Re: Wp7
After a few days of usage, I'm really loving this device, and like you said - even with all the "limitations".
*** Please do post you own points of interest/annoyance that you notice. Now is a good time to send feedback directly to MS via their websites (will try to locate a good point of contact) so that they bring out decent fixes/imrovements to the OS and apps.
* I think this thing does "crash" in some places but does a good job of hiding/recovering it
Like some apps will quit and return to the previous menu and you have to go back though it seems to return to where it was, like the GMail email thing and the "email accounts" settings page. Also the main live tiles home screen the "live-ness" goes away where the tiles become plain colour with names and no customer pic/colour/animations running for a few seconds, then it starts off again. The UI still is working/responsive meaning I can scroll/navigate between menus/apps in this state.
* Internet Explorer is very good/smooth though looks like it has some catching up to do compared to latest Opera/Firefox mobiles. For non-mobile optimised sites sometimes the font is too small and the screen width/does not "re-flow" the text and you have to scroll left/right which is annoying since it does not fit the screen width. Opera mobile on my N900 and the Firefox mobile beta with a nice extenstion does this font-sizing/re-flowing thing and pretty much even the worst non-mobile sites are at least readable if not navigable.
* Haven't used the Bing maps/GPS too much, but looks quite nice/smooth again here, will try running it while on the road next time and not driving myself.
* Sadly (or funnily) the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync/Outlook support does not connect/work with my companies Exchange email (my N900 worked fine) - tried to ensure I have the right settings - sent email to my IT support - lets see what they have to say. Other emails (Live/Hotmail/Gmail/Yahoo) work well including fancy spam/advertisement emails with big pics and attachments work well.
* The Adobe PDF reader application is slow/basic but at least you can read PDFs when you need to. The MS Office mobile handles even the latest DOCX/XLSX formats though does not support opening password-protected files. Havent tried editing files to see how user-friendly that part is, but reading is fine.
* The incoming messages has this neat but some times annoying thing where it displays the message right at the top of the screen even if you're screen is closed/locked - privacy issue - don't want to get any embarrassing/personal texts for all to see
* The device has a digital compass, though can't seem to see/display it anywhere in the OS or apps - apparently MS has not released a developer API that can be used to access it - should come in the next update and at least one app promised to update once its available. Would be nice to see the Maps app autorotate based on your direction you are facing. Currently you can calculate speed/direction if you move around while GPS coordinates are being sampled.
* I just LOVE all the subtle animations/effects both 2D and 3D and also the fact that they are smooth and flicker-free, as good as, if not better than the experience on iOS
TODO/wishlist:
* Check out any messaging/IM apps like Pidgin for multi-protocol support in one place - currently I only see a Live/MSN app and another one for YahooIM.
* Want to see other OpenDocument/LibreOffice file format support - actually haven't checked it yet - maybe MS Office app already reads it?
* FIX THE DAMN MS EXCHANGE EMAIL SUPPORT K THX PLZ BAI
* Some nice VPN/terminal programs perhaps?
I guess you need to rely more on third-party apps in the MarketPlace to mature more than anything special from MS itself for the OS. Looking forward to the next two announced updates where they promise CutNPast support, better multitasking, improved user customisability etc.
Sadly half the fun disappears when there is no connectivity (don't have 3G yet) and GPRS/EDGE is too slow.
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Also noticed the OS does not have indic fonts so any apps/browser/facebook etc where people post messages/emails with Hindi shows as blocks/squares. Visited baidu.com and it displays chinese characters apparently just fine. I'm sure they'll fix this stuff in upcoming updates, certainly by the time India launch happens.
Tried doing a search in the Gmail built in app, at first it looked like it was not doing anything and when I clicked the search hardware button it did a web search, was disappointed. Started to log in to gmail web mobile site to search for emails. Then had a thought, went into Hotmail app and there it searched emails fine! Was thinking to myself "SUE THE EVIL EMPIRE BASTARDS AGAIN" for crippling gmail search but then went back into the gmail app and realised the search was happening just app was unresponsive while it was scanning around 5000 conversations (15,000 emails) in my Inbox!
So search works quite well, no need to sue these buggers.
Then I checked my gmail account in desktop browser and see there are about 15k emails in my inbox and perhaps about 50k emails archived using just under 1GB storage.
So selected the "All Mail" folder in the Gmail WP7 app and started to sync it to see how far it can handle it, it synced up to about 15k emails then I dont know what I did it started counting back down to ZERO and again started syncing currently reached 5k emails, will leave it for a few hours to see how that goes.
Next stress-test would be running Internet Explorer on various sites with as many tabs as it allows/can handle to see stability/performance in that department.
I've already mentioned the UI/tiles appear to crash or something even though the UI/menus themselves still respond and move around/animate, so some sort of nice recovery.
I wish Microsoft would publish videos/blogs with some technical details of how they engineered this OS like they used to do during Windows Vista development on Channel 9 under Jim Allchin - since Steve Sinofsky (hope I got the names right) took over for Win7 development everything went back behind closed doors.
I would really be interested to know technical details about the OS guts, like I'm sure they're running multiple threads for UI/apps so it works smoothly without interfering/pausing each other and have basic multitasking in the OS itself for things like background syncing, listening to GSM radio for incoming calls etc.
