Sorry to the OP. Many people I know swear by their iPhones. And with those for whom iOS doesn't fit (for whatever reason: Apple's idiosyncrasies, carrier/phone choice, app/OS choice, etc.), Android is an excellent alternative where Angry Birds runs just as well.
WM7, on the other hand, still sounds like a black sheep, so I'm always curious to hear how someone decides to opt for this choice. I think the most common I hear is "I was waiting for a long time, and I was hoping this time Microsoft got it right."
Signed, a former loyal Microsoft customer/fan who one day stopped waiting.
I own both an iPhone and a couple of Android phones. I think both platforms have some pretty significant issues. From my perspective, I don't appreciate the lockout of competitive applications on iOS (browsers, etc.) and Apple's attempt to leverage their platform to force their content businesses to the forefront (required in app purchases, etc). Android seems to have bred a pervasive ecosystem of spyware, and has big issues with keeping the OS upgraded on most phones. Both platforms suffer from serious delays in addressing vulnerabilities in the OS and webkit browsers.
Which isn't to say that I expect(ed) WP7 to be any better in those regards, though there was always hope. I didn't go out and buy one/start developing for them, but I can certainly understand how someone might come to choose door #3.
There is always no better choice until suddenly there is one.
More money, perhaps, but to me that's not saying much. As usual everyone is competing for 3rd place, not just in the market but in developers' hearts. Whichever platform gets an amazing new innovative app first wins, third loses. The rest didn't even place.
Maybe this was a restriction in the past, I'm not sure, but I've been happily running iCab Mobile for quite some time and enjoying it's more grown-up featureset.
Note that that browser apparently uses Safari/Webkit objects to display content and interpret javascript. So you're still effectively using the iOS safari browser, albeit framed and with a different UI and some management features.
First, he gave the obvious and fairly well-known official answer, “We have no plans to release the full Firefox browser for Apple iOS devices,” Brubeck wrote. Why? Because the current iOS SDK agreement forbids apps like Firefox from including their own compilers and interpreters, Brubeck explains.
But he continues on to note that there are a couple of ways to work within Apple’s system, notably what Skyfire is doing (using Apple’s own build-in WebKit libraries) or what Opera Mini is doing (using a proxy server to execute their JavaScript). “Mozilla could create a browser that did one of those things, but it wouldn’t be related to Firefox in any way,” Brubeck explains.
I got a WP7 phone (the HTC HD7) after realizing that I had a top-of-the-line Android phone (the HTC Evo) and, even with CyanogenMod, it still felt really slow. Almost worse than an iPhone 3G. For me, WP7 feels a lot better than Android or iOS.
Like you and the linked article, I really enjoy working with the WP7 development stack. I'm currently working (with 3 other devs) on a mobile application for 4 platforms (iOS, Android, WP7, and JQuery Mobile).
Even having skipped an entire sprint (~10 days) to focus more on Android, the WP7 app is progressing along further and faster than the other clients. Just having support for (albeit limited) databinding is a huge win. Plus, you get great looking apps pretty much for free with the theming defaults.
That said, I have access to a few Windows phones (HTC Surround, HTC HD7, and some keyboard phone) and I would not be able to switch to any of them over my Nexus One. Dealbreakers for me:
* The search button is locked to Bing (not configurable)
* The browser is not only IE, but a crappy offshoot of an old version of IE (I believe IE7 w/ a few patches)
Can you please post your per-platform usage stats after you launch? I think that it would be of value for the mobile developers here.
Also, since you are attacking simultaneously on four fronts - a blog post about the advantages and disadvantages of developing code and assets (graphics) for each platform would be great (obvious one - no IB/ExprStudio for Android?).
Have you tried CM7? One hour after installing the CM7 release candidate, I found I was in love with Android. It's like upgrading from a cheapass Windows XP netbook to a MacBook Pro with an SSD.
Also, I may be completely overstating how slow it was. It definitely wasn't unusable, but it felt slower than it should have been. This was after multiple wipes to multiple ROMs too.
Consider how much data you're putting on it. No phone is going to be fast when you ask it to pull down 5gb of email as some of my users do. The iPhone isn't that magical.
Do people even know or care about the difference between Windows phones and Android phones? My sister certainly doesn’t. There is the iPhone (which she doesn’t like at all) and then there are all other smartphones, some of which she quite likes.
When she talks about cell phones she talks, with the exception of the iPhone (which she just calls iPhone), about manufacturers – HTC, Samsung – and she only recently said that she quite likes the HTC Mozart (which, to my surprise, runs Windows Phone 7).
zyphlar, for some strange reason your comment is dead.
Here is your text: “She'll like it until she realizes it actually sucks. Which is why consumer electronics manufacturers can still turn a profit in last place. But eventually she'll see everyone else doing cool things she can't do, and she'll switch. Or convince herself she didn't want to do those things.”
The HTC Mozart was recommended to her from a friend – I’m really not all that sure that the differences between WP7 and Android matter to all that many people.
For WP7, I like the design, I like the .net development environment and it does what I want a phone to do. I generally find it more convenient than the I-Pod Touch and the "missing features" aren't things I personally can't live without (well, or I just use my I-Pod for them)
Just want to say that you can do iphone/android app dev in C# by using Monotouch/MonoDroid. Of course, you have to write a different UI layer for each platform.
I'm afraid I agree with this post. I bought a Samsung Focus on Black Friday with AT&T's Buy One Get One Free deal. What I like about it is the nice looking user interface and the web browser. (As a phone itself Samsung Focus is awesome). The actual Windows Phone 7 OS is awful. I put in a 16gb memory card a few months ago and it's incredibly slow. Everything takes a long time to load. By "long time to load" I mean 5+ minutes to open an app. All of the apps are tremendously slower after installing that memory card. That's most likely due to the memory card itself, but it's practically unheard of for phones to have dramatic performance reductions after installing a memory card. That makes me believe it's the software.
I really bought it because A) I like to try new things and B) I like developing with .NET/Silverlight because of the awesome development tools.
I had a G1 before and although not as slow as that was (I updated it to 2.2 at the time), this OS isn't a good buy.
The phone itself though is really nice, it has a high resolution screen (480x800) with a 5 mega-pixel camera and it's really light.
The slowness is the memory card. I have a Focus with a high end memory card and it's great.
WP7 software RAIDs (kinda) the SD card with the internal flash and treats it all the same. One nice thing about it is that unlike my Nexus One, all storage is first class storage. Apps, music, photos, video - All of it can go anywhere, with no special casing. The bad thing is that if your SD card is slow, everything is slow.
That said, Microsoft should have known OEMs would expose the card slot, and that users would put in slow cards. They should have gracefully handled it, or had the OS ignore/reject crappy cards, like they did with ReadyBoost on Windows.
As others have said, you're not supposed to replace the memory card for WP7 mobiles. I have a LG Optimus and I've never had any slowness issues.
I was concerned about the lack of upgradable memory before the purchase but it's nice to not have to worry about switching in and out cards and worrying about exactly where anything is saved. I did make sure I purchased a 16MB model though, being stuck with 8MB would suck.
It isn't great that Telstra customers have to wait for their operator to approve WP7 updates. Of course, this still sounds better than the Android model (where many customers can never get upgrades for their phones).This is a case where Apple has a clearly superior and more user-friendly model.
However, aside from that, the post just seems to have a laundry list of minor complaints about the marketplace. Some of these problems have existed on itunesconnect as well. (For instance, on one occasion, I had to use Firefox for a part of the app submission, because Safari couldn't do the job)
I'm surprised that these issues are the cause of his regret. (Note: I say this an iOS developer, who considered WP7, but decided against it).
Apple has a superior update model? Sure in theory, but I'm not aware of many significant updates to an iDevice that would be comparable to the Android update history. It seems like each phone gets one significant upgade before being phased out 18 months later, same with Android except with Android you have the flexibility of complete customization (and the customization is what causes update delays.)
@d_r: Had Android, just last week my Milestone finally got Froyo. The dev tools - particularly UI - just don't exist. I like to be able to program for whatever I have. That's not going into how bug riddled either Android or far more likely Moto's Android implementation was - including gems like rebooting far more often than WP7, played music at random times without touching it, having to reboot the phone if it was put into flight mode to get signal back, etc. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of good things about Android, but wasn't for me. v3 (when its on phones), might be though - the improvements and more attention to UI/consistency are looking really nice.
Yes, there was certainly a fair bit of "I hope they got it right this time" to it. If they hadn't lied and delivered the updates when and how they said originally, it may be a different story.
@credo: they're more the most recent issues that have caused regret. As a developer, getting my (few) apps up there has been a nightmare, even with help from MSFT AU's DPE trying to speed things up.
The Milestone is utter crap, and the reason I will never buy another Motorola product again (it took them how long to finally release Froyo, months after Gingerbread was available on other devices?). There's a port of CM7, though, which is a significant improvement:
Can't fix the defective headphone jack in software, though.
As far as I'm concerned, the only Android devices worth talking about are the Nexus phones. Everything else is a second-class citizen. And yeah, going with Java and shoving XML everywhere...ugh. Fortunately the NDK is now good enough to develop a game entirely in C++, so it doesn't bother me.
I wonder how long that will last though. Google just hasn't seem serious about developing and nurturing the Android Market. If somebody like Amazon came along and relieved Google of the burden, would Google take them up on the offer? Amazon would run it more like Apple runs the AppStore, albeit without the competitive restrictions.
This same holds true with IOS dev center and Safari. For all of apples talk about html5 and standards and all that, their own internal pages don't appear to be tested on anything other then safari.
Development tools and technical documentations are outstanding. Visual Studio has excellent WP7 support. The submission process was actually quite smooth. Never had problem except, yes, IE only. Shame on MS. The phone user experience is called Metro, the icons are actually Tiles, original design and different from the icon-based iOS and Android. I would say, for once, MS tried to not be a copycat.
What's bad
My biggest headache, the phone build-in search is useless. The Marketplace search is also useless, and it crashes a lot and had to restart the phone to be able to use the Marketplace again. Little apps available in Marketplace, 10,000(WP7) vs 150,000(Android) vs. 400,000(iOS), though this will changes over time as WP7 picks up momentum. No copy & paste. NoDo is supposed to add this feature ,but the roll out is WAY TOO SLOW (my Samsung Focus is the last device on the list). Overall, I am still anxious to see how WP7 will do in 2011.
So much for turning a late entry into an advantage by taking notes on the pioneer's struggles, and avoiding all their big mistakes.
An experience like the one described would have been par for the course in 2007 or 2008. But 2011? When it really has to be humming from Day 1? WTF times a million.
If this is what's going to save the ghost of Ericsson, they're toast.
Html5 is the new app platform. Microsoft trying to push silverlight is really just another way of their triple E strategy (embrace, extend, extinguish). In this case, embracing web apps, extending it by their .NET platform, then trying to extinguish html5 using Silverlight.
This time, it won't be so easy as IE6: Google bets on html5, Apple (although somehwat), and they both have very good browsers already.
Some of these I think are valid points, the update process needs to be improved. Currently it feels like the WP7 update process sits somewhere between iOS and Android, all the problems of both and the benefits of none. Smaller updates released more regularly would go a long way to solve these issues.
The marketplace update process I've never had a problem and I've used both Firefox and Chrome never IE. I'd love to hear some of the marketplace rules that he feels are broken. Most to me seem pretty up front.
From what I read, all his problems are with the Marketplace? We have read about that crappy update more than once and for requiring your to use IE, I don't find that quite abusing, since Apple itself requires that your install QuickTime to watch movies on their website.
Symbian and Windows Mobile supported copy/paste for a good period of time before iOS and Symbian/Windows was the standard that people expected from a smartphone.
True, but iPhone + iOS was a smoother experience in nearly every detail (from the capacitive touchscreen to intuitiveness), that people accepted the lack of copy/paste.
From what I have seen of WP7, it is nice, but not nearly the revolutionary step ahead that iOS was compared to Symbian/Windows.
The iPhone at launch was a great dumb phone with a cool touchscreen. I remember that my boss got an Iphone 2g and was pleased with the interface but he missed apps.
There are lots of people who seemingly never used a smart phone before the iPhone came out[1] and seem to think that everything that existed in iOS was always the first of its kind.
Nokia's smart phones did copy/paste fairly well and long before the iPhone even existed. Yes, the iPhone set the bar higher for many features but it was certainly not the first to do many of them.
[1] It's debatable that you could even call the first iPhone a smart phone since you were basically stuck with whatever preloaded apps came on it - though it was obviously a very good phone nevertheless.
I had a Symbian phone for three years. For three years, my two biggest complaints were "why can't I copy and paste?" and "what the heck is that pencil button for?".
aeoth, I didn't get a chance to read the article yet due to...
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Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:4.0.30319; ASP.NET Version:4.0.30319.1
My email address is in my profile. Please contact me.
WM7, on the other hand, still sounds like a black sheep, so I'm always curious to hear how someone decides to opt for this choice. I think the most common I hear is "I was waiting for a long time, and I was hoping this time Microsoft got it right."
Signed, a former loyal Microsoft customer/fan who one day stopped waiting.