Geek Factor

Many friends think I am a Windows Phone fanboy. I would rather describe myself as a happy and enthusiastic user than  a fanboy. This post is an attempt to capture some of my annoyances with the platform. I haven’t included any of the features which we know are being addressed in Mango. So no whining on lack of multitasking and stuff.

Over to the list.

1. No navigation application. Its the mid of 2011 and the dust has already settled down on smartphone wars. But no signs of a usable navigation application on WP7 yet. No TomTom, No Garmin. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Need I say more? (There is a T-Mobile navigator or something in the Marketplace, but it is subscription based. Who wants to pay $10 every month for using a navigation app, considering it is available for free on a competing platform?)

Update 13-July-2011: Garmin Street Pilot now available in Marketplace.

2. Application categorization. Sure, Ballmer hates the app-in app-out paradigm of other platforms, but that doesn’t mean the OS should not have app categories. Vertically growing app list becomes tiring to navigate after a while. And the only way they are sorted is alphabetic – which, needless to say, makes things even more difficult. Now even if you don’t want to have categories, why not sort apps automatically based on their usage? I mean, atleast sort the top 10 and the rest can go in alphabetical order.

Or bring in the same groups concept of People app which we see in the Mango builds into the app list. Will work beautifully.

Update 13-July-2011: People-like alphabetical categorization as well as search now available in the latest Mango builds!

3. Cost of third party applications. Now, what is MS thinking? Games which cost only $0.99 are $2.99 or more on Windows Phone Marketplace. If you think it is the developers who are pricing it high, you are wrong. Seems like MS has a low price sealing of $2.99 when it applies the “XBOX Live” stamp on these games. Now, who needs these superfluous tags? Just give me these apps at the same god damn same price as other platforms and I will be happy.

4. Can’t take a screenshot. I really wish I could post plenty of screenshots of what I am talking about through out this post. Unfortunately, there is no way I can take a screenshot of an application on the WP7 phone unless I resort to some low tech, like using a camera. It is too easy to do on the iPhone and not so difficult with Android. Developers badly miss this feature. Taking a screenshot of the emulator and then cropping it is what most developers do today.

5. Default social applications are of low quality. When compared to the FB app on iOS, the one on WP7 is a shame. True, the OS has some deep facebook integration in itself, but for a true FB experience, you need notifications, chat and status updates. This one looks and behaves like a glorified web page and nothing more. Needs a serious revamp or redesign. Same goes true for the Twitter app. Both need working Live Tiles too.

Incidentally, it must be noted that both the apps are developed by MS and not the respective services. So the update cycle do not follow that of the other platforms for these apps.

Update 13-July-2011: The Facebook integration in Mango makes the default application almost redundant.

6. No VPN Client. One another missing feature in WP7, which was available in WM OS since the beginning. A smartphone cannot be marketed to businesses unless it has a VPN client on it. Hope Mango brings it back.

7.Zune Player. A large music library is almost unusable if it does not have search. Bring in search, star based rating system and on-device playlist creation to complete the most gorgeous music player on the planet.

Update 13-July-2011: On device playlist creation/updation now available in latest Mango builds.

8. Internet Explorer. While everyone loves to hate IE on the desktop, the mobile version on WP is not bad when it comes to rendering web pages. Where it seriously lags is the lack of web fonts (iOS is the one to beat in this aspect) and wasted screen real estate when in portrait mode. All they need to do is to shamelessly copy iOS in these two shortcomings and you have a winner here.

And Flash and Silverlight(!) please.

Update 13 July-2011: Webfonts now available. Screen real-estate is very optimal. Better than iOS now!

9. Volume Control. There is no separate volume setting for the ringer and Music player! Go figure.

If you reduce the volume of music player, the ringer volume too reduces. If you bring it down to zero, the phone itself goes into vibrate mode. Crazy.

10. No call duration info in Call History. While this may sound like a minor annoyance, this is a very important feature for many of us. Present in almost all smartphone platforms, it isn’t rocket science to implement, so WP team should be upto it in the next release.

Keeping fingers crossed to see the goodness Mango is going to bring.