Right, HD7 has regular TFT LCD which cant compare to SAMOLED though when you are using your own phone you are not tilting it away and looking at it directly and works fine for me even in sunlight/outdoors. AMOLED display they also say you can save some battery by choosing the dark background because all-black pixels are totally unpowered. In any case I prefer white background so doesn't matter too much to me.
I was worried about 4.3 screen size but when finally holding it my (admittedly large) hands its quite comfortable and also fits nicely in my trouser pockets - the HTC manual actually warns you to remove the device from pockets before sitting down to avoid undue pressure/damage to it haha.
I haven't faced antenna signal "death grip" issues in a past few days with my HD7 though I haven't been using the phone extensively in various locations either.
Yup, pretty much any
smartphone can hardly cross a day's worth of usage, this HTC HD7 too.
In my case, I've decided to get at least one phone PER platform. I've already gotten iPod Touch 2G so am familiar with the iOS, got the
Nokia N900 about 6 months ago, just got this WP7 device, next will probably be an
Android 3.0 device assuming it also becomes super-smooth UI wise, maybe MeeGo if it has a chance of launching/succeeding.
iOS is till the king overall, but I am having as much, if not more, fun using WP7 as when I first tried the iPod Touch 2G in
Apple store in London and immediately bought that device, I now feel WP7 is the king in the fun department.
Multitasking is a double-edged sword, coz like you saw with Android apps, and I saw with Maemo (Nokia N900), if there is some misbehaviing component it consumes CPU like nothing without you realising until you suddenly have a dead phone in the middle of the day
But I like
Microsoft's "hybrid" or "middle ground" approach (allow multiple hardware devices with some design guidelines) compared to the tight-lockdown of Apple (which gives top quality control) and the openness of Android/Maemo/MeeGo which is nice but can cause stability/consistency/quality problems in itself even though its good for true power users.
Anyways, congrats to the OP, mnreddy, I bet you will have fun with your WP7 phone when you get it!!!
---------- Post added at 10:00 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:14 PM ----------
Here are some notes from my usage experience for the past few days:
After a few days of usage, I'm really loving this device 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 Cut-N-Paste support, better multitasking developer APIs, 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.
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.
---------- Post added at 11:08 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:00 PM ----------
BTW, the MS Exchange ActiveSync corporate email problem I was getting has a solution which works for me:
When attempting to sync email on Windows Phone 7 you receive error code 85010001
Silly me for not doing a simple search on the error code and banging my head and trying to get help from my highly *competent* IT helpdesk who simply replied to my lengthy descriptive email with a one-liner "Sorry, we don't support HTC Windows" heh.
alm is not in my list and I don't like anything about Blackberry.I do agree that Windows Phone 7 Os has many of the problems on paper(those are not problems for me).one important feature that I miss in Windows Phone 7 is, 'Google Maps' app.
