Windows Phone 7: 2 months on.

So, in late October I threw away my iPhone 3GS and replaced it with a brand new HTC HD7, complete with Windows Phone 7. And I wrote a review of how the device and OS compared to my iPhone after just 2 days… It was quite complementary - apart from a few issues with battery life and a lack of apps I thought that the HD7 was just as good as the iPhone 3GS, and even slightly better in some areas.

2 months on and my opinion has changed. So much so that I have turned back to iPhone, replacing my HD7 with an iPhone 4. Why?

Well… the reasons are many, mostly in Windows Phone 7, but a few little ones with the phone itself (mostly the camera - which isn’t as good as first thought).

• Stability
  
  After 2 days it wasn’t apparent, after 2 months it definitely is… Stability is of serious question in 2 aspects..App Crashes - applications like twitter and foursquare, apps which you would think should be cornerstones of the new WP7 model _crash_ more often than not. That is they fail to start, or start and then hang. This is frankly not good enough. Whether it’s the underlying platform, or the apps being created by third parties it’s simply not good enough.

  Visual glitching - the UI glitches at a critically high level. That is to say the main UI for the phone _often_ displays multiple “layers” of navigation over the top of each other, making the use of the phone impossible until it’s been reset. Again, this is unacceptable - yes it’s a new platform, but it seems to me like no-one has tested the OS, or they’ve deemed it “good enough” until an update can be put in place to fix the issues.

• Battery Life
  
  Yes, it got better than in the first days of having the phone, and after I turned wi-fi updates off it was a lot better. But still, even when optimised as best as I was able to the phone would only manage 16 hours of battery life, and that’s not actually using the thing - if I used any games, or played any music then the battery life would drop down to 10 hours. Just not good enough.
• Speed
  
  It wasn’t until I installed Fruit Ninja on my HD7 that I noticed the speed difference over the HD7 and my iPhone 3GS. Where the iOS version is slick and beautiful, the WP7 version stuttered and was a pale comparison to the original. Bejewelled is also just as slow in comparison to its iOS equivalent. Additionally, due to the connected nature of most apps on the platform, where connections are slow there is an awful amount of lag and stuttering on apps which use the OS’s Panorama control.
• App Support
  
  Back in October I pointed out that the app support was extremely poor - back then LOTS of the apps available where apps which were based on the “fart app” archetype - this hasn’t really changed, there are still a LOT of apps of this ilk. Of course there are apps for the like of facebook, twitter and foursquare - but as I point out above, these crash a lot. Things like Spotify which were promised for launch have still not materialised after 3 months, and Spotify are seemingly happy to continue to say “it’s coming” without promising any dates. Yes, there are now bigger more feature rich apps arriving, but they’re generally slow and as an early adopter they’re all TOO late.
• The Browser (Internet Explorer)
  
  When I first saw the WP7 I was really impressed, and the only area that I was skeptical about was the browser - I saw WP7 first at a web CMS event and the only area of the phone that the demonstrator failed to show was the browser - which I found odd as it was a web event. When I asked about the browser I was told that the renderer was a hybrid IE7/IE8 model which didn’t really do Flash, HTML5, and wasn’t the best at JavaScript. Well, I’m here to tell you that he was right - the browser is poor. But it’s not helped by 2 things… 1, that O2 have locked the search on the device to Yahoo (MS, can’t you let me change my default search please?) and 2, the three button navigation paradigm of the phone means it’s very hard to do session navigation backwards and forwards - and access to History is far from a doddle.
• Calendar Fakery
  
  A small one, but something that REALLY annoyed me - the Calendar app which comes with the phone defaults to an agenda view when you run it, which shows all events due to happen in the coming days in a list view, and there are three buttons at the bottom which allow you to change the view or perform actions. One of the buttons allows you to see how the month will look - so you click it and it expands the view to a month view, complete with dates, and the titles of the things happening on those days… But wait, oh no, that doesn’t actually seem to be the case. That’s right, while the days are right, the text which sits next to the dates is placeholder text… It seems like a really small thing, and to be honest it’s very hard to read the text anyway so it’s unlikely that you’d use that to see what was happening - but it’s just amateurish in my opinion.

Of course there are other things that I find annoying - no copy and paste Microsoft? Yes, it’s been promised in January/February - but Microsoft, shouldn’t we try to learn from other peoples mistakes? And yes, there are still features that I like - the UI for example is lovely, the screen is beautiful, and the kick stand allows for watching movies hands free, office support is good - and the ability to edit Word and PowerPoint documents is brilliant.

But that’s where it finishes, and as a device and OS which is going up against both the iPhone and Android devices, it’s just not good enough. Which is why, as I say, I’ve ditched my Windows Phone 7, and returned to the promised land that is iOS4. On my gleaming, glittering, light emitting iPhone 4.