Windows Phone Frustrations
Hey everyone,
I came from the iPhone 4 and wanted to switch because of the lack of options and versatility that iPhone. As Windows is usually better about customization, I was excited to get my Windows Phone. Plus it has great hardware.
My god, I didn't think Windows saw Apple's success and started doing the same limiting BS but even more so. I didn't think I would have even more issues trying to customize my phone. It's ridiculous to the point of the silly.
The lack of app support is nothing short of crippling. It means that if you have an issue with the browser or any apps, you're basically out of luck. Oh yea, there aren't any browsers except for IE. I have no idea how that happened. But there are several minor issues with IE that become crippling because of bad implementation. Like for instance you can't access your favorites with a single button. Seriously, I have this massive screen, but apparently the designers of IE felt it was too terrible to use two rows for the menu. It's a joke. There's a single customizable button, so I guess if I never needed to refresh (???) I could make it convenient to access my favorites?
That's a minor issue, but there's also no Back button. That's kind of a massive functionality problem. There's a back button for the phone, but depending on your previous actions, this can send you back to the home screen or the Tabs screen. So if you're wandering around say, facebook (because the facebook app is pretty crappy), you'll actually sometimes find that it is impossible to go back without simply re-navigating to the page. It's especially true if you go back and forth between your email and browser. I didn't even know it was possible to design a browser with that kind of problem. It's impressive if nothing else.
I have a Nokia phone, so it came with a nice Nokia music app. There's an XBox music app, but as far as I can see, that can't play music that's actually on the phone itself (although now it seems to have merged minds with my Nokia app so it can). I don't have nor want an XBox, so maybe there's some magical functionality I'm missing here. Syncing the music from my computer to the phone was actually very easy thanks to Windows Media Player (which is a fantastic program), but then I found issues just playing the music. Because there's not even Windows Media Player for the phone. lol, windows doesn't even support their own phone. So I've relied on the Nokia music app, which is a joke. I've never seen something try SO hard to browse local files. It takes forever, and even crashes! It crashes just looking at files that are stored on the phone. I've never seen that before.
But it's got a great screen and such, so maybe it's good for watching things. I enjoy watching Twitch.tv a lot, so let's try streaming (with an unofficial app, of course). I found out that it can't play twitch natively from IE, which I was not expecting. But there's a bigger problem here. iPhone's have a single real button that can shut off the video, and you can even set it to 'hold' so that it doesn't do that. My Nokia? No such luck. If you press any of those three fake buttons at any time while watching something, you just have to navigate allllll the way back. Oh, and it doesn't save your place, so you'll just have to press that forward button a bunch if it was a youtube video. Oh yea, and there's no 'hold' switch to disable button pressing either. Good luck with that.
Oh and one of those buttons brings up a Bing search page, which serves as a nice reminder that windows is just trying to force me to use Bing. What kind of evil corporate overlord came up with that one? Go away. Stop putting corporate BS on my phone when there are serious functionality gaps. (Oh, and as an aside, the apps for Windows 8 desktop are also a joke. They're just the normal programs for desktop with gimped functionality.) I don't know what happened to Windows. But this is certainly not the design I was expecting. This is more the design I would expect from a Chinese knockoff of Apple.
So I have a contract for my Windows Phone because I let my two months go by. Even so, I suppose I could go back to my iPhone 4. At least that's more than a glorified camera.