ROFL. I've gotten about 30 mention notifications from twitter in the last 24 hours, as it seems many people are including my twitter conversation, and my twitter handle, in replies to the reviewer. Before the WPCentral article came out, I had a short twitter conversation with the reviewer about the fb/ig sharing, as I felt the same way as everyone else here. I even posted a screenshot of my photo sharing screen to show her FB, 6tag, and others. I even got one guy on twitter who asked if sharing photos was so difficult how did I share the screenshot, as if I was involved in the "review". Got to love twitter...
Good grief. This is partly why I don't have an active Twitter account right now.
Plain and simple, the reviewer setup a Twitter account on the device. Whether she went and downloaded the Twitter client ? gosh, there is that word again?.official or not ? or set up the account through email and accounts is unclear. The takeaway is Twitter and Facebook have the same degree of difficulty and complexity in terms of linking those accounts to your phone. You use the native account management in Windows Phone or you download a
client.
So new question ? why was one selected over the other?
In terms of making software *****-proof, how far should a developer go? Where do we draw the line as developers and tech enthusiasts and simply say ?read the facking manual? and move on to more pressing issues. My children, 6 and 10, are capable of using Windows Phone with great ease. They actually find Android to be more cumbersome to be honest, and that is not exactly a stab at Google but rather a shot against Samsung/HTC/LG for moving settings to different menus.
So let?s say there is the potential for user error linking social networks on your device. Let?s see where those potential issues are:
Let?s say you have an activated Windows Phone device. You have not yet set up a Microsoft account, you aren?t downloading apps from the marketplace so you are limited to what is installed on the device. I should mention now that if the reviewer installed Twitter, there would have been a Microsoft account attached to the device without an email account. Then the question begs to be asked, why not set up an email account to explore all the available sharing options on the Lumia 1020? Was there really an intent to showcase what the Lumia 1020 could do?
Let?s assume that since Twitter was available, Molly installed the application. Therefore there was a Microsoft account present. To setup a Microsoft account, one has to enter the accounts and email / email and accounts setting. Social Networking ? Twitter and Facebook ? are both present here.
So the official Twitter client is the first option when searching for the application to install. Under related applications, Facebook?s official client is a suggestion along with Foursquare. While there is a different UI and layout, this functionality is no different than the Android Market / Google Play Store?s suggested applications.
As Daniel mentioned in his editorial yesterday, searching for Instagram in the marketplace would have pulled up the various clients available for the service. If Molly, the reviewer, exercised the same search function for Instagram as she did with Twitter there would have been less of a case against the limited sharing capabilities of Windows Phone.
It is my opinion that this poorly conceived review only served to highlight the shortcomings of the Windows Phone platform and the Lumia 1020 itself. Even in a scathing review where the bias against a product or service is evident, the one or two things that are done right are generally mentioned. Juxtaposing an incorrect and incomplete rundown of the Lumia?s features while slamming it at the same time? I seriously question the motivation here.
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