? addition of drawer at the bottom of the hub seems entirely unnecessary: the pre-mango version with the ?add? and ?search? buttons atop the all section was fine & looked far better. throughout the rest of the hub those buttons (obviously) are unnecessary and as such there is a minimized drawer that just contains settings (which is completely unnecessary to have shown within the hub) this just wastes space & looks bad..
Uhm... there are now 3 options in the "drawer". Add new (group, contact); Search; and Settings. It makes more sense for these to be drawer options than just floating on the screen. Besides, if you're already down the list when you decide to use search, you'd have to scroll back to the top. The new way is more functional - you can start a search no matter where you are in the contacts list. This is generally true where they have used the drawer UI - you can now get to that feature immediately regardless of screen scrolling.
? still no ?mobile 2? phone number type option when saving a contact: this is honestly ridiculous and seemed a no-brainer add-in for mango and I?m shocked it was not included (especially given both outlook & windows live mail have options to add a mobile 2 to contacts?)
I hear this a lot, and I suppose there is no harm in adding it, but I honestly don't get why its necessary to have mutliple mobile numbers. Are people really walking around with 2 cell phones in their pocket? No. Therefore one of these numbers is not really mobile now is it? I know several people who have a personal cell and a work-provided cell. Only one of these is carried at all times - the personal cell. The work-cell is a work number.
Music + Videos Hub
? the biggest issue I have with music playback is the SHUFFLE!!! this is an issue I?ve had pre-mango. I HATE that the shuffle button actually shuffles the order of the songs listed in an album/playlist. I like always playing my music (mainly playlists) with shuffle on & use the song list to find specific tracks within. In Windows Media Player/Zune/iTunes/(I believe) all other main music playback platforms, shuffle does not actually shuffle the list you have selected, it just causes playback to jump around, so when viewing the list one always knows where their music is (PLEASE CHANGE THIS with Mango final build)?
This makes no sense to me. Are you shuffling or are you picking and choosing tracks? The list order changes in order to show you the order in which tracks are coming up. It makes perfect sense.
? during music playback, changing a to the next/previous slide via sliding the AlbumArt to the right/left is lags a lot?
I've experienced no lag in this feature on my Focus, pre- or post- Mango.
? also, Mango fixed the issue during playback where the list would only show track names (without artists below), but I feel it went a bit too far.. currently when selecting a track to play it shows the title in large followed by the artist (,) album below it. I feel the album being shown here is completely unnecessary and confusing, especially with long track/album titles & singles?
Absolutely not. A lot of my music (electronic/dance/dubstep) are different versions/remixes of the same song with the same name. Some have (remix - dj) appended to them, some do not... so I appreciate knowing the album. The same is true of live and acoustic versions. For example, Metallica's "Nothing else matters" from the black album is entirely different from "Nothing else matters" on S&M. I have a million examples of this. Its necessary and not at all confusing. Not having it would be confusing.
? again (common theme here) my next biggest complaint is the addition of the drawer at the bottom: other than on the main ?zune? page where there is a ?play all music? button, the drawer is always minimized and unnecessary/just wastes space/just looks bad.. this button could simple be placed as a play button as in the pre-Mango builds or to the top/right of the menu (as with the add & search buttons of the people hub pre-Mango)
What do you have against the drawers? They look fine and are pretty subtle. Having the play button on the page was extremely confusing. Most people thought it was just a visual cue to go to music, not an actual button that performs a task. Moving it made it more obvious and less ambiguous imo.
? regarding the ?history? & ?new? menus I do like the vertical lists much more than before! However, regarding the history list I have some issues with repeat items showing up (for example when I play a single song from an album It goes to the history list, then later when I play the whole album that separately gets added as well; I have no way to differentiate them when clicking a history item as they both look exactly the same/show the album cover). my recommendation would be ?history? be reserved for only albums, artists, & playlists to avoid confusion (and prevent duplicates). I also do not like how YouTube/other videos not in my collection also stay on the history (this often this overruns my list quite quickly & makes it useless for browsing my own music/videos)
Agree about the remote video history. Though it has come in handy before when I wanted to show someone a youtube vid I watched recently. I think they need to break music and video history apart.
? also, I don?t know if anyone else has had this problem but with build 7112 there seems to be a bug with my ?people? tab within the pictures hub. upon opening/sliding to it all I see is a ?choose contact? link; when I click the link I randomly get just four contacts (one under each letter: F, I, P, and S).. I have no idea why this is so & in each case clicking the contact yields nothing???
On my focus, this "choose your contact" display, shown alone, lasts a fraction of a second before the Contact Tiles load seemingly with a set of random contacts (but more than 4). Once the contact tiles have loaded (again, fraction of a second), the "choose your contact" button is at the bottom of the list. I think this should go in a drawer.
? also, within the apps marketplace the ?new? section does not show images next to the apps for some reason (though it does for ?top?). (same applies to the Xbox live section in same marketplace) it just looks inconsistent..
Images show on all pivots for me.
Internet Explorer
? ADD THE TABS BUTTON BACK to the main bar from the drawer!!!: that?s my only real complaint here.. everything else looks great, but this is incredibly annoying (I?d even say replace the refresh button with it instead, but I?ll leave it to the smart people at MSFT to figure how to best do this as it seems a common complaint?)
Initially, I felt the same way... but honestly after using it awhile, I don't think I've missed it.
Other
? multitasking quick close of apps: would be great if there were a little x-button atop each card allowing one to quickly kill an app without opening it up and backing out (better yet a slide up/down & away to close the app, though that may be infringing a bit on webos too much..?)
Why? The app is suspended, not processing anything, and just sitting in memory that would be otherwise unused. If the os needs memory, it will automatically drop the oldest app to free up what it needs. I mean sure, they could add it, but why bother manually controlling this?
? multitasking, multiple music/videos hub pages: when listening to music and backing out via the start button, I find that when I look through the multitasking menu I see the music + videos hub appear twice (once with the last page of the hub selection I was at and again for the currently playing track. this should be removed)
This is true. They also show the start screen as a card, though I think this has already been removed from the RTM build.
? longer ?long-press? back button for multitasking: I often find myself holding the back button a little too long when just backing out of a page and I guess the phone sort of moves in & out of the multitasking view really quickly and I just get my page refreshed with my accent colour showing up around the edges
Its already a full 1 sec press. You must be accidentially lifting. A continuous press won't take you out of the task switcher. You're double tapping at some point.
I gotta say, overall, I find most of your suggestions to be pretty trivial and subjective - not improvements per se.
The only feature annoyance I've had is the inability to associate facebook contacts and twitter contacts. When composing a tweet, it would be nice to be able to run through your contacts list for the people you want to mention.