Interim thought: should I stay or should I go?

I just realized that this blog is ever growing, yet my list of quick notes about what more to add grows even faster. Moreover, I recently caught myself preferring to play around with my girlfriend's HTC Inspire while the Omnia 7 rests on its charger untouched.

There are so many things I miss on Windows Phone that are build into the Android OS or just one marketplace click away from using. Some of these are

• Turn-by-turn navigation, which I'd happily pay for if it only were available (got that in Mango)
• Unified inbox (got that in Mango)
• Even the slightest bit of multitasking, so that opening the music hub would not annihilate the GPS tracking app (got that in Mango)
• Popular apps like Doodle Jump or Skype (Doodle Jump is there, Skype will most likely come soon)
• A flashlight app that uses the camera LED
• HD output
• A camera that won't forget the previous settings upon closing (got that in Mango, sort of)
• A maps application with more contemporary maps - many of Bing's maps are years behing the Google versions (maps got much more contemporary recently)
• Alternative keyboards, like Swype
• A better browser (got parts of that in Mango)
• Larger storage capacity, presumably by means of an SD card slot
• Video chat

That's quite a list, I suppose. Some time ago, Engadget deplored Microsoft's taciturnity about revenues generated by Windows Phone 7. My speculation is that, as of today, sales were fair, but not overwhelmingly good. A hint comes from the price trend of WP7 devices. Just compare the Samsung Galaxy S price chart

to that of the equivalently spec'd Samsung Omnia 7

(both pictures courtesy of geizhals.at).

In the same period of time during the first six months after market launch, the Android device lost about one fourth (minus 100€) of its value while the WP7 device sells for less than half of its original price (minus 250€). That's saying something, I guess.

So, with eager eyes on the gorgeous Samsung Galaxy S2 - should I stay or should I go? Update: Whoa, look at Mango. It's not the only saving update to rule them all but a substantial leap to catch up with iOS and Android.

Navigating within movies

When navigating to a certain playback position within a movie, most people are used to clicking on an arbitrary position on the progress bar to have playback jump to this position. As far as my knowledge goes, iOS, Android and Symbian all provide this feature. Not so with Windows Phone 7, where the progress bar is visible, but not interactive. In order to fast forward or rewind you have to click the according buttons which will then cause the playback position to move about in rather coarse steps. I haven't seen such behavior since my parents bought their last VHS recorder back in the nineties.

Update: Microsoft added that in Mango.

Bing safe search

Some days ago I was searching for the web address of a German publishing house called "Otto Bauer Verlag" on my Samsung Omnia 7 with Bing. Despite both Otto and Bauer being rather common German names, Bing on Windows Phone 7 returned not one single result for the search term "Otto Bauer" while the desktop version of Bing reported a whopping 9 million hits. Among those hits, as I became aware, one of the most prominent is a link to a Wikipedia page concerned with the life and times of a certain individual named Otto Bauer who obviously made a reputation by starring in adult movies.

With growing suspicion I tried other lewd search terms like "sex", "penis", and the despicable "intercourse", each time ending up with identical results as for the illustrious Mr. Otto Bauer - none. It appears that Bing on Windows Phone 7, at least under German T-Mobile branding, imposes the safety filters of Bing.net upon its search results. These filters do not just wipe links to explicit content from search results but block entire search terms, like said "Otto Bauer".

Such a behavior may be desirable for many, but only if one were provided with the option to disable it, which is not the case on Windows Phone 7. Hence, Bing won't let me browse to the evangelical publishing house Otto Bauer due to some enterprising and eponymous adult actor. There is a fine line between cover and confinement.

Two side notes that keep me wondering even more. First, I haven't yet found any mention of the safe search restriction anywhere on the web. So either Windows Phone users are a remarkable squad of puritans or nobody just uses Bing. And second, Microsoft seems to reckon men's primary sexual characteristcs nastier than those of women: "penis" boasts no hits, "vagina" brings up a most colourful assortment of results.

Sluggishness of the pictures hub

Today, a friend showed me the very fancy threedimensional movie roll type of photo gallery on a Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini Pro. Scrolling proved surprisingly smooth but what astounded me most was that even the fastest flicks through the gallery did not yield empty spaces instead of pictures, something I am rather unaccustomed to from using Windows Phone.

When you scroll through even short pictures lists on Windows Phone, like the "Saved Pictures" category or "Favorites", which are populated but scarcely on my device, you will inevitably face empty squares instead of picture thumbnails upon fast flicks. Despite its processor offering a surplus of 340 MHz compared to the Xperia and the graphically much more humble pictures hub, Windows Phone does not manage to keep up with the maximum speed of flick scrolling already during one single flick. It will initially display empty squares and require you to wait for them to be replaced by the slowly loading thumbnails.

So not only can the pictures list become exceedingly long, as bemoaned in my previous post, but you have to confine yourself with respect to flick scrolling speed in order to permit Windows Phone to keep up with thumbnail loading.

Update: Mango to the rescue! The empty square lag is gone in this fruitful update.

No folders

Yesterday, I wanted to show some pictures from a recent paragliding trip to my family. After ten or more seconds of flick scrolling through the list of hundreds of photos stored on the phone, my mother, whose mastery of all things technical borders on computer illiteracy at times, asked "Why don't you organize your pictures in folders?" Yes, why not? Even she can accomplish that on her five years old Nokia phone. Well, Mom, Microsoft opted against custom creation of folders or categories in the pictures hub because they want to keep things lean and simple.

Ok, granted, you can browse by date, having the pictures hub jump to the beginning of the current month, but then again, there already is one "Favorites" category, so why not allow me to add more such categories like "Vacations", "Work", "Norp", or else. Combined with (1) the lack of interactive scroll bars, (2) the fact that the pictures hub invariably sorts pictures by the oldest date heading the list, and (3) the pictures hub does not remember your view position from where you previously left off makes the omission of folders a strong contender for the So-Dumbed-Down-It-Hurts award.

The same holds for the app list, which just becomes longer and longer on my phone.

Forgetfulness, or: Where is the text I wrote

I already talked about the sms app and Windows Marketplace but there is one more thing that frequently has me wanting to kill my phone. Both the sms hub and the rating system in marketplace will not remember what you just wrote after exiting the app. So any text you entered in said apps which had not been send will be lost upon hitting either the back or home butten. No saving as a draft, no reminder dialog, nothing. Your precious words will just pop out of existence. It beggars belief.

Cursor positioning

Cursor positioning on Windows Phone is either hit or miss, sometimes a grace, sometimes a curse. To move the cursor to any given location within a text, Windows Phone offers two methods. First, you can long-tap the screen, upon which a positioning cursor will appear that may be dragged around to the exact desired position, and second, you can click anywhere in the text in order to move the cursor to somewhere near the clicked location. "Somewhere near" meaning that this second option will only allow for the cursor to be placed behind a word, not within, thus rendering this method moot for spelling corrections within words.

When the text you're editing only spans so many lines as fit on the screen at once, there won't be any problem. However, if the text extends beyond your screen real estate, prepare for swearing. Windows Phone loves scrolling and consequently, scrolling will commence virtually as soon as you bring up the positioning cursor by long-tapping on the screen. The horizontal stripe your finger needs to hit in order for Windows Phone to not scroll up or down is so minuscule that you'll barely ever manage to position the cursor where you wish to. It's no less impossible than nailing the star on a slot machine, and the omission of cursor keys on the virtual keyboard does not change things for the better.

So in essence, what I'll eventually do when spell correcting words is highlighting the whole word, deleting it and rewrite. That's such a shame because the idea behind the cursor positiong logic is quite brilliant, only its execution comes about as epicly lackluster.