The Attitude Of Others Towards WP

[baseballbert]

At the Att store I went to, sales person said WP7 isn't much, and I should wait for the Atrix 2. I then started to drop Mango knowledge on him, and I knew more about WP7 than he did.

Couldn't answer any of my questions (truth be told I set him up to see how clueless he was), and if I hadn't done my research, I would've listened to him.

 

[Sparxy19]

I agree that differant name might have been better but then once W8 comes out i suppose MS will want people to relate the phones to there tablets and PC's

 

[Big Supes]

Hi guys, newbie here.

As someone who never follows 'the trend', I found myself very impressed with the WP when it was pitched to me in a phone shop. It was at the time where I was severely annoyed with Apple and enough was enough... it was time to divorce them. My main problem was iTunes and how Apple attempt to monopolise the planet with their locked down products and copyright heavy downloads. I guess it helped that I've always been a happy MS customer, being generally impressed with Windows 7 and my Xbox 360, but even so, the WP stood out on it's own merits.

Having owned my HTC HD7 for around 9 months now, I'm astonished and baffled as to how, generally, people are such lemmings when it comes down to making a personal choice on what phone is best for them! Not one person has turned their nose up at the WP when I've shown them the sleek and easy-to-use interface. Sure, there were some basic things that were missing from the start (copy'n paste, etc), but generally, you could see the potential for this awesome platform.

 

[Skycop]

For work we have to choose between an iPhone or blackberry. I don't consider myself a ****** but I love rocking my Arrive for my personal phone. I have a co worker who is an ifanboy who was giving me a hard time for choosing the iPhone over blackberry. I'm not a big fan of apple but I don't out right hate them.

He's played with my phone for all of 2 seconds and said that he thought it was ok. When I asked him if he couldn't pick and iPhone what would he go with and he said he'd pick a blackberry over a droid (which he hates) and a windows phone.

I was somewhat surprised by his answer considering that he gave props to my phone earlier but is still convinced that blackberry makes a better phone. His reasons were that it was more stable and it started up fast. I told him that my windows phone is very stable and starts up fast and he just blew it off, even though he's seen it and acknowledged how responsive and easy it was to use.

Just didn't make sense to me. I know it's a personal preference and matter of opinion but who'd in their right mind would go to a blackberry from an iPhone instead of a windows phone or android? To me it's like stepping way back.

I'm really not trying to insult blackberry users, it's just that my work phone is a blackberry and it really feels antiquated to me and not very intuitive. But I do like the keyboard.

 

[UpTownDC]

True, but this is mainly because Nokia has only sold their high-end phones unlocked in the USA. You couldn't get them subsidized through carriers, the way the vast majority prefer to do it in the USA. Heck, the only place I have actually seen an N8 was a non-functioning display model at Fry's. . . on a display separate from the other smartphones and from the cell phone sales people.

Nokia has said that they are taking a US-centric approach this time around. They're going to sell their Windows phones subsidized by carriers. And they and MS supposedly have money set aside for a huge advertising blitz. I really think Nokia's smartphones can be a hit in the USA. The hardware quality is amazing.

MS has a solid, compelling product. All that's missing is marketing. They need to convince people that WP7 is something they should desire. That it's something people choose because they WANT it. They managed to do it with Xbox, they can do it again.

If Microsoft put's forth the effort with their marketing of WP7 like they marketed Windows 95 they would blow Apple and Android away!! They need a media and marketing blitz to show what the phone/OS can do. Every time your turn on the TV you see an Apple or Android commercial...they need to flood the airwaves, TV and print media with WP7 advertising until folks are sick of hearing and seeing it.

 

[red grenadine]

Honestly, the attitude isn't exactly unwarranted given Microsoft's past failures in the consumer space. Unfair, yes but not unwarranted.

The fact of the matter is that the failures of Playsforsure / Zune / Windows Mobile / Vista / Windows Tablets (pre-windows 8) all skew consumer attitudes negative and it's hard to dig out of that. It'll take time and a lot of effort on Microsoft's part.

At least we saw them reverse the XBOX 360 RROD situation and arguably win this generation's console wars (in large part to their fantastic XBOX Live service) so there is hope

 

[Raptor007]

My Co-Worker tried out my Trophy and really likes the phone, and keeps going on about how his Droid X (with Gingerbread) is a POS, freezes up, slow to respond etc. One thing I actually like about WP7 is the control by MS to keep the UI consistent and set standards which I feel can be a big benefit but also limiting if we don't seem some serious upgrades in hardware. What I am looking for will come along in the next 12-18 months, (not necessarily dual-core) but 4G LTE, better and higher res displays and of course more options than 1 friggin phone on Verizon.

 

[GekkoAce]

My Co-Worker tried out my Trophy and really likes the phone, and keeps going on about how his Droid X (with Gingerbread) is a POS, freezes up, slow to respond etc. One thing I actually like about WP7 is the control by MS to keep the UI consistent and set standards which I feel can be a big benefit but also limiting if we don't seem some serious upgrades in hardware. What I am looking for will come along in the next 12-18 months, (not necessarily dual-core) but 4G LTE, better and higher res displays and of course more options than 1 friggin phone on Verizon.

Currently they can't use higher res displays. MS requires 800x480 so that developers don't have to worry about screen resolution changing on differant handsets like they do on Android.

 

[Pronk]

I just wish they'd set the bar higher to start so the resolution was more future-proof. The absolute simplest way to handle backwards compatibility with apps is resolution doubling or straight scaling. That's why the iPhone 4 is 960 x 640 - double the old 3G 480 x 320 resolution. And I don't see 1600 x 960 screens coming along for a while yet!

 

[red grenadine]

I just wish they'd set the bar higher to start so the resolution was more future-proof. The absolute simplest way to handle backwards compatibility with apps is resolution doubling or straight scaling. That's why the iPhone 4 is 960 x 640 - double the old 3G 480 x 320 resolution. And I don't see 1600 x 960 screens coming along for a while yet!

I'm not a devoloper or anything, but would scaling up by 50% be very difficult for backwards compatability, etc? So 1200x720 for next gen phones up from 800x480?

Maybe Windows 8 phones will have higher resolution specs

 

[Pronk]

No idea - let's hope so!

 

[Reflexx]

The resolution was likely picked because it was high enough to look nice, but not so high that it would need a more powerful gpu to do anything nice looking.

I imagine that the resolution requirement will remain the same until WP8 comes out. And then scaling up apps with the old resolution will likely be taken care of in the OS.

 

[smartpatrol]

I'm not a devoloper or anything, but would scaling up by 50% be very difficult for backwards compatability, etc? So 1200x720 for next gen phones up from 800x480?

Maybe Windows 8 phones will have higher resolution specs

AFAIK that shouldn't be a HUGE problem but there are still issues. All WP7 apps are based on Silverlight or XNA (and with Mango they can use elements of each).

Silverlight is vector-based, so its UI should scale perfectly well to any resolution. The only problem is bitmap images used for UI elements or whatever. They would probably look crappy unless the app includes multiple versions of all its bitmapped images.

XNA is designed so that you can render the graphics at a different resolution than what they're displayed at. MS actually encourages developers to use a lower resolution and let it be scaled up automatically if it's necessary for performance. Unfortunately, a lot of games are running at 800x480 native. Meaning that they would actually look worse on a higher-res screen. The only real solution would be for many games to be re-programmed to function at multiple resolutions.

I'm sure Microsoft is agonizing whether to bite the bullet and fragment WP7 in order to support higher resolutions. I kind of hope they don't fragment it. One of WP7's biggest strengths is its total lack of fragmentation. It makes it nice and easy to develop for. 800x480 is perfectly fine IMO. I've seen e.g. the Evo and the Evo 3D side-by-side, and I'm not convinced the extra resolution makes that big of a difference.

 

[Sparxy19]

Hopefully this will help

EDIT: see next post

 

[palandri]

Microsoft training “hundreds” of salesmen to improve Windows Phone sales | WinRumors

 

[chriss1928]

I can definitely say of the people I know I know 1 person with a WP7 device and it's the wife of my manager at work. Everyone uses Android and iOS and nobody even knows what WP7 is about. I am slowly telling people, a guy with a Thunderbolt scoffs at the fact it doesn't have 4g or a big screen(HTC Trophy). He complains of battery life, force closing apps and slowdowns until battery pulls.

I play music all day long at work and with Zune Pass pretty much anything ever made is at my disposal unlike the other clowns that run Slacker and it recycles the same 20 songs over and over every day.

I think the advertising w Mango will really help out, and getting sales associates more trained on how to sell it will help. I know at the verizon store I go to its so android biased its ridiculous. If you mention Blackberry, Palm, WP7 you get slammed for not buying the "insert new android phone here" as its the best ever. Hopefully this changes!

 

[baseballbert]

I love my Focus, and I've raved about it to as many of my friends as I've could. Half of them think I'm nuts, 25% curious, and 25% have liked playing with it quite a bit.

I came over from iPhone 4, and haven't looked back.

 

[Windows Winner]

Microsoft may consider securing the services of Oprah or Lady Ga Ga or even Justine Bieber to tell the world that WP7 is the REAL THING. I just hope they don't use Britany Spears considering she was caught drinking a Coke after pushing Pepsi.

 

[smartpatrol]

Microsoft may consider securing the services of Oprah or Lady Ga Ga or even Justine Bieber to tell the world that WP7 is the REAL THING. I just hope they don't use Britany Spears considering she was caught drinking a Coke after pushing Pepsi.

Or maybe Russel Brand? Actually, scratch that. . .

 

[bilzkh]

This is just wild optimism, but a colleague of mine (a Blackberry user) said that Microsoft might be hard at work to push this phone to business/enterprise users. Yes there are obvious security issues and what not, but the way he explained it was that there are a lot of Microsoft services - e.g. Office 365, Exchange, Windows 8, etc - that businesses may continue to acquire in the future.

What Microsoft could do is - while securing contracts for these services - to simply offer Windows Phone 7.5 (or 8) "enterprise edition" phones built to work with their systems from the get-go for free. So they can offer free limited pilot programs for larger businesses, and complete handset solutions to smaller ones. They will take a loss, but they'd have multiple businesses experience the full Microsoft set-up first hand, and from there (as well as profits gained from providing services/software) make up for that loss over time.

We know they can sustain losses, but when you have a company like Nokia also supporting it, jointly subsidizing handsets may not be as big a deal. In the end, if a WP7.5/8 Nokia enterprise phone works with the MS eco-system well and users like it, then those very same businesses will probably continue buying and others will join.

Again this is just wild optimism and an outsider's guess as to how Microsoft might be thinking. In the end though, we should remember that Microsoft has a habit of coming into the game a little late, but if they persist and do it well enough, they can come out as a key player in an area. They're the type of company that is willing to take some hits and throw money at something, even for a couple of years.