Leaving Windows Phone 7 to Return to Android | Hacker News Reader

Leaving Windows Phone 7 to Return to Android

robpaveza.net

27 pointsoayandosu18 comments

He clearly used Android first. WP7 tries to put everything right in front of you, and reserve menus and tap-and-hold for rarely used operations (like delete). Not to say there aren't problems with Windows Phone 7 right now, but:

> On the call history screen, if I tap-and-hold a phone number, Windows Phone gives me: Delete

However, if instead you tap the number itself (and don't hold), you get the full contact (should it match, with call, text, FB comment, email, etc), or Call Number and Text Number

> In the text messages list, the context-sensitive menu doesn’t give me an option to call the person with whom I’m messaging.

But if instead you tap their name or number at the top of the screen, it gives you their contact (from which you can call, text, FB comment, email, etc) or if it's just a number, call and text.

Gmail support is through exchange at m.google.com, not IMAP. It does uses folders, but archiving email is a simple as deleting it in the WP7 UI. Google keeps a copy in All Messages, just removes it from the tag or inbox.

I've used 4 different models from three manufacturers (Samsung, LG, HTC), and can say that the audio and touch screen issues must be device specific. I use a Focus as my primary phone, and have carried other WP7 phones for weeks at a time -- I've had no problems.

As a developer, and as a user, you can do a lot more with Android. I still use my Nexus One quite a bit. But WP7 is a solid first offering, and while there's a lot missing, what they did they did very well.

Related to the hardware buttons complaint...that's maybe relevant for HTC phones. LG, for instance, has REAL buttons not those touch sensitive crap and you really can't press those by mistake.

afaik all the consensus "good" Windows phones (HD7, Focus, Venue Pro) have touch buttons, though. They don't totally ruin the experience, but it's really annoying that they'd do something so dumb as to squander much of the advantage of having a hardware button to begin with. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

> He clearly used Android first.

That's a reasonable assumption. Android has been on the market for quite some time now.

> Gmail support is through exchange at m.google.com, not IMAP

That's terrible. Why not just using the browser? Even with the iPhone mail client, which is quite decent, I prefer using Gmail through mobile Safari.

And the Android Gmail client is very good, despite the fact mine (at least) lacks priority inbox.

It's far from terrible. The reason WP7 is on my primary phone is because the email, contact, and calendar integration is fantastic.

I use Gmail (Personal) and Exchange (Work), and find Android is really annoying. I have to use two different mail applications with two very different UIs, and my muscle memory always has me tapping in the wrong place for the current application which results in deleted messages and wasted time.

Best thing about WP7 (for me) are the tools that they provide to developers. Visual Studio (Phone) compared to Eclipse for Android is so much better. The IDE itself and also debugging. Using eclipse after is like doing a brain surgery through arse. I use and develop for Android, but once I tried WP7 tools I got very jealous.

What is the deployment and debugging experience like on Android or iOS? I was impressed with the Visual Studio integration when I played with WP7 development a bit - you can just hit F5 and your app starts up on the phone in debug mode in, like, two seconds, and you can then step through it in Visual Studio, set breakpoints, hover over variables to see their values, and even evaluate expressions in the immediate window.

I was vaguely expecting some cumbersome deployment process, but it feels no heavier than running something on the PC. But I've never developed for other mobile platforms, so maybe this is just standard?

That's about how it is on Android. Maybe more than 2 seconds, though. 3? 5? Something like that.

OK, cool. The shorter time is probably just because I only ever got as far as writing toy apps.

With WM 3 seconds? It takes only to boot up 3-4 minutes. Emulator is painfully slow. Whole internet is full of complaints about it...

Debugging on the actual device is a much, much better experience than debugging on the emulator.

I agree. I'm doing it myself also, otherwise it would be impossible to develop for android. But you need to test your application on different screen sizes, dpi etc. Or you can buy loads of different phones to test on them all.

WP7 sdk has some major holes though. For one thing, no native way to store user data. You can either use a simple key/value thing (only good for settings data) or you can use files. What I wound up doing was creating XML files that I serialized and deserialized as needed to store data. Not exactly a good solution as the data scales.

I don't know how WP7 is going to turn out in the consumer space, but once MS releases a deployment mechanism for the enterprise, I think it'll really take off. There are so many .net developers out there working a corporate job that WP7 become the obvious choice for when you need to outfit your 10,000 insurance claim adjustors with a phone.

I'd love to see it take off in the consumer space because it has such great tooling, but I don't think it'll have the same market share as iOS or Android.

"HTTP is an abstraction of Berkeley Sockets."

Wait, what? HTTP is a protocol that can run on Berkeley sockets, certainly.

People still call them "Berkley sockets"? Isn't that akin to calling your "Von-Neumann Machine" something like "Turing complete"?

> If I call a local number by only using its seven-digit number, WP7 never, ever figured out to map it to the relevant contact. My old Motorola RAZR phones did that.

What part of the country still allows 7 digit dialing?

I suppose a cellphone might recognize a 7-digit number and prepend the phone's own area code. A landline can't do that, of course.

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