I'm copying and pasting this from a facebook post I made earlier so if it sounds like I'm talking to someone else, that's why. This is my first hands-on experience with Windows Phone, and I'm still on the fence over it. It may seem fickle and impatient of me because I just got the phone activated 24 hours ago, but I'm not really sure I like enough to go through two years of a contract with it. I'm coming from Android 2.3 running on an HTC Incredible.
I'm torn. I want to like WP8(the phone hardware itself is really well built so good job Nokia) for its speed, simplicity, and overall ease of use but there's something holding me back from really enjoying it. The interface itself as I've said before is simple, easy to use, and very customizable. But like a dimwit in a suit, it presents itself in such a way as to feel more sophisticated than it actually is. That's a pretty harsh criticism but there's really only two layers to the OS. There's the "live tile"home screen, and then there's the largely text-based app underneath. It reminds me in a way of an old BIOS system, in that it's entirely text and toggles, and entirely straight to the point. I admire it for that, but at the same time I can't say I've ever felt like I wanted a computer BIOS to be my only end user experience. Granted, the same can mostly be said of iOS and Android and their largely static "rows of icons.. far as the eye can see" but ultimately I don't feel any different using WP8 than I did using Android 2.3 Gingerbread.
Many of the tiles built directly into the OS are really well done, and nicely animated. Things like the photos tile and the people tile show neat info and are well presented but overall kind of useless. They're much more interesting than a gallery app icon, but in the end that's all it is. Now, the tiles themselves can show information like how many unread texts, or emails, or whatever and if they're the full-size tile they'll actually preview text or email or whatever in the tile itself. I think this is Microsoft's justification for not having a notification tray similar to Android's. "All your notifications are in the tiles!" and that's fine, and maybe it's just habit but I find myself missing my notification tray.
I said before that people are really well integrated into the framework of the OS. You can set your facebook account in the accounts section of the settings and it will pull all your friends into your contact list, their photos, their wall posts, etc. That's nice, and it's easy to move back and forth and grab all the info you can and it's all right there without having to use Microsoft's facebook app(there's no app developed directly by Facebook). This also works for other social sites like LinkedIn and maybe a few others. And while that's all neat and useful, as a personal preference, I do like some separation.
One thing I read from another WP convert, who went back to his original OS was that all this integration doesn't do much for privacy. If someone picks up my phone, everything is just right there. They can open my people hub and see everyone I know and all their stuff. Granted they could just open my FB app and do the same thing, but with it so integrated into the system it's harder to set things aside as private.
And there are other things just don't seem well thought out. If I have my alarms turned on, I can't see that they're on unless I'm looking at the lock screen. There's no simple 'clock' tile (HTC has one as part of their specific software package) or a battery level tile. Those things are displayed in the top status bar, but the bar auto-hides itself with no way of changing it that I've found. The little clock is always visible from the home screen but it will disappear in certain apps.
That's a weak excuse for not liking an OS, but simple things like those taken as a whole are often what makes up the bulk of people's user experiences and to have them flat out missing just seems like a big oversight. Developers can create tiles for them, but from what I understand, Microsoft doesn't allow third parties to develop high-level apps that integrate well into the overall OS and have the ability to do real-time updating, for instance.
But I think the thing that's nagging at me the most is Microsoft's (thus far) attitude toward their little baby. I understand the idea that they want to control the user experience in such a way that it is consistent across devices, but them wanting to create their own 'walled garden' ala iOS seems like the wrong move. Android is the most adopted platform in the world and one of the reasons is not locking down choice and options and high-level integration.
I think ultimately WP8 is going to appeal to a lot of people. It doesn't look like the other smartphone systems out there, and it doesn't necessarily function in the same way, though the end result is more or less the same. But only a day in, I feel like I've already explored much of what it has to offer. Resizing, moving, pinning and unpinning tiles is neat for a while and lets you prioritize to a degree, but the depth that it offers is something of an illusion. It reminds me of something my 4 year old nephew would enjoy for a while, then get bored with. It's still a very cool system and at least on the surface is very different but I can't say right now that I could survive two years of it. We'll see in another week or so what I think of it and whether or not I'm going to swap back to Android.