Comments

2
Honestly, the biggest problem it faces is the iPhone is the established market leader in this segment. The Win7 phone will have to be twice as good *and* cheaper before people will consider it.
3
I was actually at the T-Mobile store yesterday looking for a new phone. Hadn't given a Windows phone much of a thought until I started playing with one. They're actually pretty damn slick.
4
♥ me some Tufte.
5
Well, sure it's good.

So long as you don't mind if 10 percent of them break during an update ... (that's a four figure Sigma 6 failure if you can't count).
6
I have heard nothing but good things about the new MS phone. Good for them. But yes... hope they don't fuck it up.
7
Hey Will... it is... eh hum... Windows.
8
Quality of product is only half the battle. The other half is marketing.

And the third half is firing Steve Ballmer.
9
Any phone that can't multi-task is DOA. Microsoft claims that they will have an update by the end of the year. And Palm has proved that having the best OS is not necessarily going to bring you success.
10
Android isnt really a crappy copy of iOS. I think the notifications alone make it very different, in that it doesnt create a popup when you get notified of a new email of text msg.

Im sure WP7 will only get better, but for me, i'll wait a generation or two before I decide to buy one.
11
"Sigma 6", eh Will?
12
open source rules
13
The "nothing fits on a single screen" UI drives me batshit. GPU acceleration is good, though--that's something that will keep Android from ruling the roost, since some of us can't get used to the herky-jerky Java-speed UI on 'droid phones.

But the requirement for a big, shiny, Windows-logo hardware button on every handset pretty much sucks all the cool out of this, regardless of how much better Microsoft did with the OS on their ninth try.
14
I want to like Windows because I always want to find new ways to present digital information, but it looks confusing as hell to me, like the triumph of design over usefulness. That said, iI've never used one. Is it really intuitive? The ads make it look like a jumble of information. As much as I dislike the main central gutter of information, with newest info at the top that makes up most mobile OSes and websites these days, you at least know where the new stuff is on Android and iOS.

Related, but slightly off-topic: I love it when laterite's comment photo matches his/her comment.
15
Metro really is all that and a bag of chips: the first real innovation in handheld computer UI since, yes, the Palm...

...but the poor bastards are saddled with the dumbest motherfuckers in history at the helm. Ballmer keeps insisting that Microsoft's mobile strategy eventually involves putting Windows 7 or 8 onto a phone. They're doomed.
16
@Paul. It works much better than it looks. For that reason, I debated including the Youtube video in the post.

If you're really curious, I'd suggest wandering down to a t-mobile or AT&T store, and trying one out in person. Else, you can download an emulator to play with on a Windows PC (with a mouse, which does limit the experience).

I was skeptical at first, until I tried a WP7 hands-on. It really does allow the information (and relationships between pieces of information) to structure the experience in an intuitive way. It's good design.

The other point, I didn't get into in this post, is the strong integration with the cloud--similar to that of Android and ChromeOS. For the reasons you've liked the Cr-48, you might like these phone as well.
17
@5 "So long as you don't mind if 10 percent of them break during an update"

Now some WP7 phones have had issues with updates, those were limited to Samsung phones, which MS halted the upgrades and a work-a-round was issued (ie, they fixed the problem).
18
Wow, Golob *not* pissing all over a Microsoft product? Amazing. Hope they passed out coats in hell. @Will, the update issue is with Samsung - i.e. the OEM fucked it up.

Copy/paste is coming next month, as they've been promising all along, and multitasking, background operation, etc. coming later in the year. It really is a great phone - I switched from iPhone to a Focus, and I love the shit out of it. It's not perfect, and the app store is behind the curve (Oh, Angry Birds...you can't arrive a moment too soon), but it's fun, good looking, and slick to use.
19
@Doctor Memory: You put it perfectly. I'm probably among the few--thanks to working in healthcare--that has been forced to use Windows XP and Windows 7 on tablets.

When Balmer doubled down on Windows everywhere, my suspicions became crystalized. Balmer will be the death of Microsoft, and with it probably the entire Eastside economy. 'Dumbest motherfuckers in history' about sums it up.

@Switzerblog: If I rag on anyone, it would be Apple and their overhyped products. Look, I have a CS degree, I program. I beta tested WinNT 3.0. A lot of Microsoft's products--like a lot of other tech company's products are shitty. At least this praise can be interpreted as genuine.
20
its crazy not to include copy/paste in your UI, however the new windows 7 UI is dope...they came back, and came back big. the tiles are live, and very very fast. As soon as NOKIA (maker of arguably the best feature-packed handsets out there save a few samsung models) gets on board and slaps a windows UI into one of their handsets look out...plus when they kick apple's ass for patent infringement (looks like they are gona) they will be in an even better position to co-dominate the mobile computing market...Paul's continuing rampages against MS and calling them dead--even though they irritate the hell out of me too-are so premature it seems to indicate a severe lack of understanding of that company as well as a fundamental lack of knowledge of the biz in general. He loves being chained to his mac products thats for sure though.
21
@2, iPhone is the market leader? Try third. Blackberry's still #1, but not for long; Android has passed Apple, and will have passed RIM by the next accounting. Windows isn't even on the map, yet.

I finally bit the hangdown and got an Android phone. It's OK. I'm pretty happy with how it works, except for the shitty, shitty quality of some of the apps, and the fact that the alerts that pop up for Google Calendar items show the time of the ALERT, not the time of the appointment, which is so stupid I find it difficult to believe it's really happening, every time. So I have to remember how far in advance I set the alert to ring, which I want to be different every time..
22
@17 excuses, excuses, excuses.

blaming the OEM is a typical MSFT ploy. I remember phoning tech support as an MCP (Platinum) and getting the OEM-broke-it runaround when there was a published knowledgebase db fix for the MSFT-created problem.

It's a bad workman that blames his tools.
23
@21 actually, Fnarf, in actual sales (not fake numbers, real consumer sales), all your decade is still belong to Apple. Nice try, but component parts sales worldwide prove it.
24
@fnarf

Or you could just click on the Notification, which you have to do to snooze or dismiss it anyway. Of course, I have a calendar widget right on my home screen that shows what events I have coming up that day.

Speaking of widgets, that's what really makes android cool. I almost only have widgets over my home screens.
25
WiS@23: as usual, you're making shit up. Stop it.

http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=14… <- table 2
26
(For the record, I am a happy iPhone owner and AAPL shareholder. But anyone who's suggesting that the iphone is the market leader in terms of units shipped is blowing smoke.)
27
@23 World-wide the smartphone sales breakdown (not total in the market, but total sold quarterly) is roughly 1/3 Android, 1/3 Symbian (Nokia), about 1/6 iPhone and 1/6 everybody else (mainly Blackberry and Windows Phone). In the US, Blackberry does a lot better but they're almost unknown outside of North America much like Nokia is in North America.
28
Course there's the unsupported Flash 10 on the Win7. Makes that video in this very post unplayable on the device being discussed. And that a bunch of cross OS apps have fewer functions on the Win7.

The whole thing has a 'get it out there and fix it as users find the 'features' feel. Now where have heard that before? In time MS might make me love this thing.
29
I have a windows mobile 6.1 phone and really like its functionality. I have an iPhone for work and find myself swearing at it a lot. I'm an avid Mac user but for phones I think I'd be drawn to the Windows stuff. My contract expires in the spring and I'm not sure where I'll go next (probably pay as you go for cost savings) but I'll definitely be taking a look at the new Windows based phones.
I like they are trying to market it as a way to keep you phone out of your way so you can live your life.
30
@23, your "component sales prove it" bullshit is really starting to stink. You don't know anything about component sales of anything; you couldn't name a single component of a single phone, let alone who makes it or what the sales are.

Flatulent moron.

I did however make an error -- I always forget Symbian exists. They're the real #1 in smartphones worldwide, even if they're less important in the US. There are probably TEN TIMES as many Symbian phones in the world as iPhones.

Arbeck, I'll have to check that out. I haven't got past the basics in a lot of categories yet. Still looking for a decent Forty Thieves solitaire app, too, and a soccer scores app that can get ALL of the European leagues, UEFA Champions League, and CONCACAF Champions League right.
31
Edward Tufte already critiqued the Windows Phone 7 / Metro design and it wasn't an endorsement: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-…
32
The coolest app on the phoneweb now is Foursquare...location basing does the work...crappy UI or no. I might become the Mayor of India Combo (Top Food is taken.)

http://foursquare.com/
33
Have a Samsung Focus and absolutely love it. I don't miss my iPhone in the least. Of course, the last OS upgrade slowed my iPhone down to the point it was unusable, which didn't help. Looking forward to the updates, just held off on the current one to see how it worked, update should be fixed shortly. And lets not forget iPhone and Android had their share of upgrade issues: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-998872….
34
If you'd like to know what Edward Tufte actually thinks about the WP7 Metro UI, see his thoughts (based on the pre-release) here - http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-…
35
@32, wouldn't that app only be interesting to people with real-life friends to follow them, Bailo? If John Bailo checks in someplace, but there's no one there to hear him, does he make a sound?
36
Must read article: Everything that can go wrong with Windows Phone 7 update does

http://bit.ly/fTTCUO
37
@31 and @34: Now I wish I had googled Tufte and Windows Phone 7 first. Thank you for finding the analysis.

Reading it, it actually isn't entirely negative--and he acknowledges that he was basing his analysis upon watching slides, videos and fiddling with an emulator.

Until actually using a device, I'd agree with his concerns. After, I think the interface largely solves the stacking-sequencing and hierarchy problems that plague most OSes.
38
@36, see @17.
39
@37 Jonathan: You're welcome! (I've been to a few Tufte seminars, and I remember reading his brief preliminary analysis when he first released it.) What I don't understand is the relative lack of *color* in the Metro UI. Color is an important way to improve recognition and usability. Look at the bottom four "green square envelopes" on your WP7 - they are indistinguishable from your picture. And the only thing that does disinguish them is the tiny sliver of text at the bottom of each one. Contrast that with the iPhone where I immediately recognize almost all your icons. I can even see you have 20 voice mails and/or missed calls. And where text is the core information - email & text messages, for example - it should just show the text and not waste 90% of the pixels on a giant green square and white envelope that's identical to three others right next door. Would 20 missed calls show up as 2.5 scrolling screenfulls of identical green squares with phone icons, each with the phone number taking up 10% of the available screen space? That's really low information density.

@31: Sorry I didn't see your hidden/unregistered comment first. Interesting that I even did a search of the page for "tufte" before I posted, and hidden comments aren't visible that way either.
40
@James McDaniel.

The open screen is a mixed area, for certain. The UI guidelines, and intention, is for all of these squares to be animated, and be presenting the most important information within. What you see above are mostly my email accounts; I had no unread messages at the time, thus they are bland. As email comes in, there is a static count of unread messages; ideally there would also be the sender and subject of the unread messages in the tile for that account.

Similarly, I have weather and news tiles that change to reflect the current conditions / headline. The critical information for that task is typically available right from its tile. I like that aspect, and hope more apps (first and third party) implement the UI design intentions with these tiles--keeping them active sources of the needed information, rather than static depictions of what the task is.

This is more useful than just an icon and / or title. A static icon (like in iOS) only tells me what the task is, not the current state. It's the state that is most of interest to me, the user. If I can get a sense of the state by a glance, that's better. Think of the hubbub in Mac OS with the iCal icon. Remember when the app was closed, it showed the *wrong* date (for all but one day a month). Now it always shows the proper date--thanks to hacks. In WP7, all of the tiles are like the updated iCal icon.

Given the dynamism of the tiles, this is difficult to describe in prose. You really do need to see it, to see how well it works (or not) in practice, for you.
41
Do they have the MLB At Bat app yet? I wouldn't buy a phone without it.
42
I see someone has fully gulped down the WP7 Kool Aid.

"One of these things is not like the others" Indeed. WP7 only fits 8 icons on the homescreen where iOS fits *20* and Android fits 16.

One of these is where the other ones were 3 years ago in terms of functionality and available apps.

One of these is wasting 25% of the available pixels on the homepage simply rendering empty space and a right arrow. This poor design extends to many of the apps where the right side of the screen is squandered showing partial content in order to simply indicate there is more content to the right.

One of these just released its first update, which adds zero functionality, and yet managed to be a complete and total disaster to the point where it bricked some number of phones that attempted to update. Not to mention that despite Microsoft attempting to exert a higher level of control over hardware than Google, and promising that this would mean all updates would be available to all hardware, the update was not/is not available for all hardware at the same time.

To say that iOS looks like PalmOS is just so patently absurd that it doesn't even deserve a rebuttal.

It's great you enjoy WP7. I am happy for you. But the Metro design looked moronic when it debuted on the Zune HD and it still looks stupid. It focuses on questionable style and sacrifices functionality hugely.

I generally am a fan of more spartan, simplified interfaces. But that's not what WP7/Metro is. It manages to look "cleaner" in some respects by emphasizing silhouettes and outlines over full-color icons, but at the same time it sacrifices utility left and right for no other purpose other than to attempt to be clever. That is poor software design.
43
@Jonathan Golob

For some things I totally get the active tile for truly glance-able information. The weather tile makes perfect sense - big yellow "sunny" icon, with "high 75º low 54º" right below. I grok this.

But the four identical-looking email tiles still doesn't make sense to me. Beyond a corner case like a single new email, textual information is rarely glance-able. So when you get new mail there's just an updated unread count? But that seems very similar to the iPhone. And your "ideal" situation would be to have, say, the sender and subject of each of the 5 new messages you've received on each of your 4 email accounts displayed in these tiny square tiles? Would you want to just stare at the screen for 2 minutes as you waited for all the sender+subject lines to scroll horizontally at a fixed speed by like those red LED signs? How would that be better than a single tap to get to a nice *scannable* list of email that I scroll through at my own speed.

The iPhone seems optimized for scanning information, and the Windows Phone for glancing. Very little in my digital life - beyond the weather and the current date & time - is simple enough to be truly glance-able.
44
It's another Microsoft 'innovation': years behind, and fucked up. It's doomed to market irrelevancy. Fortunately few people besides MS-employees & families have them, so you don't have to hear "Where is app X for my phone?" as you do too often from the Android owners. Short answer: in most cases, it ain't coming, payroll-patriots. MS should generously subsidise development of the top 100 apps for their fukt fone.
45
@James McDaniel -- I'm really curious how you think the iPhone is more optimized for scanning information. There's not much info presented aside from unread counts. On the Windows Phone, I can see unread email, text, voicemail, a favorite contact's recent status or photo, a recent photo I took, recent music I played, the current traffic in Seattle...
46
@45 RE scannability - I'm talking about the device/OS as a whole, not just the home screen. Clearly the iPhone's home screen is designed only to launch apps, and the Windows Phone home screen (must. avoid. E.T. reference.) is designed to display bits of glance-able info. Different approaches, optimized for different usage scenarios, with different strengths and weaknesses. But all it takes is a single touch to get from the home screen to an app that is optimized for displaying it's content, instead of being crammed into a tile. And even on the Windows Phone, because there are fewer (bigger) tiles on the screen you have to scroll through them, which also requires a touch.

All I'm saying is that when I want some information - 10 new emails, current traffic for the 520 and I90 bridges, 25 new FB posts, 50 new RSS news items, 12 new Instagram photos, etc - I prefer to pay the "price" of a single touch to see that information displayed full-screen in a scannable way. Having a photo shrunk down and displayed on 1/9th of a tile which is 1/10th of the screen is cool and all - and in some very simple cases might make a decent notification system - but it's not better, for me.
47
@25 no real geek believes Gartner.

Ever.
48
Another interesting graph is one from the Economist two weeks ago: http://www.economist.com/node/18114689?s…. Apple as handset maker is barely 4% worldwide market but >50% of the profits. Astounding.

If anyone has been to a Tufte seminar in Seattle one learns quickly that ET hates all things MSFT and won't shut up about AAPL, or his geniusv, or his artwork. I like ET's books and his work but he's too much of an AAPL fanboy and his arrogance is tiring.
49
@48 During the two Tufte seminars I attended in Seattle in the 90s, he said very little if anything about the relative merits of Apple or Microsoft. He disliked many bad PowerPoint presentations, but slammed USA Today's chartjunk even more because they should know better. Of course that was over 10 years ago, I don't know what his more recent workshops are like.
50
Here's where you lost me:
Microsoft—amazingly as despite the odds—right now has the best smartphone operating system.

and backing that up by linking to the fucking MICROSOFT WEB SITE.

I'm so tired of this debate. The best smartphone is the right one for the buyer. People and phones are like snowflakes and are all different. And for the love of all things holy, Microsoft is not the leader. Jesus H. Christ, they can't even roll out updates. 10% of users were effected by the fail that was it's previous update. TEN PERCENT! You'll remember the dropped phone issue/antennae with iPhone 4 only effected 0.05% yet it was headline news. Windows 7 update retardation get coverage like this piece of malarkey.

ALSO: I'd hardly call the notification system on the iPhone "crippling". Are you god damn serious? You do know there's an "Ignore" button right on the notification, do you not? Flawless: no - Crippling: Absolutely not.
51
It looks confusing as hell.
52
I returned this piece of shit within 24 hours of taking it home.
53
"component parts sales". Love it!
54
@ James McDaniel : Anyone at all who uses the work 'grok' is either pretentious or very pretentious.
55
I just got the new HTC and I absolutely HATE it.

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