WP7 – what do I think?

Well funny enough you should ask, I have quite a lot to say.

First off this is an exiting bit of kit, my HTC HD7 is a nice phone, its fast and the only thing holding it back is the lack of functionality and configurability of its native WP7 OS, oh and not to mention its poor ability to communicate with windows on a computer!

Annoyances;
Does not show up as a device in windows, so to add files to your phone is impossible out of the box, therefore having adobe reader as a free application is completely pointless also. I was actually adviced to send PDF files via email and save them that way to the phone, good if I had punny sized PDF files…

Zune is used to play, watch, audio and video respectively. You are able to drop files fairly easily onto the phone from the software, great but what about other files?
Also zune as an application on the phone offers you very little, zune essentially is no more than 3 page website, not much functionality here, just about play, stop and next. Can I have winamp if I ask really nicely?

Simply the phone overheats during idle if a cover is used… it will crash randomly and make me late for work.

The button on my phone (bottom right) lets me search in Bing, you cannot configure that button to do anything else, meaning 1/6 buttons on my phone is useless.

Once again Microsoft is forcing IE down my throat, simple I don’t want to use it.
Don’t get me started on using IE in “full desktop mode”, It still loads pages on mobile versions of the websites, this pains me (oh and also there is no flash).

I cannot change my ring-tones to custom selections, or in fact change message alerts, or indeed alarms, in fact I cant add any new ones at all, seriously its not 1995?

Syncing with hotmail contacts, well this was a bundle of fun for me, no option to choose sync type, it overwrites any changes on the phone with the (online) computer version and I have about 6 contacts on my phone for each person (people generally use more than one email addresses (you can combine contacts on the phone but then the sync undoes all your hard work).

Okay so I figure lets give this a chance, I’ll edit my contact list on MSN (Hotmail), well that was harder than I expected and not happening, I edited about 6 contacts in 30 minutes, and there’s no option to merge contacts ie, mobile phone contact with email contact online.

Breakthrough: I ended up using Outlook which is great in comparison to MSN or hotmails website and about 2 hours later I have a semi-feasible contact list on my phone, yay….

I use Google calender and I was eager to link that into my phone.
I eventually managed this after fighting with my Hotmail account, which had been linked already (due to Hotmail being my primary email and a WP7 favourite! there seems to be no option just to sync emails, you have to sync contacts and calender).

So the calenders have been merged (I got over it), which is fine I didn’t have much on the Hotmail one, until I noticed it had started duplicating the very few events I did have, in fact I have 7 re-occurring appointments for each 1st day of the month now, but when I go on the website and look at my calender there’s is only one!

There are 3 brightness settings on the phone, there’s BRIGHT (energy efficency!), barely Visible and Invisible. Please give me a slider!

When I can bring myself to use my phone again for anything that isnt just calling people, I will provide some more feedback!