So I have had my Samsung Focus for 4 days now. I am actually extremely impressed with WP7 so far. Some things I have noticed:
* I am constantly impressed at how fluid everything is. More than just how awesomely smooth the interface is in general, I can exit almost any application and game and be at the home screen in less than a second. I can extremely quickly go in and out of applications one after another without experiencing any slowdown, and it feels amazing.
* I love the integration of everything and how quickly I can go from text messages, to facebook feeds, to a person's facebook wall, to their photo collection, then to my photo collection and back. It's so seamless to navigate, and I can't wait to see how this gets built upon.
* I love the extremely focused and no-distraction/no-frills interface. Half of the people I have showed it off to are impressed and the other half think it's boring, but honestly that's ok. It really gives people a choice of interface to use for their phone in the market. For me, the the focused (and well integrated options) really make it fast and easy to find the information I am looking for, and it being clean makes the text really easy to read.
* I love how all my games are automatically put in the Games application and do not clutter up my app listing. It makes it SO much easier to find games when I want to, but also find applications when I'm not looking for an installed game. It's a small thing, but I like it
* Xbox live integration is kind of nice. Achievement whoring never gets old, and I have quite a few friends who have 360s.
* The keyboard is nice, although I still keep hitting the return key when I mean to hit backspace, and I tend to hit the spacebar when I am going for a letter on the bottom row. I've had that issue on every virtual keyboard I have used though.
* Zune is awesome, both the desktop application and the phone app. At first I was a bit apprehensive, but between the Zune pass, wireless sync of all my music, and the music discovery options, I am having a blast. However, I do wish I could store an online list of artists I like so I can keep tabs on Zune Pass music that I like (this is an issue due to me using zune pass at work and at home).
* Bing maps seems to have more interface polish than Google maps on Android. While it lacks turn by turn navigation, everything else about it makes me enjoy it more than GMaps did on my last android. Transitions are smooth, you can more easily see the map while looking at the directions listing, and it seems to load the actual maps faster (though that could be due to AT&T). I did encounter one bug the other day where it wouldn't load directions but it didn't last long.
* Game trials are nothing but <3, Especially since apps cost a bit more on this platform than others (which makes sense, same thing happened on Android for a while until the platform's audience got larger). I'm cheap and don't like spending $3 unless it's something I will play or use ($3 can add up with a lot of apps), and the trials have gotten me to buy things I probably wouldn't have pulled the trigger on without trying them first.
* Bluetooth button on the calling interface!!!! This is heaven for me, as I use my phone with my car's Sync system all the time. Many times I put the call in privacy mode, but quite a few times I have wanted phone calls to go from car bluetooth, to phone only, and back to the car's bluetooth (like if other people are in the car). With Android, once i put the phone into Privacy (in phone) mode, I could not push it back to the bluetooth (as far as I could tell). This phone makes it very easy.
All around, this phone has been a complete joy to use, and I am very confident so far that I will be keeping this as my phone past the 30 day return period, even with the update fiasco.
However there are some things that I don't like
* Typing words that aren't in the dictionary is sometimes annoying. Sometimes it will force you to auto-correct to a word you didn't want, and sometimes it's annoying to get past that. Luckily once you do, it's easy to add a word to the phone's dictionary but until you get to that point I had to type the same word in a few times. The last time I used it I was trying to enter the first name of someone who is actually in my contact list. It really needs to be adding all names from my contact list into the phone's dictionary by default.
* The web browser sucks. I'm not sure why every review I read claims it was awesome. For starters, it can't render WPCentral's gradient correctly, and the color transition is extremely broken up and staggered. It reminds me of the old VGA days. My second annoyance is that scrolling quickly produces the blue "loading" areas, so while scrolling is smooth, you still have to wait until things load. Finally, I miss Android's zoom buttons, as it seems the only way to zoom out of a spot is to pinch to zoom, and some areas (like WPCentral's top bar) you can't double tap to zoom in close enough to hit a button, so you have to pinch to zoom. I like using my phone one handed (what I do with my other hand is my own business
)
* The only reason I will really enjoy copy and paste is due to my reliance on LastPass. It makes it hard to get at some of my passwords for services without it. It's not a deal breaker though, I have found ways to manage without it so far.
* The default ringtones and (more importantly) alarms suck. I usually don't care about custom ringtones and notification sounds, but the ones that come with the phone I am not impressed with at all.
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