So Much For That…

A while ago, as part of the overall Technical Preview program for Windows 10, Microsoft released a Technical Preview of the phone version for Windows 10 to those brave souls willing to take the risk of "bricking" their phones in order to test and help improve the latest mobile offering from Redmond.
However, due to an issue with the size of the install partition - a boring technical issue that I won't get into - only a limited number of phones were eligible to run the pre-release OS.
My phone was not one of them.
Recently, they announced that they would be releasing a new build that would be available for a wider range of phones, including mine, and provided a release date and time of April 10th at 10 AM PDT.
I decided to give it a shot - in the worst case, it would brick my 2+ year old phone and I'd pick up a cheap, low-end Windows Phone off-contract to tide me over until MS finally releases a new "flagship" phone later this year along with the official release of Windows 10.
Having gotten distracted by something else, it was a few minutes after the launch went live before I fired up the Windows Insider app to start the update process.
I was promptly greeted by a server error.  I tried again off and on for a while, and checked online to see if this was a known issue and if there was a fix in the works.  It was, and there was, and some hours later I was able to get the ball rolling and the update downloading.
It took a lot longer for the update to install than any other update I've done on my phone, but eventually the phone rebooted and I was greeted with the new look of the Windows 10 UI.
I was not, however, greeted with much in the way of actual functionality.  Most apps would immediately crash upon opening, and the battery was draining at a pace that would make Barry Allen say, "Slow down, Turbo."
It's worth noting that one of the few apps that I could get to work properly was the Photos app.  I found this amusing because on the PC version of the Windows 10 Technical Preview, the Photos app is the least usable app an can barely be said to function at all.
The new Outlook Mail app would open and bring me to a "Getting Started" screen to add accounts, as it didn't appear to carry over any of my existing e-mail accounts.  I attempted to add my GMail account, and it went through all the steps, including bringing me to the screen from Google asking me to authorize the app's access to my account.  At that point, however, a message popped up saying, "Oops!  Something went wrong!"  It then sent me back to the "Getting Started" screen, which had become unresponsive and would not allow me to try again until I closed and reopened the app, which would result in the same error when trying to add GMail, and no error message, but a return to the unresponsive "Getting Started" screen if I tried adding any other type of account.
I decided that a reboot was probably in order.  However, upon starting back up, the phone indicated that there was no SIM card present (there was), and that no wireless networks were available.  Another reboot did not solve the problem.
Before running the recovery software to attempt to go back to the previously-installed OS, I decided to do a hard reset, which would wipe all the data on the phone and give me a fresh start.
Once the reset was done, it attempted to restore some of my data.  Mostly preferences - account information, Start screen layout - etc. but there were several items that couldn't be restored because they depended on features that are no longer supported, or required files that were no longer present.  A particular folder of photos that I had pinned to the Start screen couldn't be restored, for example, because the photos it contained were wiped from the phone's storage.
I wasn't terribly concerned - there was nothing on the phone that was irreplaceable - particularly given that it was now recognizing my SIM card and was able to connect to my wireless network.
Additionally, upon launching the Outlook Mail app, I saw that all of my existing accounts were in place, though I did have to log back in to each of them.
With the Technical Preview up and running, I can share my initial reaction to some of the changes and new features, as well as some of the bugs I've encountered.
Let's start with the Pros:

Outlook Mail and Calendar - The two apps can be accessed separately, but are directly linked, and they look great.  Evidently they leaned heavily on the look and functionality of the recently-acquired Accompli in designing the apps.  I love being able to swipe to delete a or flag a message.  Not thrilled about the "hamburger" menu, but that's a battle that I think users have lost at this point, unfortunately.
Project Spartan - It's still extremely rough around the edges, but just the fact that Microsoft's next-generation browser is included in this build at all is a good thing.
Action Center - There have been multiple improvements here, including the option to Expand and see additional actions and settings.  Also, the ability to interact with notifications inline - being able to reply to a text from the notification without having to switch to the Messaging app, for example - is pretty damn cool.
Messaging - It's a nice - if long overdue - touch to actually show the contact picture for the person you're communicating with in the view of Conversations.  Also, the individual conversation threads themselves look somewhat more modern with the changes to the message balloons.
Settings - Being able to pin individual settings to the Start screen is a handy feature.
Bluetooth Keyboard Support – Another “about damn time” feature.  Of course, I wasn’t able to get this to work; while it attempted to pair with the one Bluetooth keyboard I had handy, much like Jon on a date* it wasn’t able to seal the deal.  Of course, that may have been a user error problem (again, much like Jon on a date).

...and I'm not going to list the Cons, because just a little while ago the Technical Preview bricked me.
Fortunately, I was able to roll back to 8.1 using the Lumia Recovery Tool, but making my phone completely unresponsive is the biggest Con there is, so no point in listing the other issues right now.
In fairness, it is an install-at-your-own-risk piece of pre-release software, so I can't complain too much, but until they provide a more stable build, I don't think I'll be making any further attempts at using it any time soon.
That said, I did have the opportunity to provide some feedback (which is what the Technical Preview is for), and to at least add my own to the chorus of voices calling out for some specific changes and improvements.
In the meantime, I'll keep using the PC/Tablet version on my Surface Pro 2 and providing additional feedback there.

*Though the fact that it was even able to attempt to pair puts it well-ahead of Jon on that front.

Band On The Run (Sorry)

A bit ago I decided that if I wanted to make any progress on my fitness goals I needed to do a better job of tracking my activities and calorie consumption, stepping a little further into “quantified self” territory.
After getting the firmware update that would allow the app to work on my phone, I picked up a Fitbit flex.
I knew going into my purchase that better, shinier gadgets would likely be released in the near-future, but I figured it was worth getting started anyway, and I went with Fitbit specifically because it does support my phone, which is a rare thing.
Overall, I was pleased with it.  It worked as advertised, and I have to say that there is a definite advantage to “gamifying” fitness and providing incentives.  It doesn’t matter that said incentives – badges, in this case – are ultimately meaningless; even when they know there’s no real value in a prize, human nature drives people to pursue said prize.  (See also reddit users and “karma.”)
Having a set daily goal – 10,000 steps – to achieve, with the potential to receive badges for hitting other goals served its purpose, and after hitting the daily goal for the first time, I thereafter always achieved that goal, and usually went well beyond 10,000 steps.
Like I said, even though they didn’t have any value, the badges served as an incentive.  When I found myself just a little over 1,000 steps away from achieving the 25,000 step badge at 11 PM, I spent the next 20 minutes walking around my house like a crazy person to get my step count up, ultimately leading me to get well over 25,000 steps for the day.
I also found myself watching my diet even more carefully after I began logging my food and setting a daily goal for calories in vs. calories out.  So overall, I was satisfied with the Fitbit.
My only real complaint was the lack of features on the band itself.  Sure, it would vibrate when I hit my goal, and the vibrating “gentle” alarm feature makes for a slightly less jarring way to wake up in the morning than a standard alarm (or even music).  But the display consists only of five little lights, each one representing a portion of your daily goal, allowing you to have a general idea of where you stand, and in order to get more specifics you needed to sync it and check your stats in the app (or online).
At a minimum, I would have liked for it to be able to display the time, as I disliked having to wear both the Fitbit and my watch (and I like to have a watch rather than having to check my phone to see the time).  Beyond that, I wanted something with some smartwatch capabilities that would allow me to view my calendar or receive notifications (again, without having to check my phone).
Further, while you can manually enter the information in via the app, the Fitbit isn’t great at detecting activities other than walking/running, and even there it kind of fails when it comes to using an elliptical machine.
I was a little annoyed – even though I expected it – when Fitbit announced an upcoming product that would address some of those issues, adding in things like heart rate monitoring, GPS tracking, and some smartwatch capabilities, to be released early next year.
However, I was even more annoyed when, while not quite out of the blue, Microsoft unexpectedly announced its own wearable device, the Microsoft Band.
I won’t dive into all of the specs, but suffice to say that the Band has a lot going for it.
Despite having just sunk money into the Fitbit – and despite the fact that it’s a 1.0 product from Microsoft – after looking over the details on the day of its release I ordered one.
After all, it checked off all of the items on my wish list:

GPS Tracking
Heart Rate Monitoring
More In-Depth Activity Tracking
Built-In Display of Progress Towards Goals
A Clock
Access To Calendar, E-Mail, and Other Notifications
Compatible With My Phone

While there are plenty of reviewers who are damning it with faint praise (it is a Microsoft product, after all, and there are plenty of people in the tech world who are not inclined to give MS much credit even when it’s due), and focusing on it being “ugly” and bulky, I quite like the look of it.  As for being bulky, well, your mileage may vary, but it’s lighter than my watch was, and not having to wear both a watch and an activity tracker has lightened the load on my wrist.
There are those who are also complaining that it’s not quite so feature-rich as other smartwatches, but it fits the bill for me, particularly given its integration with Cortana.
Again, your mileage may vary, but I’m not inclined to engage in terribly complex activities via a small device on my wrist, so the “limited” functionality hits the right balance in terms of convenience.
In terms of the overall strategy, Microsoft isn’t terribly concerned about selling a lot of Bands – though they did sell out of the existing stock very quickly, apparently – but rather on licensing out the technology and partnering with other manufacturers of activity trackers.  Indeed, they made the Band compatible with iOS and Android as well.  More to the point, they’re looking to corner the market on health data, and getting everyone to standardize on their cloud-based health data platform.  The Band itself is, in many ways, kind of irrelevant, and serves mostly as a proof-of-concept and showcase for their sensor technology.
To get back to the matter at, er, hand, however, I’ll focus on my own experience using the Band.
So far I have no complaints about the Band itself and have been quite pleased with it.  Some accounts complain about inaccuracies – particularly around heart rate monitoring – but I’m not a professional reviewer and so I haven’t done any of the comparison work that other reviewers have.  For my part, I’ve found the step count to be pretty accurate, and the data it provides seems to align with what I know about my heart rate and the ranges in which it tends to beat.
That said, I actually bought the Band at a lousy time.
I had been suffering from some serious lower back pain that had drastically impacted my mobility and motivation – not just my motivation to exercise, but even to just go on living – and a trip to the doctor led to me being put on a course of steroids.  Said steroids dramatically weakened my already useless immune system, so almost as soon as I went in to work and exposed myself to the hundreds of walking disease bags there I came down with a nasty cold that left me laid up for the past two days.
So there hasn’t been a whole lot of activity to track, but hopefully that will change soon.

Despite recovering from being stick, I still exceed my goal...because I'm just that awesome.

I have very few complaints about the Band itself.  I find it comfortable enough that I’ve pretty much stopped noticing that it’s there, and even though having it turned so that the display is on the inside of my wrist, I’m getting used to it – it’s definitely a more natural position for interacting with it – and rarely find that it interferes with things like typing.
That said, it would benefit from following the contours of the wrist at least a little and having a slight curve rather than being flat.
And while I don’t feel a need to engage in terribly complex interactions with it – I don’t necessarily want to be wearing a phone on my wrist, after all, at least not with the current options available – I do wish that acknowledging/dismissing a notification on the Band would serve to also acknowledge/dismiss it on the phone.  I’d even like to be able to delete an e-mail or text on the Band.  Of course, I’d also like to be able to do that directly from the Action Center on my phone itself, so…
The majority of my complaints are with the accompanying Health app that accompanies the Band.
First off, the Windows Phone app looks pretty much the same as the iOS and Android versions.  Sometimes standardization is good, but this isn’t one of those times, as the interface is not built according to the design language of Windows Phone/Windows 8.1 apps.  This is especially troubling, given that the Band’s interface is very much a “modern” (formerly known as “metro”) UI.  There has been a marked trend on Microsoft’s part of late to ignore its own design language, most notably with its recently-updated OneDrive app, and I find it troubling, as the modern design – particularly on Windows Phone – is a key differentiator, and it’s one of the elements of the platform that I find especially compelling.
Further, the tile for the app only has the small and medium options for size – and it isn’t live.
It also isn’t universal – there is no version of the app available for PCs/tablets.
I assume that one will be forthcoming, as there is a driver that gets installed if you connect the Band (via its USB charger) to a PC.
Which leads to the other complaint I have about the app:  it’s very basic.  While it does present you with options for viewing detailed reports and for personalizing the Band – changing the accent color, adding/removing tiles, etc. – there are no options for tracking how many calories you consume.  Ideally, as Microsoft continues to partner with Fitbit, they’ll add that feature, and have hooks into Fitbit’s comprehensive food database.  Fitbit aside, though, Microsoft already has a Health and Fitness app that allows you to track your calories, so at a minimum Health should integrate with Health and Fitness.
I’m also not particularly thrilled with the alarms.  Like the Fitbit Flex, you can use the Band’s silent alarm – if you’re wearing it while you sleep to track your sleeping patterns – to wake you up in the morning, and that works fine.  As I mentioned, I prefer being woken by the slight buzzing on my wrist.  However, the alarm has to be set on the Band itself, and you have to turn it on manually at night, every night.  With Fitbit, you set alarms and their recurrence pattern in the companion app.  Health should add that same capability.
Speaking of sleep monitoring, one other issue I have with the Band is that it doesn’t pay any attention to your phone’s “Quiet Hours” setting.  In Windows Phone 8.1, you can designate Quiet Hours during which your phone won’t buzz/ring (you can also set up exceptions).  The Band doesn’t care about that.  If its set to vibrate upon receiving an e-mail, it will do so, no matter what time it is.
This isn’t really an issue if you’re actually using the sleep monitoring, as telling the Band that you’re sleeping disables notifications for the duration, but it is an example of integration with Windows Phone that needs to be more fully-baked.
So the ultimate question is, would I recommend the Band?  If you have a wish list for a smart wearable/fitness tracker that I have, absolutely.  If you’re looking for something more basic, without any of the smartwatch capabilities, I’d say go with the Fitbit.  If you need more advanced smartwatch capabilities, well, I can’t help you there, but you have a wealth of choices.
Ultimately, though, I’d recommend taking a wait-and-see attitude, as the odds are you’ll have even more options in the near-future if Microsoft can succeed in getting other activity tracker and smartwatch manufacturers on board with its emerging platform and sensor technologies.

Suggestion Box

Not that anyone who has any influence will see this – although I have to admit that I was surprised by the amount of traffic that my last post about Windows Phone 8.1 has received – but as this is my primary public forum (such as it is), I thought I’d share some suggestions for improvements and enhancements for the two pieces of technology I’ve been living and working with for the past few weeks:  Windows Phone 8.1, and the Surface Pro 2.

Windows Phone 8.1:

I’m starting with WP 8.1 simply because, as it exists right now, it’s actually pre-release software, and as such, there is room for Microsoft to make some improvements before the product is officially released, though, again, as a person who is completely lacking any sort of influence and lacking an audience of people who have influence, I doubt that anything I write will even be seen, let alone implemented.
Beyond that, some of my suggestions pertain to Cortana, and as much of what Cortana does takes place in the cloud, rather than client-side, there is the possibility for a more rapid turnaround when it comes to adding or changing features.
So let’s start with Cortana.

Functional Reminders – By this I mean reminders that are not for me, but rather are for Cortana herself.  As an example, I can tell Cortana, “Turn off WiFi,” and she’ll do it.  Conversely, I can then tell her, “Turn on WiFi,” and she’ll turn it on.  Combining this capability with reminders – particularly the location-based reminders – would be a particularly useful function.
In the interest of conserving battery life, I typically turn off WiFi when I’m out and about, where my regular 4G or LTE – I have unlimited data – is usually sufficient for my needs, and I don’t have a need to connect to random WiFi hotspots.  However, I usually turn it back on when I get home, where a constant WiFi connection is available (as is a steady source of power for recharging).  So in this use case, I would turn off WiFi when I leave the house, then set a reminder for Cortana to turn it back on when I get home.
I tried this to see if it was available.  It’s not; when I said, “Turn on WiFi when I get home,” she simply set a reminder for me to turn it on, which popped up when I got home.
I believe she does have this capability to some extent.  You can, for example, tell her to Check In (via the appropriate app, like Facebook or Foursquare) when you get to a specified location, but I don’t do check ins, so I’m not sure if I’m right about that.  Either way, it would be an incredibly useful capability if it were extended to a wide array of functions.
(And for what it’s worth, you can set WiFi to turn itself back on after a specified interval.)

Natural Language Improvements – Improvements in this area are bound to be forthcoming anyway, but speaking of reminders, when I ask Cortana to create a reminder for me, I have to do so in a slightly unnatural fashion.  For example, if I were a different Jon, namely the one from the comic Sex Criminals, which is a great comic, by the way, I might want to set a reminder to drop a deuce in my boss’s potted plant at noon.  So if I, as the other Jon, said, “Remind me to drop a deuce in Mr. Shankworth’s plant at noon,” Cortana would respond with, “Okay, I’ll remind you ‘To drop a deuce in Mr. Shankworth’s plant at noon.’  Is that right?”
(Note:  She doesn’t have enough of a personality to ask, “What the fuck is wrong with you?”)
That is to say that the reminder on your Calendar would be titled, “To drop a deuce in Mr. Shankworth’s plant.”  She knows enough to figure out that “at noon” is the when, but not enough to drop the “To.”
So to get it formatted without the “To,” I would have to say it like this:  “Remind me:  Drop a deuce…”
Similarly, saying, “Remind me that I need to to stop dropping a deuce in Mr. Shanksworth’s plant” would create a reminder that contains everything after “Remind me.”  It’s not a huge deal, but it would add to the sense of familiarity and make talking to Cortana feel a bit more natural if she could figure out that when you say, “Remind me to buy toilet paper next time I’m at the store,” she would just create a reminder titled “Buy toilet paper.”  She’s already smart enough to know that “next time I’m at the store” defines the time and place, so I don’t think it would be too much of a stretch to get her to pare out the extraneous relative pronouns and whatnot when writing the reminder to Calendar.

Lack of Interests – Cortana can keep track of the things you’re interested in using her Notebook, through observing your usage patterns and through direct input, which is great.  However, I’d like to see it go a step further and make it possible for you to let Cortana know not only what you like, but also what you hate.
For example, she knows that I’m not interested in sports, in that it was not something I checked off as an interest, which means that she won’t deliver me any sort of sports news or scores or whatever.  However, she doesn’t know that my feelings go beyond merely lacking an active interest, and that I don’t want to see anything relating to sports.
I mean, I don’t care who wins any game.  At all.  Ever.  But certain sporting events tend to spill out beyond the limits of their boundaries and fall into the general category of “news,” which means that I’ll still end up seeing headlines about such-and-such sportsball team winning the big sportsball tournament.
I’d like to avoid that by being able to specify with a certain amount of granularity what types of “news” stories I don’t want to see.  I’d also like to have more control over the news sources.
Of course, an anti-sports position is peculiar to me, but I think most people have topics they don’t want to hear about while still having an interest in the more general category under which those topics fall.  You might, for example, have an interest in entertainment news, but no interest in, say, Justin Bieber, or the Kardashians, or whoever.

Action Center – On the non-Cortana front, I’ve been somewhat disappointed in the Action/Notification Center.  It’s been pretty hit-or-miss – mostly miss – when it comes to notifying me about activities on Facebook.  The other issue with Facebook notifications – and this may be a problem with the FB app itself and/or the way it’s designed, though the same may be true of the sporadic nature of receiving notifications – is that if, say, I get a notification that someone commented on my status, I’ll click on it, the FB app will launch, and it will take me to the applicable status, but the comments are collapsed, so I have to make an additional click to see what the comment was.  So much less efficient than the old way.
Additionally, it would be nice to be able to actually manage the notifications right there.  For example, if I’m notified of an e-mail, I’d like to be able to just delete it right there without having to go into the actual Mail app.
Ultimately, though, what really needs to be done is for MS to implement the interactive live tiles that are being tested by Microsoft Research, as the overall experience needs to be a bit more seamless, as it was/is in WP 8, while still adding in the ability to add functionality via the more rapidly deployed app updates as opposed to core OS updates.

Extra-Large Tiles – Windows 8.1 has them, so why not Windows Phone 8.1?

Calendar – This is much improved in WP 8.1, but while the week view is appreciated, why did adding that necessitate eliminating the Agenda view?  Yes, it’s sort of there in the week view, but there’s no reason it can’t exist separately.
Also, add the ability to display more than one appointment on the live tile.

Surface Pro 2:

Some of these fall into the category of Windows 8.1 suggestions, but they’re things that have really stood out for me while using the Surface Pro 2, so…

Custom Gestures – There are apps that will allow you to create your own custom gestures, but this needs to be baked in.

Independent Scaling/Display Controls – And here I’m not talking about whatever it is that’s being called independent scaling, but true, honest-to-Glob independent scaling, whereby a user can invoke separate controls for each display.  I right-click on the external monitor and bring up Screen Resolution, and I’m presented with controls that will only apply to the external monitor.  So I can set my scaling to 100%.  Meanwhile, I do the same on the Surface Pro, and boom, I can set the scaling there to 150%.

Saved Docking Preferences – When in its docking station – or otherwise connected to an external display – it should remember how you had things set up the last time you were docked.  (Assuming this isn’t your first time docking it).
I put the Surface Pro in its docking station.  It remembers that I want the scaling on the external monitor set to 100%.  It also remembers that I want all of the icons and shortcuts on my desktop to display on the external monitor, and that I want all x86 applications/control panels to open on the external monitor, without me having to set the external monitor as my primary display.
Then I undock, and everything automatically moves back over the Surface Pro.
Also:  fix the damn mouse problem.  Having to undock and re-dock the Surface Pro to get the mouse cursor to stop being invisible is a nuisance.

I’m sure that if took the time to think about it there are a lot more suggestions I could make – particularly on Windows Phone 8.1 – and I do have some ideas around the way some things ought to work and the potential for better integrating MS devices and services into the average person’s life, but many of them would require a lot of development from companies other than MS and are likely things that are part of Redmond’s vision anyway, but these are the main ones that have been on my mind.

Of course, while I’m tilting at windmills…

Adobe:  Make your Creative Suite more touch-friendly.  In Manga Studio 5, I can pan, zoom, and rotate the image using touch.  in Photoshop or Illustrator?  Not so much.
On the other hand, despite responding well to touch, the overall interface itself in Manga Studio isn’t especially touch-friendly either.  So that’s something to be worked on in both worlds.
Which isn’t to say that you have to make “modern,” Windows Store-style touch apps, but Photoshop/Creative Suite and Manga Studio have different default workspace options to choose from, so why not add in a touch-based option?
Also, Adobe, admit that there’s a problem with lag when it comes to certain brushes in Photoshop and fix it rather than trying to blame it on some mysterious “something” that your legions of users must all somehow have on their disparate computers that are running on an assortment of operating systems.

Living With Cortana

Microsoft recently released the developer preview of the Windows Phone 8.1 update, which is a significant overhaul of the current Windows Phone 8 operating system.
The process of installing the developer preview involves registering with Microsoft as a developer, downloading the Windows Phone SDK to a PC, performing a developer unlock of the phone, installing an app on the now-unlocked phone, and them simply choosing to run an over-the-air update on the phone.
There are some risks involved – the developer preview is, after all, a beta product, installing it may void any warranty you have, and once the update is installed it’s not possible to roll back to the previous version of the OS – and the update does not contain any device-specific updates provided by the handset manufacturer that are typically included with the MS update once the update is officially released by your mobile carrier.  In the case of the manufacturer of my phone – Nokia – those device-specific updates are often rather substantial, with bug fixes and new features.

Given the glacial pace at which AT&T rolls out available updates – I just recently received the “Lumia Black” update, a combination of Microsoft’s third GDR (General Distribution Release – a minor update consisting primarily of bug fixes) and Nokia-specific enhancements, despite the fact that it had been available for carriers to distribute for months prior to my receiving the update, and was installed on all new handsets – I decided that I found the promise of new features in WP 8.1 compelling enough to install the developer preview.

After all, by the time AT&T makes it available, the odds are that MS/Nokia will have already distributed the first WP 8.1 GDR and will be ready to distribute the second GDR, and it will be nearly time for me to upgrade my phone anyway.

So with that preamble out of the way, let’s dive into the point of this post:  my experience using WP 8.1…after some more in the way of preamble.

I was an early adopter of the Windows Phone platform back when it launched in 2010 as Windows Phone 7.
While there were definite shortcomings, overall I was pleased with the experience, finding the user interface to be rather compelling, with more visual appeal – to me – than the iOS and Android options.  The dynamic Live Tiles, which bounced around on the Start screen, frequently changing to give at-a-glance updates on the people and things I was interested in struck me as much more useful than the comparatively static icons found elsewhere, and, again, I though the flat “modern” design of what was then known as the Metro design language, seemed much more fresh and appealing than the dated glossy icon look.
The “app gap” wasn’t – and still isn’t – really an issue for me, particularly given the “hub” approach that MS took, which allowed me to centrally manage multiple accounts and services.  For example, the “Me” tile, which contained information about me, allowed me to post a status update to Facebook and see any and all notifications from connected services, while the “People” hub created detailed contact cards for collating all of my contacts’ information from various services into one spot, allowing me to easily follow their social media activity, and even keep track of my recent interactions with them.

And it’s worth mentioning that in order to get all of this information, I just had to sign into the phone with my Microsoft Account, and all of the heavy lifting of bringing in my contact information was done for me.

So who needed a Facebook app, or a Twitter app?  On other platforms, there may be an app for that, but on WP 7, there was a hub (and Live Tile) for that.

Beyond that, I don’t care about the latest and greatest Angry Candy game or whatever, or need dozens of different fart apps (or even one, for that matter), so the “app gap” was a non-issue for me in that regard as well.

Beyond any of that, I was already pretty well entrenched in the Microsoft ecosystem – mostly for pragmatic and financial reasons; having no reason to attach any special significance to my computing platform of choice, I simply went with what provided the most ease of use and hardware/software compatibility for the lowest cost, so…Windows – having just come to the end of my contract with my second Windows Mobile device, Microsoft’s previous smartphone platform, which was an outgrowth of the moribund Pocket PC/PDA market.

Prior to my first glimpses of the Windows Phone 7 interface, I had assumed that I would more than likely move to the Android platform once that contract expired, but I was swayed by the potential I saw in Redmond’s offering, and so I became one of the select few who invested in that platform.

Since that time, Windows Phone has made substantial gains in market share – and in closing the app gap – particularly outside of the US, but it remains a very distant third behind the various flavors of Android and iOS devices in terms of number of apps, market share, and mind share.  A Windows Phone in the wild is a rare sight indeed, and when people see mine – it is quite eye-catching, after all, particularly given its brilliant red color and its sleek design – they express surprise at the idea that there is such a thing as a Windows Phone.

All of which is to point out that investing in the Windows Phone platform was something of a leap of faith, given that it was a completely new platform, and in many ways an entirely different paradigm compared to the market leaders.  Ultimately, it was a matter of believing in its potential, and being willing to overlook – or at least live with – its shortcomings.  Out of the gate, for example, it lacked any sort of multitasking, or even basic functions such as copy and paste.  Indeed, not only did it fail to achieve full feature parity with its primary competitors, it failed to achieve parity with its predecessor.

(In many ways, Windows Mobile was an amazing smartphone OS, with many strengths and features that are lacking in all current smartphone platforms.  Where it was most lacking, however, was in its interface.  I may write a future post discussing some of the things I miss about WinMo.)

With 8.1, Microsoft is making a surge to close that gap, approaching the problem from multiple fronts beyond the OS itself, and to build on the foundation that they built with WP 7, and then rebuilt with WP 8.  So how well does it do that?  It’s difficult for me to say, as my experience with other smartphone platforms is limited.  All I can tell you is what I know, and what I’ve discovered over the past few days.

So, finally, let’s get to it.

Interface:

At a glance, not much here has changed.  From my perspective, that’s a good thing.  Given that the tiled interface is a major component of virtually all devices in the Microsoft/Windows ecosystem – desktop PCs, tablets, Xbox One – it makes sense to retain a consistent look.

That said, the interface is rather polarizing.  I won’t dive into the complaints and comments from the haters, but clearly, there are a lot of people who hate it.  That said, regardless of the distribution, most people seem to fall into the love it or hate it camp (though it’s worth mentioning that many of the people in the “hate it” camp have a sort of context-aware hatred; they hate it on a standard desktop PC, but are a little warmer to it on touch-enabled devices).

As mentioned, I fall into the “love it” camp.

In any case, while there is little in the way of obvious changes to the interface, a deeper dive reveals some rather significant changes.

With GDR3, Microsoft added support for larger, higher-resolution screens, such as those found on the Lumia 1520 and the Lumia Icon.  As part of that support, they added the ability to display three columns of medium tiles – there are three sizes available:  small, medium, and wide, with wide taking up the amount of space of two mediums – but this feature was only available on 1080p screens.  With 8.1, they’ve made the third column available for all handsets, regardless of screen resolution.

I’ve found that I like having the third column available, though many users complain that it makes the text on the tiles too small, and makes the small tile size unusable.  Fortunately, it’s an optional setting.

While it’s always been possible to customize the Start screen to a certain extent through the arrangement of tiles and through the choice of accent colors, there have been many users over the years clamoring for the ability to add a background image to the Start screen.  I’d never seen the point, personally, as the image would be almost entirely obscured by the tiles.

It is possible to have a background image on the Start screen on the PC/tablet side, but there it makes slightly more sense, as there’s a larger area and that iteration of the Start screen is rather more open.
However, with WP 8.1, that option is now available on Windows Phone, and I have to say that the implementation is rather clever.
Essentially, if a background image is a selected, the non-text areas of the Live Tiles – assuming that the app developer allows for it - become transparent, revealing the image behind them, but also maintaining the background color in the gutters between tiles, which makes the background image look rather like a jigsaw puzzle, albeit one with very simple rectangular shapes.  It’s a nice look in and of itself, but MS went even further and created a parallax effect, whereby the background image scrolls at a much different rate than the tiles above it.  The tiles, as they scroll, reveal a different part of the image.
It just plain looks cool.

And the last thing I’ll mention about the interface is that it’s possible to sync your phone’s theme with the theme of your Windows 8.1 PC or tablet in the same way that you can sync your PCs/tablets with each other, though I personally haven’t done so.

The Start screen with a background image.

The parallax effect; note how the background image hasn't
moved as much as the tiles have.  Also?  Run Pee is one of
the greatest, most useful apps ever.

Calendar and Office:
There have been a lot of apps put out by various developers to replace the default Calendar app, which since WP7 has had only minimal options.  With 8.1, the Calendar is much improved, adding a Week view, which was one of the most requested features.  Beyond simply listing your appointments for each day of the week, the Calendar also displays weather information for your current location, which is a nice touch.
As far as I’ve read and seen, there haven’t been any changes made to the Office apps.

Internet Explorer:

Users don’t really have any options when it comes to which browser they use on Windows Phone.  It’s Internet Explorer, period.  It’s possible to install other browsers, but they’re essentially just “skinned” versions of IE, and it’s not possible to make any of then the default.

That complaint aside, 8.1 sports a mobile version of IE 11, which brings several enhancements, such as the ability to open unlimited tabs, the ability to upload files to sites, the ability to save passwords, and the ability to sync passwords and favorites with your Windows 8.1 PC.  If you have a tab open on your synced PCs (in the “modern,” Windows Store version of IE), you can choose to open that same tab on your phone.  Again, this is a feature that was already available on PCs/tablets running Windows 8/8.1.
Additionally, you can pin individual sites to your Start screen, and, presumably through looking at RSS data (or through some other mechanism), that pinned site will become a pseudo-Live Tile, changing to show updated information from the site.  For example, if you were to pin Threshold to the Start screen, it might (I haven’t tried, so I don’t know) alternate between showing the titles of the most recent posts.

(Update:  Nope.  It just shows a static image of the page.)

The other enhancement – and this is dependent on whether or not the site supports it – also comes from the PC version, and allows you to view a page in “Reading Mode,” which strips much of the sites formatting and multimedia content, rendering it much more readable on a small screen.

And now on to the two most substantial changes to the Windows Phone platform…

Action Center:

Another demand users have been making for years is the inclusion of a notification center, one place where they can go to see a listing of recent calls, texts, e-mails, and social media notifications.
This function has always been a component of the Live Tiles – as well as the Lock Screen – but this system wasn’t fully centralized, nor did it always provide a lot of detail.

Additionally, “toast” notifications, or banner notifications as they’re now called, appear only fleetingly, and if you didn’t catch what they said when they popped up, there was no way, short of looking through your Live Tiles and finding what app had notified you, to view them after they disappeared.

Enter the Action Center, which can be accessed – even from the Lock Screen – by swiping down from the top.

Beyond seeing notifications, you can also toggle WiFi, Bluetooth, Airplane Mode, and Rotation Lock through buttons in the Action Center, and quickly launch All Settings.

I’m told that this is pretty much the same as what’s available on Android and iOS.  Which…fine.  It works.  Not everything needs to be a radical new paradigm.

I have some additional thoughts about the Action Center below, but basically it does what it’s designed to do.

And now the biggest change…

“Technically, that would be Bill Gates.  No big deal.”

While voice commands have been a component of Microsoft’s mobile platform going back to the Windows Mobile days, pretty much the most famous example of voice command is Apple’s Siri, which, beyond being able to respond to simple commands, has a personality and is able to talk back to the user.

After Siri’s launch, Android got Google Now, which is a bit less chatty, but has a better contextual understanding, able to look at various pieces of data about the user in order to serve as a more efficient virtual “personal assistant” than Siri, or at least that’s my understanding; again, my experience with other smartphone platforms is limited.
With 8.1, Windows Phone introduces its own virtual personal assistant in the form of Cortana.

Taking its name from a character in the Halo series of games –an artificial intelligence that assists the Master Chief character – Cortana is something of a hybrid of Siri and Google Now, with a similar contextual awareness to the Google iteration and, like Siri, packing a personality of her own.  The title of this section is Cortana’s reply to the question, “Who is your father?”

She will also tell you jokes – “There are two kinds of people in the world.  Those who need closure.”  - sing songs, and tell you, “I’m sorry, Dave.  I’m afraid I can’t do that.” If you tell her to open the pod bay doors.
Beyond the gimmicky aspects, however, Cortana serves many useful purposes, with several unique – so far as I know – tricks of her own when compared to the other virtual personal assistants available.

Cortana actually replaces the Bing app; clicking the Search button now invokes Cortana.  Beyond search – which now extends to searching your SMS messages – she can launch apps, take notes, send texts and e-mails, dial your phone, set reminders, and perform all of the other functions you would expect a virtual personal assistant to perform.

If, like me, though I am warming to it a little, you feel strange talking to your phone – I so rarely use my phone as a phone that I even feel a little strange talking on it – she can also accept text input.  Indeed, she’s smart enough to know that if you aren’t talking, she probably shouldn’t talk either, so you don’t have to worry about her loudly announcing that she found that German scheisse porn you were looking for while you’re in the middle of a meeting.

Where she differs from Google Now is that you have a degree of control over what she knows and can know about you.  In creating Cortana – which was originally just a code name, but after information on the project leaked, thousands of users signed a petition for that to be the actual name – Microsoft interviewed several real world personal assistants, and found that many of them kept a notebook filled with information about their clients.

Cortana does the same, and you can go in and edit her notebook at any time, telling her what she can and can’t look at when gathering information about you, and also correcting any false assumptions she might make, because Cortana actually learns about you the more you utilize her services.

There’s a lot more I could say about Cortana, but plenty of others have already done so in-depth, so if you want to learn more about her, hit the interwebs and check out the various articles and videos.
Instead, I’ll just focus on my own experiences with her and say that I have, in fact, found her to be helpful, and have been amazed at how well she responds to natural language queries and commands.

I’m particularly impressed by her ability to understand context.

For example, if I ask her, “What’s my day like tomorrow?” she’ll provide me with a listing of all of my appointments.  I can then ask, “What about Saturday?” and, based on the context of my previous question, she’ll know what I’m asking.

Similarly, if you ask her to find you a Thai restaurant nearby, she’ll present you with the information on the nearest one, and if you then say, “Call it,” she’ll know that you want her to call the Thai restaurant.

Her contextual and place reminders are also pretty cool.  If I tell her “Remind me to tell Scott that Cortana is pretty cool,” she’ll take a note of it, and the next time I interact with Scott, whether on the phone, via text, or e-mail, a reminder will pop up.   (Admittedly, I might have to take additional steps to ensure she knows which Scott I mean if I have more than one in my Contact list, but even so.)

Similarly, she can set up place reminders.  For example, I can say, “Remind me to buy condoms that will sit in my drawer unused until their expiration date the next time I’m at Target,” and the next time I’m at Target, the reminder will pop up.

If you have to travel to get to an appointment – provided it has an address in the appointment – she can look at traffic data and tell you when you need to leave in order to arrive on time.

In the morning she will provide a “Daily Glance,” showing your appointments, the weather, and headline news, though I have to say that it’s pretty adorable that she thinks my day doesn’t start until 7 AM…

Again, there’s a LOT more stuff she can do, but the info is all out there, and so far these are the primary features I’ve utilized.

At present, you have to invoke by hitting the Search button or opening the app, but there is, apparently, a plan to give her an always listening mode, which would allow you to invoke her with a voice command, much like the “Ok, Google…” command, or, for the douchier among us, the “Ok, Glass…” command.

Summary:
So far, I think that 8.1 is a substantial improvement to a platform that I was already well-pleased with, despite its shortcomings, many of which have been addressed with this update.  I definitely look forward to getting the final, fully-baked, Nokia-specific update, probably sometime late this summer or early in the fall, but in the meantime, the developer preview has been a worthwhile update.

Complaints (There had to be a few):

One aspect I don’t like about Cortana is that while I’m able to specify my interests, I’m not able to modify the sources of information she pulls from when presenting me with the latest news.  This seems strange, as she’s pulling from the Bing News app, which does allow me to specify sources, and yet she’s giving me a lot of headlines from a source that I’d removed from Bing News.

As for the Action Center, while it is useful, and I like it overall, it kind of renders the “Me” tile, which had been a key differentiator from the Windows Phone competitors, irrelevant.  Indeed, much of the functionality of the tile has been stripped.  It no longer shows me my notifications, and the social media integration has been changed for the worse, in my estimation.

Previously, I could post an update to Facebook (or Twitter as well, if I so chose) directly from the Me tile via a customized WP interface.  It wasn’t robust, by any means, but it was quick and efficient.

Now, however, MS has opened up the API to allow apps to integrate with the Me tile rather than providing a built-in integration.  I understand the reasoning behind this – new features can be rolled out more rapidly via app updates than via OS updates – but the implementation, at present, is clunky.

I can still go to the Me tile and click “Post Update,” but this now results in launching the Facebook app, which isn’t exactly smooth and seamless.

Beyond the Me tile, these types of functions have been de-integrated from most of the hubs.  It’s still possible to view your photos that are in Facebook or OneDrive albums via the Photos hub, but, again, it’s not entirely seamless.  Additionally, the new Photos hub no longer has the panoramic wallpaper that it used to (which also served – and now only serves – as the background for the Photos tile), and by default it opens to an “All Pictures” view – arranged by date, and which does not include non-local files – rather than a list of available albums.

The Music app – now Xbox Music – has also changed for the worse, though oddly enough, and contrary to the experiences of other users, I find it to be a little faster.  Still, the overall experience actually marks a regression.

Conclusion:

Many reviews have stated that this really should be considered Windows Phone 9.  I agree that it’s much more than a simple point upgrade, but I don’t entirely agree with that assessment.  Even so, with this release MS is providing something that is a much more credible alternative to Android and iOS than any previous iteration, at least for those who are less ensnared in the Windows ecosystem and who don’t already feel an enthusiastic affection for this smartphone platform.

It also demonstrates that MS is committed to continuing to develop the platform, which is never a sure thing with anything that MS produces outside of its core business.

As Cortana continues to learn – she mostly exists in the cloud, and as such new features can be rolled out without requiring an update to the app or OS – and gains new functionality, she’s likely to become a strong selling point, and is less likely to become little more than a gimmick that gets old fast, which is the way many of the iPhone users I know feel about Siri.

If Microsoft rolls out a version of Cortana for its other platforms – Windows PCs/tables and the Xbox One – which they bloody well should, though, again, that’s not a sure thing* with Microsoft, there’s the very real possibility of her becoming a major game-changer.

And finally, with relaxed hardware restrictions that allow pretty much any device that can run Android to be quickly adapted to run WP, making the OS free to OEMs, the looming acquisition of Nokia’s devices and services division, and the incremental move towards a universal app model, the continued growth of the platform is there waiting to slip through Microsoft’s fingers.  Hopefully, they can manage to grab it.  Honestly, I’m kind of counting on them to screw up, but I’m hoping I’m wrong, and in the meantime, I’ll continue to be a fan of the platform for as long as it lasts.

*I’m still mad about Courier.  I will always be mad about Courier.

We Can Hardly Stand To Wait, Please Friday Don't Be Late

I was so concerned about Friday not arriving on time that I decided to take matters into my own hands and make it come early by taking it off, thereby making Thursday into Friday.
Actually, I mostly just needed a break from work for the sake of what I laughingly* refer to as my mental health, and to have a weekday upon which to do "Weekday Stuff," those things that I prefer to do during the week rather than on the weekend, such as making one my trips to the dreaded Costco.
As it turned out, through sheer happenstance, it was a good day to take off, as my company is doing some sort of charity golf tournament tomorrow, so pretty much no one will be at work anyway.
Certainly not any of the higher-ups, at least.
Despite having tomorrow off, my mood hasn't much improved, though I suppose it's not as bad as it was the other day, when I made the "And I Still May" post.  (Note:  I still may.)
Honestly, the next day was even worse.
Despite taking the day off tomorrow, I actually ended up bringing work home, and even roped Scott into helping me with it.
(Thanks again, BTW.)
I couldn't help myself, though, as it was one of those things that was beginning to mock me, and I knew that it would drive me crazy if I didn't keep working on it until I finished it or finally acknowledged defeat.  As I wasn't quite ready to throw in the towel, I had no choice but to haul the laptop home with me.
Also, there was this:

Me:  I haven't been able to figure out how to get it to work.
Boss:  Well, keep working on it.  You'll get it.
Me:  Honestly, I just don't think it's even possible to get it to work.
Boss:  Well, you've made me believe that's never the case when it comes to you.
Me;  Then you're a sucker.

Still, how could I acknowledge defeat in the face of that sort of endorsement?
Lousy boss, always providing encouragement...
Of course, this is the same boss, who just the day before, had occasion to say, "Don't you do it, Jon Maki.  I will throw you out a window if you even think about it."
She was joking, of course.
Mostly.
I think.
Not that I actually had any intention of doing the thing she was telling me not to do, anyway...
On a brighter, less life-threatening note, I got the recent Windows Phone 7.5 update, or "Mango" as it was code-named.  I'll be writing some Hubs about the installation experience and my thoughts on it, but the tl;dr is that I really like it and it was definitely a worthwhile upgrade.

*Yes, the laughter with which I refer to my mental health is, of course, maniacal.

Really? Part Two

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm very happy with my Windows Phone, to the extent that I would say that the whole "glance and go" concept that MS put forth is totally off-base: I can't take my eyes (or hands) off of the thing.
Even when I'm not actually doing anything with it I still find myself just randomly scrolling around and looking at it, being amazed at how smoothly everything moves, and some of the nice little touches that round out the UI, such as the way the arrow on the Home screen, which points to the "next" screen over, which is home to all of the installed apps and other functions, bounces between the edge of the screen and the live tiles when you scroll all the way to the bottom.
Or the way you fly up and over in Bing maps when locating yourself after having moved from one place to another.
In short, it's just plain neat.
However, in terms of the "glance and go" concept, they did actually pull that off pretty well, as the lock screen displays a wealth of information at a glance, such as indicators for any new e-mail, calls, or text messages you may have, the time, your next appointment, and indicators for signal strength and battery life.
Of course, I wouldn't be Jon - and Microsoft wouldn't be Microsoft - if there weren't a few things for me to cmplain about.
On the topic of the lock screen, I wish that it were a little more customizable than it is - an overall lack of customization options across the board is probably my biggest complaint - beyond simply being able to choose your wallpaper.
For example, I wish that there were a way to get the lock screen to also display weather data for your current location.
The lack of customization options throughout the OS/UI doesn't bother me too much, since I like the basic look of it anyway, and you can adjust the important things, like the number and kinds of live tiles on the Home screen, but still, I would like to have a few more options.
Along those same lines, there is a paucity of options in terms of settings for how tiles and apps behave, which, again, most of the time isn't an issue, and I understand why it's as locked-down as it is, but the ability to change just about anything you wanted was one of the things I liked most about Windows Mobile 6.5 (and about the Windows desktop OS, for that matter).
Still, my complaints are few, and relatively minor...except for the lack of Bubble Breaker. I'm not much of a gamer - note that I have little or no opinion on the XBox Live integration into the phone, since I don't use it at all, but I assume that, if you're into that sort of thing, it's really cool - but Bubble Breaker has been my go-to time-waster since the days of my PDA, and I'm definitely feeling its absence. There's a free third-party app that's like Bubble Breaker, but I find it to be kind of ugly, and the developer didn't really do much to make it finger-friendly, which, given the lack of a stylus, is an issue.
In any case, here's a rundown of some of my other petty complaints:

The Pictures hub is very cool, especially since it gives you access to any photo albums you may have on Windows Live, Skydrive (the free online storage service from MS), and Facebook, but I do have one small complaint. By default, as you scroll sideways to get to different options, it shows you a sampling of some of your pictures. However, the pictures it displays are more or less random, and I'd like to be able to actually choose which pictures are showing up. Also, while I understand that they're competitors, I'd like for MS and Google to play a little nicer with each other and allow you to access your Picasaweb albums via the Pictures hub.
(Also, on an unrelated note, Google seriously needs to improve the mobile version of Picasaweb; finding a specific picture in a large album involves constantly clicking on the "next" link until you get to the page it's on. Gee, if only Google knew anything about performing searches...)
While the Windows Marketplace is constantly expanding, espcially given that MS has gone all out in making developing apps for WP7 an easy and attractive proposition, I do miss having the ability to "sideload" apps obtained from other sources.
(I will say that having to move things to and from the phone via Zune - or, alternatively, via "the cloud" - isn't terribly onerous. It's certainly got iTunes beat. Still, I would like to be able to plug the phone into a computer and have it be recognized as just another storage device.)
On a related note, if there's a way to sync with your PC via Bluetooth, I haven't found it.
The deep integration of social networks -Windows Live and Facebook - is very cool, even for someone as anti-social as myself, but I think that the failure to integrate Twitter as well is, well, a failure. Same goes for blogging. It'd be awesome if I could make a blog post right from the "Me" tile in the same way that I can update my status on Facebook.
As for the phone itself - meaning the actual hardware - the SuperAMOLED display is awesome, and I love how light and thin it is, but by that same token, perhaps just because it lacks heft, it feels kind of cheap. I also wish it weren't quite so rounded; I much prefer the look of the otherwise identical Omnia 7, which isn't available in the US.
Battery life is - as I expected, given the raw power of the hardware - terrible, but it's sufficient to get me through my work day
And in terms of the carrier - AT&T - I don't really have the kind of complaints that so many other people seem to; I've generally found it to be reliable enough for my purposes. However, I do wish they would offer some sort of 4G service.

To get back to the things I love about it, the Zune interface for music and videos is, in my opinion, vastly superior to the iPod. If it weren't for just one issue - which I'll get to below - I would be perfectly willing to get rid of my iPod Touch entirely.
Now that Netflix is offering a streaming-only option, I may have to sign up just so that I can make use of the phone's Netflix app.
Oh, and the IMDb app? Gorgeous.

I won't complain about some of the missing functionality that's set to be added via updates - such as Flash and cut & paste - but here I'll have to mimic the commercial and say, "Really?" about the inability to create custom ringtones.
And now for my wish list:

The aforementioned display of weather data on the lock screen
An alarm clock app that allows you to wake to the music stored on the phone. That should be basic functionality included in the Zune interface, frankly. (This is what keeps me from ditching my iPod, as I have a physical alarm clock that interfaces with the iPod and lets me wake to music). I've seen some alarm clock apps that may provide that function, but I'm not certain if they do or not.
The real Bubble Breaker!
Better indication of remaining battery life; the graphic just doesn't cut it. I want percentage listed.
The return of Outlook Tasks.
Again, the integration of blogging tools into the OS.

As you can see, it's a pretty small wish list, which, considering that this is a Microsoft product, is pretty amazing.
A few other notes...
Most of the phones have the ability to have additional storage via MicroSD cards added, but the Focus is the only one that makes it possible for the user to add storage. However, once added, it can't be removed without wiping the phone, as it gets integrated into the system memory. This works fine, given the inability to sideload, and the great job the OS does of organizing files for you.
In my case, I bought a 32 GB MicroSD card at the same time I bought the phone, which brought the total storage available on the phone up to 40 GB. To put that in perspective, that's nearly 400 times as much storage as I had available on my very first desktop computer.
On a phone.

Really? Part One

Several years ago, because I had some money burning a hole in my pocket and I saw a good deal on it, I bought a PDA from HP which was running the Microsoft Pocket PC OS.
Pocket PC began its life as Windows CE, or, as it was often known, WinCE, back in the mid-90s, and was a compact version of the Windows OS designed for lower-powered handheld devices.
Over time, WinCE became Pocket PC, and over even more time it became Windows Mobile and helped to usher in the era of the smartphone.
I liked my PDA a lot, but eventually got tired of carrying around two devices - my PDA and my cell phone - and decided to go the convergence route, picking up a smartphone from the handset manufacture HTC which was running Windows Mobile 5.
The phone, which wasn't pretty, but was powerful and had a nice slide-out keyboard, served me well, and when I saw that HTC was coming out with a newer phone, one that was sleek and sexy, I made the upgrade.
That was my AT&T Fuze, a phone that also served me well for a while, but eventually, after losing market share to the iPhone and Android-based phones, MS pretty much abandoned Windows Mobile, and while there was - and still is - a strong hobbyist community that develops apps for WM 6.5 - the last version - as well as custom versions of the OS itself, my Fuze was feeling pretty tired and dated. After all, it was nearly two years old, which is an eternity in the tech world.
Not wanting an iPhone, I started checking out some of the Android-based offerings, but couldn't really find anything that was terribly compelling. After all, I used my Fuze for a lot of work stuff, so I needed something with a level of integration with Exchange and Office that only MS could provide.
Then I started seeing stuff about the new mobile strategy from MS and their complete redesign of the mobile OS from the ground up, the terribly-named Windows Phone 7 Series.
I really liked what I was seeing in terms of the interface, but for a while I remained on the fence about making the switch - while continuing to obsessively track down every bit of information I could about the new platform - and found myself being kind of put off by some of the news. There was, after all, the fact that the OS would not offer cut & paste, a feature that it took quite a while for the iPhone to offer - which I derided Apple for - nor would it be a multi-tasking OS, which, again, was like Apple. Further following the Apple model, you wouldn't be able to "sideload" applications on the phone - all apps had to be added via an app store using the Zune softwae as an interface - which, again, was incredibly Appleish, and the new phones wouldn't have removable storage.
Still, I liked the hardware specs: high resolution, multi touch displays, fast processors, and 5 megapixel cameras. And I learned that some of the missing features would be added quickly via software updates.
I was put off by the inability to add removable storage, or to be able to plug the phone into a PC and just use it like an external hard drive.
But then I would see other things that just seemed so cool, and eventually I drank the Kool-Aid and decided that when the time came, I would make the move to WP7.
After making the decision, it was a matter of waiting to see the phones that would be running it. I saw some promising things from my old favorite HTC, a dead sexy offering from Dell, and a pretty sweet-looking offering from Samsung.
Sadly, when the launch came, none of the phones I was salivating over were going to be offered by AT&T, appearing instead on T-Mobile or not available in the US.
Still, there was a final offering from Samsung that I liked the look of, which would be on AT&T.
(If I were going to switch carriers I'd go with Verizon so that I could have a unified bill for mobile, Internet, cable, and landline phone, but Verizon wasn't a launch partner, and was taking a "wait and see" attitude with WP7. Now I've read that they'll have WP7 phones by the holidays. Dammit.)
When I was in Michigan for my mom, my brother-in-law picked me up from the hospital while she was having a procedure done and brought me to the AT&T Store, where I picked up the Samsung Focus, and where I made a fan of the phone out of the employee who sold it to me, as he said, "Yeah, I don't think I'm leaving here today without one of those."
What I liked about the Focus is that it's big - 4" screen - it's thin and light, and it has a SuperAMOLED display that's really clear and bright.
I do miss having a physical keyboard, but I'm getting used to the onscreen version.
If you've seen the Windows Phone commercials, you've seen the best part, which is the eager wife who's attempting to draw her husband's attention away from his phone:


I'm with you, honey; really? As much as I love my new phone, I'd put it down in a heartbeat for her.

The wife is portrayed by one Christina Cuenca, Miss Lousiana 2006. (Thanks, Internet!)
I did what I could with a cap from the commercial to create the above image, which is currently serving as the wallpaper on my phone.
In any case, on to the phone itself...
One of the big selling points of WP7 is its tight integration with social networks. Once you sign in with/create your Windows Live account and connect it to the social networks of your choice, the phone will automatically snag all of the relevant information about the people in your networks. If you have people who appear as contacts in multiple accounts - such as, for me, Scott, who is a Gmail contact, a Facebook friend, a Windows Live friend, and one of my contacts in Outlook - all of their information will be presented in a single entry, and you can save favorite people on you main screen as a "Live Tile," a dynamic image that bounces around, displaying the person's name, image, and any status updates.
Contacts are one area where I've seen people complain about the phone, since in the "People" hub - hubs are like folders that organize information - you just get one long vertical list of undifferenctiated contacts. That works fine for me, and finding specific contacts is pretty quick and easy, but if you were more social and popular than I am and had hundreds of contacts, I suppose I can see how it could be an issue.
I've decided to make this kinda-sorta review of my new phone a multi-part post, since it's been pretty long already, but in bringing this part to a close, let me just say that while there are, naturally, a few problems with it, and I do have something of a wish list, overall I really love Windows Phone 7, much more than I ever though I could or would. So you'll be seeing a lot of enthusiastic gushing in the next part, because I really am legitimately excited about the phone, and I want to evangelize for it a little in the hopes of ensuring its continued success.