Windows Phone HTC HD 7 - First Impression

Two weeks ago, right after the arrival at Manchester Airport and while waiting in the baggage claim area, my mobile phone stopped working: the touch screen was no longer operable. I noticed one spec on the screen at one location, as if the layers of the touch screen surface have collapsed at that point. While the screen still showed data and the buttons of the phone worked fine, the touch screen no longer responded to any touch.

Fortunately a few days later my contract allowed me to get a free upgrade. Which phone should I get? I am already using an Apple iPhone for project-related work, so I would look for other alternatives. Android looked good, but in order to get the HTC Desire HD I would have to switch to Three, and I would prefer to remain with O2. O2 only offers the lower-end version HTC Desire as an Android phone. Since around 1998 I had quite good experiences with Windows CE devices: first the PDAs, then PDA phones. I liked the backward compatibility and the ability to edit Word and Excel docs on the mobile device, so also my most recent phone had been a Windows Mobile (6.1). Since October the new Windows Mobile Phone 7 devices were out - breaking completely the backward compatibility and actually offering less functionality (I wonder why it is so hard to implement copy/cut-and-paste; Apple had the same initial problem). There is still one phone out there with Windows Mobile 6.5.3, which still offered the old well-proven functions, such as synchronising with Outlook (even without Exchange) and backward compatibility, so I could run some of the software that I still was using (for example CodeWallet was a very nice utility for storing passwords; they are working on an iPhone app). But then I got lured by the latest Windows Phone: the HTC HD7.

The upgrade was free, and so I got my phone on last Friday. And here are some first experiences:

The overall look of the interface is very slick. Nice fonts, although the overall stylishness and coolness sometimes leads to text being shown too large and going beyond the screen.

There appear not many customisable settings, especially in comparison with the iPhone. There is only one main screen with those tiles (which can be arranged and configured), then there is one other screen which sorts all "application" icons in an alphabetical column. I have not yet found out if one can actually define more screens, which I would prefer.

Similar to the Apple Appstore one can also here directly download apps. The selection appears much smaller than for the iPhone; also the prices for many apps are somewhat high; but there are also free apps. These apps appear somewhat of a lesser quality as the ones for the iPhone: for example the Twitter app for Windows Mobile does only support one account, whereas the same app for iPhone supports multiple accounts - although both apps come directly from Twitter. Similarly the Facebook app, which works fine, but seems to have only few configurable options on the Windows Phone side. It also shows less information on Windows Phone, for example you cannot even see which people are behind a "like".

In some other cases there is stylishness over function: for example on the "people" tile, the faces of contacts pop up in a random manner. While this looks interesting, it has no meaning at all, as these face popups appear only to be random. It would have been great if these would be linked to actual activity online, for example when a contact post something on Facebook, or when an email arrives. But the faces fade in and out even when there is no network; when I see those faces and then check for the actual activity of that person, there is no correlation whatsoever to the tile display and the actual activity.

One positive thing: all contacts are now accessible under one tile, providing one access point for contacts from Outlook (Exchange), Facebook, and all other email accounts. This is really useful.

On the other hand, there is no common joint inbox, as it is on the iPhone: instead each email account has its own tile on the main screen.

One big advantage of the old Windows Mobile phones had been the capability of synchronising data and files with a PC, although the synchronisation suffered from terrible programming of ActiveSync, which often resulted in duplicate items and updating of the wrong file. The new Windows Phone has replaced this by using the Zune software. First one has to download a 120 MB big file for the Zune installation, then one has to wait for another 30 minutes until all the updates for this have been downloaded and installed, then Zune is ready. Supposedly the synchronisation of the Windows Phone with the PC would work from there. But I had connected the phone per USB to the computer already before I installed the software, assuming (hoping) that there would be some kind of self-installing driver there, as it is with many USB devices. Unfortunately that was a wrong hope - the device did not install itself, and when I tried then to use Zune for installing the drivers, the phone did not show up there in the "device" settings. That had worked better with the iPhone on the Apple Mac... no surprise about this.

So it appears to be a big problem that I had connected the phone to the PC before I had installed Zune... fortunately I found the solution in a forum, and I was finally able to have the HD7 installed as a "portable device". But then it did still did not show up in Zune... until I realised that I had to click an "ok" somewhere in order to move on. Strange GUI...

Unfortunately this Zune software only synchronises media files, but no other files such as Excel, Word etc. There is some mention on synchronising "One Note" files, but I will have to explore this further.

The camera takes excellent sharp pictures, and the 4.3" display (800x480) is very nice: bright and crisp.

Overall the experience with this phone so far is mixed. I still am looking for a proper way of getting the synchronisation going. On the windowsphone.live.com website, it says I can sync notes from my phone by tapping on "Office>All>Sync". But that does not exist... instead there is mention of a "Sharepoint", which I found out costs something... so it looks pretty bad, and I may not be able to get my car petrol statistics or the list of all my flights (all in Excel files) over to this mobile phone, which really is a pity.

A year ago Microsoft had about 7% market share of smart phones. This has now dropped to 3%... and if they do not soon provide an update to their new Windows Phone OS with all the features one would expect (cut-and-paste, synchronisation of Office files with PC), then soon there will be the well deserved end of their attempts in the mobile market. Windows Phone does have potential - the look-and-feel is good, but it needs more substance.

No more Skype on Windows Mobile Phones

I just wanted to put Skype on my Windows Mobile phone, but I found out that Skype no longer offers Skype for Windows Mobile (since 25.February 2010): they give a quite strange and dissatisfying explanation for this decision. I wonder what was the real reason...

In the meantime, Skype for Windows Mobile is still available for download on other sites - here is the download through CNET.

New Mobile Phone: XDA Guide

Since a week, my mobile phone acted up strangely. It just kept freezing, and I had to do numerous restarts until it would work again. I suspected that it would be related to a memory problem, but there was still more than 40MB free. Of course, some people will say "I told you so" - because this phone runs Windows Mobile.

I have used Windows Mobile devices since a very long time, when it was still called Windows CE. And there was always some trouble with them, especially related to the synchronisation with a PC: there were in many cases duplicates of contacts and files created, and I had manually to go through them and delete them.

But what I always liked about these Windows Mobile devices (PocketPCs) was that they would fit in well with my desktop (or laptop) PCs: I liked the "compatibility". Back in 1998 I had bought for work a NEC Mobile Pro, running Windows CE 2.0. And since then I had a series of devices, all working with the Windows OS. Great was the Toshiba PocketPC, or Handheld PDA as it was called in 2002. My brother gave me a GPRS modem for it, and I made phonecalls and connected from the net with that thing. Since 2006 I had a mobile phone running Windows Mobile: the O2 XDA Exec, with a nice keyboard and a 640x480 screen. In 2008 I switched to a XDA Stellar (HTC TyTN II), with a smaller keyboard, a smaller screen, but this reduced also the weight and size of the phone overall. This phone is the one that now somehow got sluggish since a week.

This Friday afternoon I wanted to make a call and send some txts, as I was on the way to a meeting - and the phone just would not start. Everything froze after a few strokes on the touch screen. I had enough then and entered the next O2 store. A day before I had already scrolled through a few models on the web site, so I knew that for a non-business tariff there would be no phone with a keyboard anymore. They had an XDA Guide, and after a short deliberation I took it. I needed to upgrade my phone plan for this, but then the phone itself was free. I later found that O2 has more other XDA phones available, but not in stores, only online. And some are also only available on business tariffs.

Here are the first comments about this phone XDA Guide:

It runs Windows Mobile 6.1. Yes, some people do not like Windows, but I like the fact that I can use Excel for utility consumption lists and petrol mileage, that I can write Word-compatible (sort of) files, and that I can look at my powerpoint files on the phone (I actually never ever did this, but if I want, I could). I also like that I can write software, using Visual Studio and the whole .NET framework. And since Microsoft ActiveSync 4.5 I actually never had any problems with synchronisation, no more duplicates. I also like the direct connection to the Microsoft Exchange server at our uni, so I can get all the emails right on the phone, share the address book with my more than 2000 entries between the server and the phone, and can have my whole work calendar on the phone. These reasons are why I resisted the Apple iPhone lure, which is very tempting. But I see currently no alternative to a Windows Mobile phone for my requirements. Version 6.1 now has a nice integration of Exchange, Gmail Hotmail, or any other email service into one interface. Also, applications can now (finally) be closed down. The greatest advantage of Windows Mobile phones over the iPhone is that they can be used as modems. This is really great - I always have internet connection on my laptop, no battery-power-hungry WiFi is needed.

The XDA Guide runs a special user interface on top of Windows Mobile: TouchFlo uses the touch screen for iPhone-like interaction with the fingers. However, the integration with Windows Mobile appears a bit superficial: top and bottom line on the screen show the Windows fonts and colours, and in between is the FloTouch screen. There was probably not an easy other solution to program this, but it looks definitely not as classy and sleek as the iPhone. But it works nice.

The XDA Guide has a GPS built in, and it comes with the software CoPilot 7, which provides voice navigation. This is very nice, because the software would otherwise cost an additional amount to purchase. The cradle for installation in the car is ok, but the power cable which one needs is a bit short. It also goes out straight from the bottom, so one needs some space underneath the device on the dashboard, otherwise the cable connector will eventually get bent. The battery life when using GPS is short as with all GPS-powered phones, so while driving one needs the power from the cigarette lighter.

The overall device is very light and slim. Quite a difference to my previous bricks that I carried. Also one big improvement: there are no buttons or controls that can accidentally be pressed. With my previous phone, the XDA Stellar, it happened more than once that while I carried the phone in the pocket, phone calls were made (to the last caller) just by accidentally pushing some buttons. The XDA Guide only has a "on" button at the top, which needs to be pressed down very firmly and cannot just be activated accidentally.

Overall I am quite satisfied with the phone so far. Great set of features, does everything I want. of course I miss the built-in keyboard... the onscreen touch keyboard is ok, but a bit too small for my fingers for fast typing. Somewhat silly is also that one has to change between letter mode and number mode - and the decimal point is in the letter mode, so when entering decimal numbers, one has to switch back and forth between the modes...

But overall this is a nice device. Has of course also a camera, quite standard at 3.2 MP. The quality is ok, but is no match for a normal digital camera. Memory is better than on any previous model: 340MB RAM for data and 186 for software, so even after installing a few apps the memory still is more than 270MB data and 100MB program space.

Problems with Windows Mobile Phone - Miraculously Solved

This past Tuesday, at 10:54, something must have happened: this was the last time when my Windows Mobile Phone (HTC TyTN II) synchronised its email with our server at work. I could not identify the problem... the calendar sync went ok, there was a connection to the server, just when it came to email, all that was displayed was "connecting...", then "0/760", trying to get the emails over. I had contacted our tech support, thinking it had to do with something on the server. They could not find any fault, so I kept trying with the phone, changing sync settings etc. Internet connection on the phone worked ok, anything else also seemed to work fine. Then yesterday I found another fault: tried to run Google Maps which I had installed last year, and that gave an error: "Google Maps cannot be opened. Either it is not signed with a trusted certificate, or one of its components cannot be found. If the problem persists, try reinstalling or restoring this file". Now that was strange. I had used Google Maps a few weeks ago, it was working fine. A couple of phone soft phone resets did not help. I hesitated to do a hard reset, fearing I would have to install all my applications again.

I installed the latest version of Google Maps, worked ok. Except when I wanted to set GPS options: a crash with an error message occurred then.

Not sure what the cause for these problems was. There must have been something in the memory. Maybe an overflow? I still had more than 47M available. I deleted manually all emails in my inbox on the phone - more than 250. Tried again to sync, but still did not work.

But when I woke up this morning, the email problem had "healed" itself! The inbox was filled with new emails, and the connection to the Windows Exchange server seemed to be ok. Not sure what solved this problem... I will try to monitor.