Shabad Chawla's blog

Why?
So… a number of people have asked me what my opinion on Windows Phone 7 is. Here’s what I think. If you’re looking for a balanced, comprehensive review of the platform or device – look elsewhere quick. This is my point of view and is basically an HTC Desire vs Samsung Omnia head-to-head from my own daily usage perspective. In short if you’re me and are considering switching from the Desire to the Omnia –  you (I) will find this very useful. Others less so!

Performance
It is MUCH faster than the desire. Shutdown on the Omnia takes 7 seconds, on the Desire it takes 30. It finishes uploading a photo to facebook while the desire is still thinking about starting to upload.

Interface
The interface is ummm “swishy”. Nice transitions (they take time so they may get annoying) but at the same time the UI elements are really minimalist, for example the tiles are all flat with square corners. Compared with HTC sense that looks a little dull- but functional.

Browser
Browsing is quick and painless but I’m not a fan of this IE either. The Android browser re-flows page on zoom MUCH better. This incarnation of IE Mobile is like the iPhone – so not great.

Phone
There is currently no smart dial and no speed dial. Major boo. All that speed in other areas and it takes me twice as long to call somebody as it did on any of my previous phones of the last 5 years. Voice dial isn’t bad though, so I may finally start using it after years of ignoring its existence. *PAIN POINT*

Additionally, I couldn’t see a way to get call timers. In fact AFAIK you can’t even see call duration for a call from call history. This was a surprise and is also a major pain – I routinely want to know how long a call was and I had come to rely on my phone to be able to tell me. *PAIN POINT*

Text Input
Typing is surprisingly good & quick. More so than on the stock android / HTC keyboards. I do miss swype though and find myself waving my finger all over the keyboard from time to time! It’s really easy to type double handed in landscape (and to a lesser extent in portrait). Auto correction is good and speed is excellent. Shame that when you backspace it stops auto-correcting.

Battery
Battery life is a lot better than on the Desire. I’ve caned it all day and it still has about a quarter. My Desire would have died by lunch time.

Screen & Size
The screen on the Omnia is VERY nice. It’s a great size and colours are extremely vibrant. A couple of the stock wallpapers that ship with the device manage to do a great of showcasing the screen’s capabilities. That said, I don’t do much (read any) movie watching on my phone (the benefits of not taking public transport very much) and not much gaming either. Most videos you end up watching are the short YouTube variety and the quality you watch those in isn’t limited by the screen on your device anyway. I initially thought the Omnia was too big but got used to it very quickly – so much so that when I picked up a Desire after a couple of days it felt positively small. To hold in the hand the Omnia feels more slippery and prone to accidental drops. It’s also just a bigger slab so you end up holding it differently. The touch sensitive buttons on the bottom don’t encourage a firm grip around (you accidentally end up hitting the search button).

Email
Email support is fine, email has become a bit of a non-feature nowadays I think. This does take away the one pain point I had on the Desire which was the way it handled subfolders in my Exchange mailbox. Here you get to choose which ones to sync. Search server has disappeared (lost from 6.5) but then Android doesn’t have it either.

Storage
Skydrive integration is good, you can auto-upload all pics you take plus access docs from skydrive and sharepoint so those are nice features. This means that in the event of a lost phone pretty much the ONLY things I’ll lose are my texts and call histories. I’m sure there is / will be an app that lets you back up texts to the cloud so that probably means all you lose is your call history.

This phone is an 8GB model so not massive but all the space is usable for everything, unlike the annoying Android on which I was constantly running out of space and unable to have the apps that I wanted. This one actually lets me have a lot of my desired content on the same device so that’s definitely a win!

Marketplace
Not foolproof. Couldn’t download a bunch of apps, no real reason why (try again later).

Not commenting on variety since the marketplace is still new and will catch up in time.
Apps look more expensive, don’t recall seeing many £5 apps on android market whereas there are quite a few here.
Browser
IE still sucks. Still slow and most importantly doesn’t re-flow well at all. Need to keep panning or zooming on web pages.
Other browsers are available but I couldn’t download metrobrowser and can’t trial browser+ for free.

Calendar
Works fine but I find it annoying that I can’t adjust how long to snooze a reminder for. WM6 could do this just fine, I could decide to snooze a reminder for a few minutes or a few hours or a day. Now on WP7 you get a standard snooze which I think is about 5 minutes.

Email
Works well as expected from an Exchange integration point of view. Folder handling is good. Seem to have lost search server option from 6.5. Also not a huge fan of the minimalist I terrace with no colours. I like seeing overdue flagged items in red.

Also just discovered that I can’t edit the original message when forwarding an email. Or when replying. *PAIN POINT*

Tasks
Don’t exist – why, Microsoft, why? Have you decided on behalf of all your customers (like the uber-CEO over at the fruit factory) that we no longer want / need / should have access to our tasks? I can’t say I’m overjoyed about this. That said I’m used to life without tasks so this isn’t as big a deal as it was a while ago. I’m confused by this lack of support for task sync on all modern smartphone platforms. The iPhone was the first to drop tasks and everyone else seems to have followed suit. I can only guess that tasks just don’t have a high degree of importance in the consumer space (which most of these devices seem to be aimed squarely at).

Apps
No TWEETDECK!!! But I’ve got Seesmic so maybe I’ll survive  I have been seeing some nice apps in the marketplace that I didn’t have on Android so that is nice. Every single WP7 review has banged on endlessly with stats and figures about how few apps are available on the WP7 marketplace so all I have to say is that it’s early days and it appears to that Microsoft are playing the long game here. As more and more users are making their handhelds their primary information-access devices Microsoft must see this platform as a key element of their overall strategy going forward. So there will likely be a huge amount of cash and effort thrown into WP7 (& 8 & 9)  over the next few years. Doubtless the marketplace will develop.

My biggest problem by far is the lack of support for third party apps. Every time I’m browsing a twitter client and click on links it takes forever to get back to the tweet and I need to scroll all the way down the timeline again to get back to where I was. On android tweetdeck data persists even through a reboot. *PAIN POINT*

App marketplace is less mature (as widely reported) but that will change. It isn’t a huge limitation as there are plenty of apps on there including every kind of chalisa (think hanuman, durga etc etc) known to man!!! It looks like apps are more expensive in general, about £5 is a common price.

Camera
Quick to start (and you don’t need to unlock the phone to get the camera working – nice trick!). Good quality pictures but once again for me the camera on a phone is a bit of a non-feature. As long as it does the basics reasonably well, I’m not hugely fussed about any bells or whistles. This camera works fine.

Random Bits

Also very cool how you can log in to the Windows Live account associated with the phone, see all your photos, locate your phone on a map, make it ring, display a message on the screen or remote wipe it!

The lack of proper turn-by-turn satnav seems like a glaring omission. Microsoft should really make this a Bing feature rather than letting mobile providers choose whether to bundle 3rd-party apps (as Orange are doing with the LG Optimus 7 in the UK). Especially given the fact that 3rd-party apps don’t multi-task I expect any WP7 satnav to be a major pain, enough to make you switch to a different phone or a dedicated satnav. Android IMHO scores highest here – the already excellent Google maps now has layers (satellite view, traffic, latitude etc), turn-by-turn voice guidance and just works. And is free.

Conclusion
There is lots to like about WP7  and the Omnia 7 but there are several things I really don’t want to deal with, lack of 3rd-party multi-tasking being chief amongst those. My normal usage of the phones involves frequent switching apps (like back and forth between a browser and twitter client) and having to start from scratch each time was enough to drive me around the bend.

Lack of smart dial and proper call histories is another major pain. For a  phone that’s supposed to help you get in and get out quickly, this is a strange omission. I guess the getting and getting back to life doesn’t involve calling anyone anymore. I recently had a conversation with a friend who said the iPad had pretty much replaced his iPhone, so maybe I’m old-fashioned but I’m definitely part of the minority that still uses a phone for voice comms.

So… I wrote most of this post a long while ago and since then I’ve switched back to Android. I’ll be looking in on Wp7 in six months or whenever the next wave of devices (including an OS update) comes around. Until then it’s time to re-familiarise myself with the “low disk space” icon in my Android’s notification area