub to the subtle vacuum animation when you discard an e-mail draft; and moving to the more obvious features, like the Zune integration not only allowing me to sync with my desktop Zune Software but also letting me use my Zune Pass subscription to download and listen to almost any song on the service over the wire. The Windows Phone does a lot of things right.
From the moment I powered up my phone and entered my Live ID, things just started lighting up. I had connected my Live ID and Facebook accounts so my phone started pulling in all of my contacts from Windows Live and Facebook and suggested contacts that should be linked. My wife’s Cliq did something similar using the Moto Blur interface over Android. When I added my business email account through Google Apps it pulled contacts and calendar appointments from Google. I wondered why there isn’t Twitter integration in the people hub, but it might be for the best, Facebook updates tend to be lest transient than tweets. Linkedin would be a nice addition though.
For some reason when I went to the games hub, I had to re-enter my Live ID to connect it to my Xbox Live Account. After that my avatar started visiting me on the Games Hub tile and I was able to see my Achievements on the Games hub. Which by the way is pretty awesome in and of itself. Windows Phone has launched with a pretty nice lineup of Xbox Live Enabled games (no multiplayer yet but Achievements yes and we all know the only reason to play games is for the achievements). I was impressed with Need For Speed Undercover (not enough to buy it) and how they implemented steering, turbo boosts, and drifting using the tilt sensors and simple gestures on the phone. Apparently you can brake too but that feature was wasted on me. There was also some innovation from Ubisoft in bringing the core aspects of Assassin’s Creed to a mobile game. All in all, there are quite a few entertaining games from the major publishers. And if that weren’t enough there are a number of games from independent developers on the phone. And everything looks great on that 4.3 inch screen.
Moving past the games hub there are a number of applications that came pre-installed on my device including the standard e-mail, messaging, calendar, etc. I was also delighted to find Netflix, T-Mobile TV, HTC Hub (a collection of apps that are exclusively for the HTC devices), and the T-Mobile Family Room (which looks very useful but only if your family has another Windows Phone from T-Mobile).
The most impressive app that came pre-loaded was the Office Hub. These aren’t just watered down viewers for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. You can actually use them to edit your documents. Also, the SharePoint integration is pretty useful for document collaboration. It would be nice to have a way to sync to SkyDrive but I’m sure that’s coming.
The browsing experience on the phone is delightful. Most of the time you can read a site without zooming in landscape (due to the size of the screen). When you do need to zoom, a double tap usually causes an intelligent zoom so that a div spreads the width of the screen. I haven’t had to use the pinch gesture for zooming, but testing it out, it is very responsive. A lot of devices that support pinch to zoom gestures have a noticeable lag between when the gesture is performed and when the UI responds. That doesn’t exist here.
The 16 GB of storage is pretty sizeable. I currently have a good chunk of my music library, a few movies that I ripped, and a number of games and apps installed and I still have room to spare. It’s not going to replace a dedicated Media player in terms of raw storage but seriously who needs to have 300 hours of music on hand at all times? Besides, if I have a sudden urge to listen to a song I didn’t sync to the phone, chances are I can bring it down and listen to it in a few seconds using my Zune Pass subscription.
There’s no physical keyboard on the HD7 but I don’t miss it at all. I had become proficient with the on screen keyboard for my prior phone with a 2.5” screen. I can practically touch type on the HD7’s virtual keyboard. And in the rare case I do fudge a key, the autocomplete comes to the rescue.
The Bad
The biggest complaint I have about the phone is its piss-poor battery life. This might be due to my usage patterns, but I haven’t been able to go a full day without needing a recharge. Truth be told, I had battery problems with my last phone (an HTC G1) as well. Using a 1250mAh battery for the HD7 is probably more to blame though. It’s not really problematic for me. Between the office, home, and car, I’m never far from a recharge. I’ll let you know how it holds up during my first plane trip.
The speaker phone is all but useless for me. My wife complains about the echo whenever I turn it on. It’s unfortunate because I’m really conscious about holding it to my ear so I tend to use the headphones when talking on the phone.
I hate that I have to waste a tile on the phone app. My G1 had a dedicated button for that feature, it would be nice if Microsoft had included that button as one of the required face buttons (it is a phone after all guys). This is a problem that’s universal with the platform, not just the HD7.
Multiple pages for tiles would have been nice. I don’t have many apps installed but I’ve pinned my most important contacts on the start page. I have to scroll to get to most of my apps. Let me setup “pages” and select what tiles go where (see how Android and iPhone does it).
I would like to use my Microsoft Points to buy Windows Phone Apps. I use them to buy XBLA games and music for Zune. With Windows Phone 7 coming from the same division, I’d expect to be able to use them for Phone apps as well.
The Ugly
You never realize how big a 4.3” screen is until you go back to looking at a 2.5” screen. I turned on my G1 to get some data off of it and couldn’t believe how small everything looked. Looking at the picture to the left, you can see that the entire G1 almost fits within the HD7’s screen.
T-Mobile supports 4G speeds, but my phone doesn’t. I’d imagine that the T-Mobile TV feature would be more useful with the faster speed afforded by 4G.
Too bad Netflix doesn’t let you cache movies for a trip. Between music, and games, movies are the only in-flight entertainment I’m missing on the phone. Thankfully, I can easily sync the movies I’ve ripped from my DVD collection with the phone.
Between the excellent browsing experience and the integration between the people hub and Facebook, the separate Facebook app practically redundant. It’s pretty sad too because the Facebook app is pretty well done.
Overall
The HD7 and Windows Phone 7 do a lot of things right. This phone and the platform are the perfect pair. While it has it’s fair share of shortcomings *ahem* battery *ahem* most of the issues can be addressed with software updates. Hopefully, T-Mobile and HTC keep up the level of support with the HD7 that they’ve done with their other devices.