Voice Search in Maps

The maps application on Mango now comes with voice search and turn-by-turn navigation. Let's call this gizmo Bing Navigation for now. Bing Navigation is just like Google navigation on Android, at least it tries to be. Yet fails.

The reason for me calling Microsoft's take on navigation in Mango a failure is the ridiculously limited number of options to enter a navigation target. Mango offers voice search, but only in the maps, not the navigation part of the app. The voice search button is available when you are searching for a map location but not for entering a trip destination. This baffles me since exactly in those situations where you decidedly do not want to type, e.g. navigating while driving, you have to. Plus, Mango does not offer favorites, recently found locations or contact addresses as destination options. This makes keyboard input the one and only way of entering a trip target in Bing Navigation. Talk about a bare-bones navigation system without wit or intelligence and Mango delivers. Granted, you can use the variety of search options in maps view and then switch to the navigation view but this is not the way usability works.

Share your videos? Not through Skydrive.

Anybody tell me why Microsoft does not allow to share videos on Skydrive. After all this hype about Windows Phone enabling HD videography, at least in the 720p flavor, you should be able to upload video material to Skydrive. The only viable built-in way to get video off the phone and onto the internet is to connect the device to your PC, transfer it and upload the clips frome there. Seems oddly old fashioned in the proclaimed post PC era.

Update: This has been solved with Mango, where an option to upload video to Skydrive is available. Thank heavens.

No way of moving forward

Even on Mango, the Internet Explorer lacks a forward button. You can go back to the previous web site using the back softbutton but there is no way to forward your way through the browsing history. Agreed, the forward button is rarely used but when you need it, its absence usually means retyping the URL or committing a whole lot of searching again.

Mango

This morning I installed the leaked RTM build of Mango on my Omnia 7 and played around with it for some time. Verdict: solid, scarcely outstanding, and a tad disappointing in places.

What Mango essentially accomplishes is to retrofit most of the features that were reported missing when Windows Phone 7 came to market in 2010. Mango now sports multitasking, a unified inbox, threaded mail view, turn-by-turn navigation, permanent changes of camera settings, IE9 with a functional landscape mode, Bing voice search, improved Office, and many more enhancements, most of which center around social network integration.

Alas, it fails to address many of the minor shortcomings I described in this blog. Let me name a few examples. Mango still does not feature speed dialing, it lacks folders or groups virtually everywhere except the Me hub, the keyboard keeps disregarding special characters like umlauts, the browser still takes no notice of Flash, and the mobile nomads will continue to miss native thethering.

Mango thus leaves me puzzled. Windows Phone surprisingly turns up a lot like Apple's iOS when it comes to maturity. You will easily spot feature omissions in Windows Phone, some minor, some glaring, but the features it does offer are implemented with such care, thoughtfulness and virtuosity that you would hardly believe it to be just the second iteration. After handling a Windows Phone powered device for even a short while, you will clearly see the territory where it shines and outshines its competitors. However, Microsofts's fledgling mobile OS leaves a good lot to be desired. Android feels more powerful, more versatile, more customizable than Windows Phone.

Windows Phone is quality, Android is quantity. And Android offers such an abundance of the latter that it comes out on top. For me. For now.

Switched

I did it. Before me lies a brand new Samsung Galaxy S2 Android powered smartphone. The Omnia 7 will stick around for a few more weeks until Mango is available and got its chance to prove whether Windows Phone can hold up against its competitors.

The two things I can already say: Android is more feature rich and offers a greater level of choice between apps, even system applications such as keyboard or mail, for literally all purposes conceivable. On the downside, Android feels incoherent and difficult to operate for the uninitiated, it is buggier, and it looks frolicky, if not to say muddled in places, thus providing much less of a streamlined user experience than Windows Phone. I love Android but picture my mother to founder on Android while readily mastering Windows Phone.

For the time being, Android offers a better trade-off between the good and the ugly for my intents and purposes, yet I can still picture me coming back to the interface grandeur of Windows Phone.

The Call Log

How many different people do you call or get called by each day? Two? Ten? Tons? Either way, as long as you are among those who do not wonder why there is a phone in smartphone, you'll find the call log on Windows Phone a constant bother. This ironically owes to the log being just what the name suggests, a sequential list of entries. All telephone events are added to an ever growing queue of incoming calls, missed calls, and outgoing calls. There is no option to filter by one of the former categories, nor does Windows Phone allow you to narrow down call events to one contact.

So in case your best friend recently had a whinge about you not calling in weeks, good luck finding the call log entry proving that you indeed tried just a few days ago.

Phone Numbers

Daily usage of Windows Phone will enhance your short term memory for long numbers. This is because

1. it won't render any number on any webpage or in any email as a clickable phone number - this will only work with SMSes, and
2. it won't allow you to copy-paste a number into the dialing app

Being able to paste numbers into the dial pad was my second most anticipated use of the copy-paste feature added by dint of the NoDo update, but for some reason Microsoft failed to see the benefit in that.