My first 24 hours with Windows Phone 7

grandebob#WP

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First, my background:
I'm a smart phone lover. My first smart phone was a Kyocera Palm OS phone with a Greyscale screen and 8 MB of ROM. Since then I've used Windows Mobile, Treos, Centros, iPhones, a Pre and now I'm trying a Samsung Focus WP7 phone. I am fortunate where my job allows me to play with several different phones and OS's. The company I work for is an internet based company who sees the future of mobile and wants to learn about this fledgling branch of the internet as it happens. I figured it would be interesting, and would help me sort out my feelings on the platform by writing a short review of my first 24 hours.

On opening the box, I am immediately impressed by the styling and the weight (or lack of) that is the Samsung Focus. The screen is big and bright, and the handset feels light and good in my hand. It makes my droid feel like a brick and my Pre look like a postage stamp. The lines are smooth, the phone is light, yet has a sturdy feel to it. I'm impressed.

I boot it up and my first hour with WP7 is all smiles. The home screen tile metaphor is fresh and interesting. The phone is responsive and stutter free. Flipping through photos is quick and the camera loads quickly and I can take pictures with ease. I used my hotmail account that I've had for over a decade. Not that I use it for anything but MSN messenger, but I have it. Email setup was easy, even connecting to my corporate exchange server was fairly easy. I had little trouble finding some starter apps like Netflix, Twitter and the likes. But the more I used and tried to configure the phone, the more out of love I began to fall with it.

My exchange server forces me to have a PIN on my device. Not a big deal, my phone detected the policy and applied it for me. However, it doesn't let me configure a lock grace period. My server specifies I can have up to a 15 minute grace period after sleeping my phone where I can wake it up again and not have to reenter my PIN. This option is simply not there. I, like most people, have several email accounts. I cannot configure different alert settings for different accounts. I get lots of reports that are emailed to my exchange account at midnight. I don't want to know about those. But I do want to know when our emergency email account gets an email regardless of the time. Unfortunately, I'm stuck with an all or nothing notification system for email.

The marketplace. At first glance it was new and fun, but now I find it painful to find something. Searching isn't much help since when I search the Marketplace it includes music and movies in my results, even though I start the search from the Apps section.

I have mixed feelings on the Zune desktop app. It is heads and tails better than iTunes, but that is like saying "My vomit when I drink Jager tastes much better then my vomit when I drink peppermint schnapps." I love being able to browse apps on my desktop and install them on my phone. But why do I have to sync with a cable? What is this 1998? Let me click a link and send an install notification to my phone. Same thing with syncing music, podcasts and videos. Why the hell can't I get these things over the air? I'm done with cables and desktop sync software. Sync to the cloud or don't sync at all.

XBOX Live and Zune. So I don't have an XBOX or an XBOX live account. Nor do I have a Zune or Zunepass. I don't want extra subscription fees. I'm paying AT&T a buttload a month for service and data. I might start buying apps. But the last thing I need is extra fees for Zune, XBOX live, AT&T Navigator, and countless other services trying to get $3-$15 a month out of me. No thanks. I may try the Zune trial to see if it is worth it, but I've invested so much time into tweaking my Pandora stations that I would much rather continue to pay them then to sign up for a different service just so I can download songs on my desktop and sync them. F-That. Stream it to my phone or take your service elsewhere.

Ring tones and alerts. I can't make my own? I can't even buy them from somewhere? I'm stuck with yours? Yuck.

These are my impressions after 24 hours with the phone. I do focus a bit on the negative side, but overall I'm impressed with the new paradigm that is WP7. It is still a very 1.0 OS and hopefully this promised update will hit soon and address these issues and more I haven't even discovered yet.

What do you guys think? Where are my initial impressions wrong? What did I not look at, or look at wrong? This phone has gone from love at first site to a "why was I excited about this?" Hopefully it will come back around to something I can live with and learn to love.
 

red grenadine

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I have mixed feelings on the Zune desktop app. It is heads and tails better than iTunes, but that is like saying "My vomit when I drink Jager tastes much better then my vomit when I drink peppermint schnapps." I love being able to browse apps on my desktop and install them on my phone. But why do I have to sync with a cable? What is this 1998? Let me click a link and send an install notification to my phone. Same thing with syncing music, podcasts and videos. Why the hell can't I get these things over the air? I'm done with cables and desktop sync software. Sync to the cloud or don't sync at all.

You know that you can set up a wireless sync on your phone and never use a usb cable again, right?

XBOX Live and Zune. So I don't have an XBOX or an XBOX live account. Nor do I have a Zune or Zunepass. I don't want extra subscription fees. I'm paying AT&T a buttload a month for service and data. I might start buying apps. But the last thing I need is extra fees for Zune, XBOX live, AT&T Navigator, and countless other services trying to get $3-$15 a month out of me. No thanks. I may try the Zune trial to see if it is worth it, but I've invested so much time into tweaking my Pandora stations that I would much rather continue to pay them then to sign up for a different service just so I can download songs on my desktop and sync them. F-That. Stream it to my phone or take your service elsewhere.

You can download and stream songs directly from your phone with a Zune Pass. You also can keep 10 songs as DRM-free mp3s per month as well.
 

action_efn_jackson

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You know that you can set up a wireless sync on your phone and never use a usb cable again, right?



You can download and stream songs directly from your phone with a Zune Pass. You also can keep 10 songs as DRM-free mp3s per month as well.

The Zune streaming is sick! I didn't know I could do that till like 3 days ago. My office offers wifi so I am able to site here and listen to anything I want in crystal clear quality! I love my Surround.
 

jgibo1

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I really enjoyed the Zune pass but I am not going to get to utilize it as much as I would like. I am mainly a tv/ movie watcher and listen to the radio or sd card in the car. Enjoying the games when I have time at lunch. If I see an app I want to try right away I will connect my Focus to the pc. Otherwise I will let it install when it is plugged in with power. I believe I read that if you reset your phone it will only reinstall the apps downloaded through zune so I try not to buy anything from the phone so I won't have to worry later. Hopefully that will be straightened out in a update.
 

grandebob#WP

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You know that you can set up a wireless sync on your phone and never use a usb cable again, right?



You can download and stream songs directly from your phone with a Zune Pass. You also can keep 10 songs as DRM-free mp3s per month as well.

I'll have to look into the wireless sync, that is better, however I still don't want to have to sync with my PC at all.

The Zune-Pass service seems nice, but I can't say there are 10 songs a month that I would want to keep and manage. I don't really like keep large libraries of songs and movies stored and backed up. I like services like pandora and XM where I can tell it what I like (or in XM's case go to a station I like) and hear good and new music. I don't want to manage playlists and sync files. It is too cumbersome. I love the instant feedback of Pandora. I don't like a song, I never have to hear it again. Very rarely do I say "Man, I'de like to listen to this song by that artist." At $15 a month, zune pass is not for me.

Still trying to figure out if I can get podcasts delivered over the air (meaning not syncing to my pc) via the zune app or if I have to get another app for that.
 

jgibo1

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there are a couple of apps for pod casts. The twit.tv app works very well but currently not for live. ustream has one and there is one more that is called PODCASTS!
 

grandebob#WP

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TWIT.TV is great. I generally don't watch video podcasts, just listen to audio. It's hard to watch a video while I'm walking my dogs or driving to work. I'll hae to check out the PODCASTS app. Thanks for the recommendations.
 

mattdreed

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I still cant get it to work on my focus. All I can do is get 30 second samples :(

unfortunately, not all songs/albums are available for download, but a good number are. If you're not able to get the full song for anything, then I imagine your zune pass has (free or otherwise) has not been set up right.
 

TiLoBrown

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I keep trying to figure out how the set it up, but I cant find it. My stuff for Zune is the same for Xbox Live and that works fine
 

nrfitchett4

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I keep trying to figure out how the set it up, but I cant find it. My stuff for Zune is the same for Xbox Live and that works fine

did you subscribe to zune pass? You have to sign up for it, first 2 weeks free, 15bucks a month after that. I'm splurging on it. I have found that smartdj is great on my home pc. Let's hope it gets added to the phone version on the first update.
 

leo5111#WP

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just for the info, for a case get the body glove yes it makes the buttons a little bit of a pain such as volume control etc BUT its nice thick rubber that if the phone bounces on the ground on its back the thick rubber will protect it well, and it has a nice snug fit to the phone, and for people with pet peeve about the buttons i took a razor blade and thinned out the rubber just the exact little square that contacts the phone buttons where the buttons are cant see what you did from outside and makes buttons easier to depress
 

action_efn_jackson

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You know that you can set up a wireless sync on your phone and never use a usb cable again, right?

No I didn't. This totally means what ever you DL on your phone will automatically upload to your PC/Zune when ever you plug in your phone to charge if its within range of your wifi? Also will DL any updates your carrier or Microsoft sends out?

If so that's kickarse!
 

nrfitchett4

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No I didn't. This totally means what ever you DL on your phone will automatically upload to your PC/Zune when ever you plug in your phone to charge if its within range of your wifi? Also will DL any updates your carrier or Microsoft sends out?

If so that's kickarse!

on the zune desktop, go to settings for the phone and there is a choice to sync over wifi. Make sure that is checked, then from now on, anytime your phone is charging and idle for 10min while at home it will autoupdate over your home wifi.
It will not do MS updates though as I've heard those are usb only, but still, not having to sync your phone to your computer is very cool.
 

action_efn_jackson

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yes it is. i saw how it worked just last night. i dled a song from the marketplace to my phone via wifi. then later when i plugged it in to charge i got oh my pc. when i logged onto my windows acct zune was up and showed it had synced up with my phone and the song i had dled was there as well. pretty dang slick.
 

RedDawn

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I have had mine for 48 hours and so far love it. I had an iPhone 3G previously. I love the UI. Sometimes I wish there were secondary icon’s available….like instead of a full color version I could have a lo-rez version that is the same color as the system icons. Sometimes the color icons are jarring. I moved them to the bottom of the scroll.
My Zune doesn’t seem to be as loud as my Iphone was. I seem to have to turn it all the way up to get it almost where I want it. Maybe it’s the rocker in me but a little louder would be nice. I love the Zune interface a TON though so I will deal with it.

I have only bought 3 games so far. The Harvest, IloMilo and Max & The Magic Marker. All three I enjoy a lot. They run very smooth and the graphics are top notch.

One thing I don’t like is that I cant enter my companies wifi info manually…..anyone know why MS didn’t include that? I mean did they think people wouldn’t use this phone at work? We have a guest network here at the hospital that I can use but have to go through an acceptance page everytime it connects.

The only other weird thing is my Focus can’t connect to my Microsoft Sync in my car. I haven’t had time to look it up to figure out if my BT is broken or the Sync software just needs upgrading.

So in short I don’t miss my iPhone yet at all! F iTunes!
 

louser

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I keep trying to figure out how the set it up, but I cant find it. My stuff for Zune is the same for Xbox Live and that works fine

Tilo,

Did you get it working? I'm a new WP7 user but long time Zune user. Have every Zune since launch. Anyway you need to link your phone to enable Zune pass through the software. You can have 3 devices on one account, which is great for me and the kids. I'm at work so I can't remember exactly how to do it. PM me if you need help.

Lou
 

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