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Windows Phone 7 is, for me, the most eagerly awaited mobile operating system ever. That said, having read countless articles, watched hours of videos and undertaken many training courses on it (the benefits of being a Microsoft MVP) I greet the new OS with a more than a little apprehension though, as being very much a power user I am aware that at it's early stage of the life cycle it's not going to be all things for me.
Anyway, back to the experience, I picked up my Vodafone Trophy yesterday after a fair few hours of wangling with the Vodafone phone support. I'll not pretend it was an easy process, but to be fair to Vodafone they have accommodated my wish to upgrade to a new device and plan even though I was only half way through my current contract, for a fair price.
So I got the phone home, charged it, popped in my SIM card and let the Windows Phone 7 goodness wash over me. My first impressions of the OS, Metro, and the hardware (HTC Trophy) were good. The menu animation is very slick and smooth and the screen is just about as responsive a touch screen as I've ever used. All good so far.
Right, first things first, it's time to get rid of the carrier customisation. From there I went back to the "homescreen" and with a long push on the Vodafone Web applications tile for all intents and purposes my device was how HTC meant it to be. Not done with my ridding of foreign bodies from my lovely new Windows Phone 7 device I next turned my attention to the HTC tiles and removed those too.
To give credit to Microsoft, from day one they said that carriers and OEM's would not be allowed to mess with Metro, and they're good to their word. Kudos to them. The red vodafone tiles are already making my eyes hurt and giving me an instinctual feeling of rage. I go into settings, theme, and change the accent colour from vodafone (red) to Teal and my Feng shui becomes nicely aligned once more.
Ok, now that I have my Windows Phone 7 device as Steve Ballmer intended it to be, I set about configuring it to my own wants and needs. Over the years I've owned or borrowed more mobile devices then I've had hot dinners. I've also swapped OS a fair few times so I've got the changeover process pretty much nailed down.
I use a two step configuration process. Step one is designed to implement my "can't leave home without it" functionality and entails:
Setup up and synchronising my Exchange account (for contacts, calendar and email),
Configuring ring and notification tones for SMS, Email and phone(I've used the same ones for years),
Copying my music onto the device.
Step two is the "really want to have" setup and involves installing applications for the following:
GPS navigation,
Stopwatch/Timer,
Sudoku,
Live sports scores.
When I made the transition to Android on the HTC Legend step one took me about 30 minutes all in, and step two about the same. In essence, within the hour after taking the device off charge I was running on Android at full steam. Microsoft has made loud noises about user experience so I was expecting the setup for Windows Phone 7 to be a walk in the park. How wrong I was.
Ok, step 1. Synch with Exchange. Every phone in the world now makes Exchange syncing easy so I wasn't expecting any pain here. Wrong again. I put in my details, it auto discovers my Exchange.... and fails. Exchange certificate error. Ok, I thought, no worries, just install the Exchange certificates on the device in the same way I would for Windows Mobile 6.5......or not. No SD card to put the certs onto, and no PC to device file sync facility either.
An hour or so of Googling later and I've found the answer. Simply email the certificates to myself. That's simple enough.....except I can't get my email on the device. Not to worry, I setup a brand new hotmail account just so I can install my certificates onto my device. After another 30 minutes or so doing this I finally get my certificates onto the new phone. Right, go into email, click sync.... and another error. Not the same error, but a different error. I dig out an old WM6.5 device, hard reset it, put my SIM card and SD card in, install the certs and sync with Exchange. It completes first time. WTF?
Ok, not to focus too much on that now, (but suffice to say I'll be taking the Exchange server apart later to try and fix this. What do Microsoft expect companies who used Self signed Exchange certs or hosted Exchange customers to do in this case? Get the whole company to setup a hotmail account?) back to phase one. Ringtones. Now having already realised I can't get my lovely comfortable normal configuration on the device I decide to just ignore the fact that there doesn't seem to be a way to add custom ringtones to WP7 at the moment. I go into the list of ringtones (settings - ringtones & sounds - Ringtone) and joy of joys, my favourite "Oldphone" is there. Good news at last. I wasn't so lucky with the notification sounds. It seems that for all the billions of development the best MS could come up with here is some jingly variations that all sound like R2D2 is being strangled. I choose the lease obtrusive notifications for SMS and email and move on.
I've now been "fiddling" for three hours and have got absolutely nowhere. I'm also at the point now where the the time it takes the fluffy menu to animate it's way on and off the screen is really starting to annoy me, but I can't even be bothered to dive back in and see if there's any way to speed up or turn off the transitions. I suspect there isn't but I'll be happy to be proved wrong. The final part of my essential setup is moving my music onto the device and to be quite honest I don't have the will to try it tonight so I'm going to bed.
So basically, 8 hours after buying my Windows Phone 7 device I've not got close to completing the stage 1 setup. My SIM card is back in the awesome value SIM slot of the San Francisco and I'm still seeing and communicating with the world through Android tinted glasses.
More tomorrow......
Day 2. Configuration and Setup part 2!
With a good nights sleep accomplished I set about righting yesterday's wrongs. To cut a long story short, and after a fair amount of certificate jiggery pokery I exported a new cert, emailed it to my alternate address and installed it on the phone. This time it worked. I'm unsure at the moment why the previous cert worked on WM6.5 but didn't work on WP7 but I think I'll chalk it up to voodoo. So with hurdle number one out of the way I set about the last task in Step 1 of my configuration process which is to move my music from my Android's SD card onto the Trophy. As there's no SD card slot it was time to test out Windows Phone 7's Activesync/WMDC equivalent, Zune. With yesterday's shenanigans still haunting me and Microsoft's past history of mobile sync software I was hesitant to say the least. I swallowed hard, and clicked the download button for the 64bit version of the software (I know, I know, but I like to live dangerously!). Download was about 65MB, and once completed it installed.
The Zune software is quite a pretty affair, and seems pretty sensibly designed. I setup the default syncing areas for Music, Video, Photos and Podcasts and all was done. At this point I gritted my teeth and plugged in the Trophy. Windows 7 detected the device, and trundled off to the internet to pick up the drivers which it duly installed. Zune then sprang to life and a little phone icon in the bottom left of the screen appeared. There were a few setup options about whether to automatically or manually sync from PC to phone for Music, Videos, Photos etc and whether to automatically update the song information and album art. I decided to sync all my music (4GB on this machine) automatically, and to manually sync the Videos, Photos and Pods. I then clicked finish and off it went. While the device was syncing it showed a nice page with a progress bar and completion percentage and I was free to wander around the Zune market place and play music to my hearts content. I took this opportunity to browse the marketplace for films etc and check out some of the other features. More on those later. I didn't clock the 4GB of music transfer time but it was much faster than I expected (15 minutes or so?). So was the update of the music information and album art. Consider me suitably impressed.
There's been a lot of irritation from current Zune owners of how the Zune software has been butchered to meet the needs of Windows Phone 7. I sympathise with these guys, but from my perspective, when you look at Activesync and WMDC, the Zune software is a hundred fold improvement. As a sync solution it definitely gets my thumbs up.
That's it for today, I'm gonna go kick back and listen to some tunes. Tomorrow I'll dive into the Marketplace and see if I can get Step 2 of my setup accomplished and start using the device for real.........
Day 3
After a much more positive day with Windows Phone 7 yesterday I'm feeling a lot better about the whole situation now. Added to that, I got about 44 hours out of the battery on my HTC Trophy as well, which is very good for modern day Smartphone.
Going back to my 2 Step setup I dive into the Marketplace to download some apps. I picked up:
Weatherbug - Which is a free Weather application that also puts the weather in a live tile.
Xbox Live Extras - Which does what the built in phone aopp should do and basically gives you the functionality of xboxlive.com on your phone.
Chrono - A free simple stopwatch program.
Sudoku - A free Sudoku game.
I also picked up the free Microsoft apps:
World Clock
Unit Converter
Translator
Shopping List
Level (spirit)
Calculator
All are pretty simple but work well. The two programs I'm missing now are a decent real time live sports scores app, preferably with a live tile attached and a GPS navigation program. Microsoft's limitations mean that technically a TomTom or Copilot app is not going to be allowed to run on Windows Phone 7, but the Windows Phone 7 Bing app does do GPS Navigation in the same way Google Maps does it for Android, so I guess that's half way there. I'd love to see something like Googles Scoreboard on Windows Phone 7, but unfortunately at the moment I've not been able to find one. I'll keep looking though and if I find one you'll be the first to know about it.
I also tried to download Board Express which will be Windows Phone 7's first tapatalk capable app, but unfortunately the Board Express folks are currently struggling to get it through Microsoft's approval process, but hopfully we'll see that soon.
Apparently there are now over 1,000 applications in the Marketplace, but from my perspective the quality is, as with Apple and Google's marketplaces, a little less than I was hoping for. Microsoft have made a big thing about Metro and the Live tiles but unfortunately the amount of Live tile enabled applications in the store is still very lacking. Just out of interest I found several fart apps in the store already, so in this example Microsoft's application store policy hasn't helped us with the flaws in both Apple and Googles offerings. The Market is young, and hopefully in 6 months time we will have seen a lot more quality applications and less of the trivial ones.
I'll finish today with some praise. The Outlook client really is very good. It's the easiest mobile email client I've used and integrates with Exchange very very well.
Another plus point is that connecting my Motorola S9 bluetooth headset was as easy as pie, and WP7 offered full functionaltiy through the headset. A nice touch is that with the BT headset connected and music running when you unlock the device you can control the music function without need to slide to unlock and going back into the Zune application. Simple controls are offered on the lock screen itself.
More tomorrow.........
