Six months that I use it daily for various tasks. I have now enjoyed the market, bought apps, bought games, played with more services etc.
What to say? It’s a fantastic product. The phone, a Samsung Omnia 7 is flawless. I made it fall on a brick ground so I fucked up a corner but everything works fine. Only rebooted it after updates so yes, the OS is stable.
+ + +
-The dedicated camera button is more than great. Weirdly, kind of a game changer.
-The Metro UI. Not only in itself -sleek, fast- but because it becomes truly, deeply personal. I take pictures on vacation, people change their pictures on their Facebook and all that gets alive on the tiles of the home screen. The more you have content, the more it feels personal. The picture hub is mesmerizing -it shows up random pictures you took on the home screen-, it’s simple but absolutely perfect in terms of experience because it’s automatic customization. I never felt that kind of engagement with a device before. It’s like after a while, the UI sweats you.
-The back button: once you get the back button (it works as a browser back button and not like back buttons on Android/iOS), it is a joy to use it. Imagine you’re in the middle of a deep research in your Ebay app. You push the home button, go to your email, answer something. Instead of going back to the home screen, re-launch the app, retrieve your search you instead just tap the back button twice and you’re back to your search in Ebay. No multitasking sucking your battery like a vampire and yet, fast, fluid app switching. Can’t go back -haha- after tasting it.
-The battery life: extremely good, the best I have ever seen on a smartphone with a huge screen. Every time I think it’s going to die it keeps up for quite a while. Sweet.
-The marketplace is better than I expected it would be. All the standard apps are here and the overall quality is I would say between the iPhone and Android but closer to the iPhone. Prices are higher (3 bucks instead of 1 for example) which is a bit annoying for users, but a great deal for developers. For now it drives quality up and creates a better relationship than the race to the bottom and bad schemes low prices apps are allowing.
– – –
–The marketplace weird region lock: you sign up on the phone with a hotmail address and mine is US, hotmail.com but my credit card is French: can’t buy anything. I can get all the free stuff and trials. I know it’s a relatively not common problem but that’s just lame. Totally fixed.
-The marketplace confusing mess outside the phone. You have zune.net, marketplace.windowsphone.com and xbox.com, three websites with different names for three different things: music and videos, apps and games with ID identification through hotmail or live.com. Let me tell you: unify the fuck out of this shit! It is fluid on the phone, but it’s awful on the internet (different UIs, emails from zune/xbox/hotmail etc).
Despite a great service in the US, Zune is a dead brand and a lame sounding word, sorry. Xbox is a strong hardcore gamer-related brand and you can’t change that, especially with this word, Xbox. So I would use a live.com/music live.com/apps and live.com/games, one account, one interface. Even better, offering people to only use Facebook to connect to all that because the Live website interface is horrendous. You have to make it much more cleaner and simpler. Which leads me to…
-Skydrive. Great service but god, please make it cleaner and simpler, drag and drop from the homepage, a right click menu or even a special command to send files automatically from Windows, I don’t know. Also why calling the desktop app “Live Mesh”? Brand/service: Skydrive. Download Skydrive for Windows Desktop (built-in for Windows Phone), is that difficult? Is that hard? Geez. It’s depressing to see such embarrassing mistakes in terms of marketing and usability when on the phone it’s so sumptuous. I guess and hope changes are coming.
-No built-in screen capture tool. Again, how is that possible to miss a small feature that people love to use. /facepalm Is it to save battery life (no background task)? Sometimes I wonder because the excellent battery life has to be paid somewhere.
-Lazy developers who try to make a quick buck with lame ass apps. Come on, son.
-I wish you guys in Redmond would buy Flickr and integrate it so that pictures are taken and sent there without any sort of effort. Or at least please make their app because though it’s beautiful, it sucks quite a bit (weird UX, weird crashes).
That’s about it. The next phone update, said to bring in 500 new features is about to land next month. Yes. YESyesyesyesyes…