That whole live thing

Seriously, what's with Microsoft and the "live" services? On my phone, I got Windows Live, Office Live, Xbox Live, and above that, there are Skydrive, Hotmail, which somehow is Windows Live but then again isn't, and a plethora of other cloud based services. I don't know what all of these are. I don't see why I should require any of that live stuff. And I don't want to have my life online.

There are reasons why people prefer to not share everything personal with some arbitrary internet service to which they are only bound due to their decision for a certain phone OS manufacturer. It is inexcusable to be coerced into uploading any Office document you wish to view on Phone 7 to Office live. Recent sales figures? Yeah, just upload them to Office live. Strategy papers? Fine, share them with a third company. Contracts? Office live, baby, your safe haven on the internet. Or why don't you just email 'em to yourself, unencrypted.

Please do not misunderstand me, the live services like any cloud based service may be very helpful, efficient, and enriching, yet they ought not be the only means of getting certain things done on my Windows Phone. Why does the Zune software not allow transferring Office documents between my desktop and my phone? Why do I need to sync Outlook with Hotmail to have contacts and calendar entries appear on the phone? There should be other ways of accomplishing such tasks which only involve my computer, my phone, and a cable. Alas, with Windows Phone and its live service integration, Microsoft not just allows but forces you to share your personal data online. Not acceptable.

Dictionary word recognition with special characters

Many languages comprise special characters outside the 26 characters in the standard alphabet. For example, in Germany we have so called Umlauts like ä, ö, and ü, as well as ß instead of a regular s in certain instances. Yes, I know, this is so Old Europe but we Germans are not alone here. The Danish have their Smørrebrød, the Czech the Škoda, and what do you know, even the wittiest Brits can't help but being naïve from time to time.

What I'd like Windows Phone to do is to recognize me writing "Gruse" and suggest "Grüße" from its dictionary - meaning "greetings", by the way. Unfortunately, it won't because the word correction/suggestion algorithm seems to lack the association between special characters in different languages and their standard alphabetic counterparts, like "u" and "ü" or "s" and "ß". Would be a huge leap in usability if Microsoft enhanced the dictionary by just this bit.

Landscape mode thwarts Internet Explorer

Granted, the main task of the Internet Explorer is to facilitate browsing. Occasionally though, you might feel the urge to enter a URL manually or access favorites. Internet Explorer in Windows Phone will allow you to do so, but only in portrait mode. When you switch to landscape mode, the address bar disappears, and so does the menu bar. As of today, I failed to find any way to have IE display either of the two during landscape browsing. This means turning the phone into portrait mode each time you want to enter a URL, access or store favorites, or switch between tabs. Please, Microsoft, spare my wrists and provide IE with a full-fledged landscape mode.

The "sms could not be sent" bug

Every once in a while Windows Phone will refuse to send a short message that was composed in threaded view. Seconds after clicking on the "Send" button, the phone will flag the message as undeliverable ("Message could not be sent" or "Nachricht konnte nicht gesendet werden" with german localization). The sms app then offers to try again which surely is a nice touch but always, with no exception, amounts to nothing, for the message just won't go out. I have tried to send the same message by hitting retry every couple of minutes over the course of about one hour without any luck. Even worse, further sms to the contact in question will also be flagged undeliverable.

There might be a workaround to this issue. During testing I realized that, while messages to, say, "Alice" firmly withstood delivery, messages to "Bob" would relay without a hitch. I then tried to send Alice a second message, however not from threaded view but by composing a new message in list view and inserting Alice as a recipient. This message was delivered immediately, following messages were, too.

Thus the sms delivery bug appears to occur a) sporadically and b) only/mostly when sending messages from threaded view. Composing a new message to the same recipient by clicking the plus sign in list view will mend matters.

Update: The bug appears to have been remedied by the NoDo update. It did not occur ever since I updated.

Calendar syncs

Just stumbled upon a real downer. Phone 7 offers to add a Windows Live or Googlemail account and have the phone commit full synchronization with those accounts. Windows Live even allows push updates. That way, your contacts, calendar entries and mails from both Windows Live/Hotmail and Google will be in sync with their counterparts on your phone. Very nice in theory, agreed, but actually done painfully sketchy.

Phone 7 refuses to sync any other but your main calendar from both services. Neither of your own subordinate calendars nor any subscribed calendars will appear on the phone. While I to a certain degree understand the lackluster integration with Google, there is no excuse for Windows Phone 7 not allowing a complete sync with Windows Live.
Windows Live. A Microsoft service.

No speed dialing

Yes, I know the lack of speed dialing to be one of the more widely criticised feature ommissions in Windows Phone 7. Nonetheless, allow me to again point out how entirely incomprehensible and annoying this is to me. Speed dialing is t-h-e most efficient way to call somebody from your contacts list. Every other method - except maybe custom favorites lists - requires at least twice the number of screen taps to reach your desired contact. I mean, come on, even Bill Gates himself could code a sufficiently performant speed dialing feature during lunch break. How hard can that be? What makes things even worse in Phone 7 is the absence of any third-party apps retrofitting smart dialing. For Android there exist a variety of smart dialpads while on Windows Marketplace - void.

Keyboard language settings

The keyboard in Phone 7 is one of the most efficient virtual keyboards I have ever used. The dictionary word pool is unfathomably huge, correction works very well and accuracy is quite high.

Confusion lingers as soon as you need to write in different languages - like myself when posting on this blog. The language selection itself is a snap, involving just a tap on the language button to cycle through the activated languages. Unfortunately, changing dictionary language will also alter the keyboard layout corresponding to the specified language. So for me, that means adjusting to QWERTY layout every time I switch to English as the dictionary language. I don't know who at Microsoft thought tying dictionary language to keyboard layout a good idea but I've got a proposition for his superiors: sack him!

The sms app

The sms app in Phone 7 bears the highest potential of greatness among all short messaging systems I have ever seen in a smartphone, and that mainly owes to its combination of list and threaded view. Upon starting the sms app you are first presented with a chronological list view of all recently received short messages. Clicking on one of the entries opens a threaded view of your conversation with just this person. I completely dig that combination because it gives you the best of both worlds. However, there are some flaws about the Phone 7 sms app Microsoft should fix better sooner than later.

(1) There is no list view of sent messages. There are times at which I just know that I sent some information out to one of my contacts but fail to remember who that was. With sent messages only showing up in threaded view, I need to review all threads to search for messages.

(2) There is no text search option for short messages.

(3) Confirmations appear as separate messages, thus bloating the whole thread. Why not use a symbolic indicator to signal whether the recipient has already gotten the message.

(4) Sent and received mails have the same color in threaded view. They are only set apart by the speech bubbles of sent messages being right aligned while received messages are left aligned. Some color differentiation would be just nice.

Update: Point (4) hast been remedied with the advent of Mango, where your sent message bubbles exhibit a darker color than received messages.

The camera shortcut

When Windows Phone 7 was presented, Microsoft's officials seemed to nearly have wetted themselves over the snappiness of the camera. Clicking the camera button from almost any app will open the camera window in under a second, allowing you to take snapshots that really honor their name.

It would have been fine if Microsoft had just stopped here but they decided to take this instant on camera idea too far. The camera button even works when the phone is locked and the screen is off. Holding down the camera button for about three seconds will have the camera window pop up ready for action from almost any state of the device except when it is completely shut down. I do not like this behavior at all. It introduces the risk of accidentally turning on the phone while it resides in your pocket, backpack or suitcase. Just three seconds of depressing the camera button plus a click on the home button will leave you with a phone that displays an active, clickable home screen dangling around.

Above all, the camera shortcut does not even bear the advantage of being a real short cut. Clicking the On button, swishing away the lock screen and triggering the camera button hardly takes longer than the camera shortcut to activate, rendering this feature entirely useless.

Addendum: As I just noticed, this feature can be switched off. Go to "Settings | Applications | Camera" where the option to turn on the phone by depressing the camera button can be deactivated. Neat!

Marketplace

Windows Marketplace is at first glance a fancy looking experience, sporting slick graphics, lean design, and a reasonably populated assortment of apps. Unfortunately, when actually using it, edges get quite rough. Let me rub on a few.

(1) There is no sorting option. You are bound to the inherent and rather impalpable logic of the creators of Marketplace when it comes to the sequence in which its entries are listed. While Microsoft offers certain categories like "Top", "Free", and "Highlights", there is no option to sort for rating, alphabetic order, downloads, price, or anything else whithin those categories. This may sound like a minor hassle but has ridiculous implications in reality. An example: Most of us would expect the "Top" category to list the top rated games in descending order of average rating. Not the case. Among the first five results in the "Top" you'll currently find two games with meagre average ratings of less than three out of five stars while some of the highest rated games in Windows Marketplace like 7cave or Carneyvale: Showtime do not even make it into the top 50 of the "Top" category. Can anybody explain this to me?

(2) The rating meter and price tag are omitted in search results. You have to open each entry to see both these informations.

(3) You never know where an app has been stored. There are two distinct storage areas for apps in Windows Phone. First, the main app repository, and second, Xbox Live. Normal applications become stored in the app repository, thus appearing in the main app list and, if you wish, on the home screen. Games are installed within Xbox Live, where they are initially invisible to the rest of the Phone's ecosystem. An Xbox Live item does not display in the main app list but can be added to the home screen. Now there are borderline cases of apps that do not intuitively fit well into either the application or game category. Marketplace does not inform you where an app has been installed, leaving it to you to search the app list and then Xbox Live in order to find the app you just downloaded.

(4) You cannot specify in which category to search. Search results will be a bedlam of applications and music, all crammed into one, often way too long list of hits.

(5) The app crashes - at least on my Samsung Omnia 7. Every once in a while, clicking on a category or an app will cause the screen to black out, render the phone unresponsive for some seconds and then return to home screen. After that, marketplace will fail to open, at least for several minutes, with only a restart of the device providing for immediate remedy. And by the way, not only will marketplace cease to function, Xbox live and the music app (!) will, too.

Update: Issues (4) and (5) appear to have been remedied in the NoDo update. Two down, three to go.

No alarm time display in lock screen

The alarm application in Windows Phone is very close to what I would call a perfect, i.e. sufficiently easy, versatile, and powerful implementation of an alarm clock. It allows for multiple labeled alarm times, repeated alarms and individual alarm sounds assignable to every alarm. Moreover, the alarm clock live tile displays the time of the next alarm on the home screen which is a gift for all you obsessive-compulsive alarm time recheckers out there.

In contrast to the live tile, however, the lock screen only shows the alarm clock symbol to notify you that an alarm is active. It omits to tell you when this alarm will go off. Hence, you might just mistake the alarm you forgot to set for tomorrow's pivotal job interview with the everyday "kiss wife" alarm. How hard could it be to include the time of the next upcoming alarm alongside the alarm symbol in the lock screen?

The flack about flick scrolling

Flick scrolling on many levels is a highly approvable gesture, for it bears all the immersiveness, casuality and coolness a distinguished tech bohemian as well his pubescent sister demand. However, the usability of flick scrolling is limited by the length of the list you want to scroll through. While several dozens of list entries can be efficiently handled with flick scrolling, several hundreds of entries eventually become a real drag. And such several hundreds of mails or short messages or photos today are the rule rather than the exception, particulary with social networking so tightly integrated into Windows Phone.

The limitations of flick scrolling led Google to implement scrollbar-like grips when scrolling through long lists in Android so that you can move from A to Z in no time. Windows Phone 7 also provides visual feedback when flick scrolling through a list or web page by displaying an ethereal scrollbar that signals your position. However, this scrollbar only serves as a visual indicator, not as a means of user interaction. I would opt for slightly larger but touchable scrollbars which would allow you to navigate lists of arbitrary length most efficiently.

No "Select All" option in mail hub

Let's stay with the mail hub a little longer. When I first synced the Exchange mail account at my office with Windows Phone, the device received over 500 messages, each of which mysteriously flagged unread although I had opened all of them in Outlook before.
No problem, I lightheadedly thought, just select the whole bunch and..., wait, where is the "Select all" button? The shattering answer after thoroughly searching through every menu I could find in the mail hub: there is none. You cannot select all messages in a mail folder with one command. Instead, you have to select all mails manually - which is very neatly implemented in Phone 7 but doesn't make up for the need to flick scroll through hundreds of mails and tap each and every one of them. No excuse.

Quoted text in mails cannot be edited

When I reply to or forward emails I often quote parts of the original message, either within my response text or below my own message. The emphasis here lies on "parts". There are seldom mails worth quoting in their entirety so editing quoted text has always been a matter of course for me. Not so with Windows Phone 7. It doesn't allow for any changes of quoted text in mails, and it even does not offer any way to specify whether or not to quote the original mail when replying to or forwarding it. TOFU is the default and sole behavior when responding to received mails.

What could be so difficult about just including the quoted text as normal text in the mail editor when hitting the reply/forward button.

You cannot remove a contact picture once it has been set.

Assigning a picture to a contact is an easy task in Phone 7. You chose the contact, enter edit mode and tap on the empty picture space. The pictures hub will then open and allow you to select a picture, crop it to the desired picture part and finally save the picture under the edited contact.

This is all fine but Phone 7 proves stubborn when you later wish to remove a picture from a contact. Note that I'm talking about a deletion of the contact picture from the contact, not the replacement of a picture by another one. So how do you do it?

You can't. There is no way to remove a picture from a contact entry once it has been set. No long-tap, no context menu, no trash symbol. It's as simple as that: you can't.

The only way to liberate a contact from an unfavorable picture therefore is to create an Exchange account, sync your Phone 7 with it, remove the contact picture in Outlook or any other Exchange enabled software, and wait for the next sync of your Windows Phone 7.

Come on, Microsoft, how hard could it be to add this feature to a context menu.

The home screen does not rotate

Screen orientation is a mixed bag on Windows Phone 7. There are applications which change between portrait and landscape view depending on how you hold the device while others keep stuck in portrait mode regardless of how you maltreat the gravity sensor. For example, the mail hub rotates, contacts don't, pictures in the picture hub rotate, the picture hub itself doesn't, calendar rotates, the Zune hub doesn't, settings rotate, marketplace doesn't. See a pattern?

In case you fail to, welcome to the club. The only explanation I can think of is that Microsoft decided to have function follow form while crafting some of the Phone 7 experiences. The layout of these applications seems to have been designed specifically for portrait mode, following the premises of a "taller than wider" approach. Switching to landscape mode would imply said applications to split vertically onto two different screen, thus introducing the need to scroll vertically.

However, there is not reason for the home screen to refuse rotation between portrait and landscape mode. Currently the home screen offers space for a matrix of 4 rows times 2 columns of tiles. Tiles can be either square and occupy one tile space or elongated and span a complete row, i.e. two columns. Given this layout you cannot come up with any configuration in portrait mode that would not have a direct correspondence in landscape mode. To move from portrait to landscape would just require tiles to rotate by chunks of 2x2. I'll provide some examples to illustrate.

This is a typical home screen in portrait mode:

Rotating this to landscape orientation is an easy task. You only have to commit rotation in chunks of 2x2 tiles, just like this:

You can't conceive any configuration of tiles in portrait mode that would disallow to apply this 2x2 rotation scheme. In landscape mode on the other hand, certain configurations of square and elongated tiles pose a problem for rotation. Consider this layout, where rotation to portrait mode is not straightforward:

A very simple solution comes to mind immediately. Microsoft could simply prohibit home screen reorderings in landscape mode or automatically switch back to portrait mode whenever the user attempts to reorder tiles.

Hence the question arises: with landscape mode being a rather prominent screen orientation for many people, especially for those with heavy use of internet, games or texting applications, why does Microsoft not allow the home screen to embrace landscape?

Welcome to the Windows Phone 7 annoyance and admiration blog

Yes, in this order.

I truly love my Windows Phone 7 mobile. I love its looks, its lean aesthetics, the snappiness of the user interface, the novel ideas Microsoft put into many of the applications, simply everything that makes Phone 7 stand out among the crowd of other evenly capable and competitive smartphone operating systems. Over the last weeks I have become a huge fan of my Samsung Omnia 7 an its software entrails. Microsoft has done a magnificent job with Windows Phone 7 that even had me abandon my iPhone 3 and move over to the archenemy. Alas, as with probably any gadget one owns there are a few (or a few more) things about Windows Phone 7 which are unexpected, unpleasant, or flat out annoying.

This blog will capitalize on the share of issues Windows Phone 7 has. Despite the predominantly adverse attitude most of the blog entries will sport, I'll try to retain the winking eyes of a big brother tapping you on the head and saying: "You'll learn".

This blog will fill bit by bit over time so please accept my apologies for the sparseness of entries during the first days of its lifetime. Most of the pieces I am going to discuss will certainly have been whined about elsewhere, so the only thing I can promise to avoid too much redundancy is to not reiterate the most common complaints raised by every of the arrived reviewers out there.

So without further ado I warmly welcome you to join the bashing. Feel very heartily invited to post comments, correct me wherever I err and post solutions or workarounds for the nitpicks I'm making. And allow me a final remark concerning the sequence in which issues are discussed. It will be truly random and in no way imply any hierarchy of awkwardness.