Andrej Tozon's blog

I had a pleasure of using a Windows Phone 7 device (LG Optimus 7 to be exact) for the past month and this is me sharing my experience with it. A quick note on my phone background: I’ve been using an iPhone for the past two years and am used to my wife’s HTC Hero (Android).

The thing is – I had to switch back to the iPhone after I returned my WP7 today (had it on a one month test drive) and it felt - weird. Let me just say that switching from the iPhone to WP7 and back felt a lot like switching from ZX Spectrum to a PC and back to the ZX (a 20-year old metaphor but who cares ). Something along the way of comparing serious, monochrome OS to a colorful, toyish one, if you will… Which OS suits you better remains a matter of personal taste, but to answer the question I got on one of my recent WP7 developer talks, I definitely don’t think that younger population won’t be attracted to Windows Phone 7; there are a lot of features that young audience will very much appreciate.

First, there’s the people hub – to track and manage everything and everybody from a single place is just awesome. Android is offering a similar story, but IMHO it’s not that well executed as it’s on WP7. My only wish here is that Microsoft would allow for 3rd party apps to easily integrate into the hub. And on the subject, twitter not being integrated into the hub is a huge miss, for example.

I also definitely love the Metro UI – simple, quickly recognizable graphics and large fonts. Easy for brains to process while on the move. There are, a couple of quirks I ran into… you can only add tiles on the single main screen (vertically, from the top down), and the main screen can hold up to 8 tiles. Imagine a live tile you put in the 7th row of the main screen. The gesture for unlocking the phone would be flick up, flick up. Except when you flick up the second time you can’t be sure where you’ll land - it depends on how hard you flicked. When in a hurry or on the go, that tile hunting game can be pretty time-consuming. And this is the phone that is supposed to save us from our phones, right? Either making flick up / down gestures to move a whole page up or down, or the ability to put tiles on the secondary screen on the left of the main screen would make more sense because your flick up, flick right gesture would land you exactly where you expected.
One additional thing that annoyed me was having to do two gestures to answer the call (unlock, answer) – why, oh why? Phone calls are the reason they are called phones – they should require the least amount of thinking and physical activities with this devices.
And, and I don’t know if this is related to WP7 OS or physical device - when answering a call, there was a certain lag involved before the microphone got switched on. That resulted in many confusing calls when I answered with ‘hello’, which the person on the other side didn’t hear, and waited for me to say something.

Build quality – I don’t know, the phone felt plasticky to me. I was especially worried I would accidentally pull out the Start button because of it’s embossed logo on it. And just to be clear – putting USB port on the side? That’s the worst place to put it. Cradle, anyone? Also, the photo button would be one of the greatest features on the phone if I wasn’t accidentally repeatedly hitting it when holding the phone in my left hand. It responds immediately, making your phone ready to take a photo in a matter of a second. But because of its position, it’s either a blessing, or a curse.

Ringtones – well, I tried to find a ring tone on my Optimus 7 but I couldn’t find one. The wide variety of beepy and clicky tones didn’t do much for me; I need noise to tell me it’s my phone ringing. Old phone, please!

Applications – tried them a few and they worked great… except for some with long(er), virtualized lists… jerky as hell. Hardly usable. Hard to keep up reading a list when every second or so you completely lose your track. Marketplace hung a couple of times. People’s hub crashed a couple of times, esp. when deleting a contact, imported from the SIM card. I was really impressed with the shipped IE browser. Very responsive and smooth. The whole being online experience is totally abstracted away from the phone, it feels really great.

A couple of other quirks: When trying to make a phone call, the contact info always tended to show in a landscape mode. I realized that I needed to hold my phone in a straight vertical position in order to be displayed correctly. The typing keyboard didn’t exactly liked my fingers’ typing, I was missing the keys constantly – wish there was a way to calibrate the keyboard.

In conclusion: yes, the OS has issues, some of them quite serious. From a casual user’s standpoint, I’d say the most annoying is the one with microphone lag and I hope this  will get fixed somehow, either by Microsoft or the device manufacturers. On the positive side, the phone is very easy to use and offers a great experience.
I have to say I got pretty used to it in the past month and I’m definitely considering buying my own WP7 in the near future. If I was living in a country, supported by the WP7 marketplace and the App hub, that would be a non-brainer.