Windows Phone 7 - a second look

For a few weeks I had now the HTC HD7 with Windows Phone 7, the new mobile OS by Microsoft. In my first brief note about the initial user experience, I noted many shortcomings, both compared with the previous version of Windows Mobile 6.5 and with the current other smartphones competition. So what remains of this negative first impression after a few weeks of use?

The overall resume of these first few weeks using Windows Phone 7 is that the update is urgently needed. This version of Windows Phone fall short on so many expectations. These are often quite little things, but sometimes also major issues. It makes you think if the engineers/developers have ever tested their product in a real life situation. Probably not.

Here are some of these issues:

- After making a phone call, any respectable phone shows the call duration. Not so Windows Phone 7. No display about the length of the call, neither in the call history.
- When a text message is received, many phones show a button to make a call to this number. Not so Windows Phone 7. The only option it to reply. No "call this number", no "store to contacts". This is absolutely inadequate. One clicks onto the sender, then one can make a call or store the number in the address book.
- the phone does only display battery status and signal strength on the start screen when switching on the phone. Afterwards only the clock is displayed in the top right corner. There would be space for a heading info line, but it is just plain empty. Would be very useful to have this info, especially when doing longer online sessions.
- the tap on the display sometimes does not work, especially when it is on a text link with small fonts. One almost needs to use a stylus to click the link then, as it would not react to the pressure of a finger. Has probably a technical reason: because the overall "click strength" is taken from the absolute number of active pixels being pressed; and since a small text has only few active pixels, this number is small. Would be better to have a relative measure. But this is just a speculation...
- the finger sliding is often interpreted as a side swipe instead of a vertical swipe, and then the page changes. This has been reported by many other people in a variety of apps. It could have several reasons: a driver problem of the display, a bug in the gesture API of Windows Phone 7, or an incorrect use of this API for detecting swipe direction by the app developers.
- Why is the battery strength only shown graphically and not as a numeric percentage?
- The Marketplace search returns too many wrong things. When I search for an app by a name, for example "Twitter" in the apps category, a lot of songs and albums also appear with the name "Twitter" in their name... this should be filtered.
- Many apps offered for Windows Phone 7 are inferior to their counterparts on other smart phones. This can have several reasons: Windows Phone 7 is new, so many apps are just in their first version, with updates (hopefully) to come. Or the Windows Phone 7 market is so small (3%?) compared to iPhone or Android, that the developers neglect it and put not much effort in. There are a few notable exceptions though.
- There is no synchronising of data/files with such files on a PC. When connecting the phone by cable to a computer, there is not much that can be done. I was hoping that I could drag some files over, or have some files automatically synced as it was great on the old Windows Mobile OS where Office files (for Excel, Word) could be automatically be stored, edited, and synchronised on both devices. This capability has now been lost and can only be sort of emulated via a much more complicated method through cloud computing. The Zune software synchronises music and video, but that I use almost never.
- No copy-and-paste. This makes it very difficult to edit Excel files, modify entries in the contacts list, etc. I cannot believe why it is so difficult to implement this feature? Also the first iPhone generation did not have this...
- The title headings of pages in apps use a very stylish, elegant, large font, but these titles stretch over several pages, therefore cannot be read fully on one page. This is especially annoying when the app only has one page, because the rest of the heading is just cut off. Here a bit more "function over form" would have been better.

There is something positive to be said about Windows Phone 7: it looks quite nice. The big tiles are more attractive than the icons/buttons of other phones, easier to touch. The also can show live content, although most apps still stick with a static image.

There is good potential: if all these little bugs/annoyances that I mentioned above are being fixed, and if there would be more options for users to create additional pages instead of just having one title page and one app page, then this may actually take off. Installing and updating apps works as smooth as with the iPhone.

So, Microsoft engineers, keep working and please produce an update soon (and without "bricking" it...) !

SCORM in XSTREAM

The first semester in this academic year has been concluded in January. My major work had been in the the Mobile Wireless Comms (MWC) MSc module: I have experimented with SCORM-compliant Sharable Content Objects (SCO), integrated in our Learning Management System (LMS) XSTREAM and accessible remotely through a web interface. SCORM enables such SCOs to provide feedback about the learning progress of the student, by having small assignments in the SCO which automatically are being fed back into the LMS. In principle this works fine, but there are a few issues:
- the connection between the SCO and the LMS times out, and then some error messages appear at the user's end. This is quite annoying, and it also may interrupt the data flow: sometimes the results from the SCORM quizzes were not reported back correctly to the LMS.
- new versions of an existing SCO will create a new column in XSTREAM gradebook. This makes the handling of the overall marking quite cumbersome, as all different versions of the SCO grades will have to be considered.
- in principle it is possible to have several questions/quizzes within one SCO. But this proves somewhat more prone to failures in reporting back the quiz results, which leads to missing and wrong grade entries on XSTREAM.

Overall, the concept of having these interactive learning objects in the form of SCOs was quite popular with students: they were engaging very well, and the assignments were designed in such a way that students could try out examples. At the core was here some additional JavaScript code, which allowed these SCOs to give each student a different set of problems to solve: the basic formulas and equations were the same, but the individual numbers and parameters were different for each student. This allowed the student to repeatedly try a particular problem, everytime with a different set of numbers.

The downside of using this SCORM-based approach is that it is very time-consuming for the teacher: the preparation of these SCORM-compatible SCOs takes longer than the traditional lecture/tutorial preparations, and fixing the technical issues regarding the incorrect grade feedback added an additional hassle. As a consequence, I am now preparing a set of "good practise" recommendations on how to best use SCORM in this context of XSTREAM.

Also, I will present this work at the CAL 2011 conference in Manchester, April 13-15.

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.

Final Departure from India

A short breakfast in the hotel at 7am, then leaving with the free Shuttle to the nearby airport. Have to show the passport at many occasions before we can board the plane. Everything is on time and runs smooth.

There are rain clouds over Dubai, and there is a little drizzle on the ground. In the terminal I cannot resist going to McDonalds and ordering a juicy burger - the first meat after 13 days. I guess I am not made for vegetarian life...

The connecting flight is on time. The route goes actually over Iraq, and when we are over Baghdad, I just am eating lunch, listening to Gustav Mahler's 9th Symphony through the fabulous Emirates entertainment system. A somehow surreal combination...

I do not feel very well, the throat hurts, and I feel feverish and warm. Take two more Lemsip cups and try to rest.

Arrival in Manchester without problems. Luggage is there, and then our group parts: Gina and Deborah have a taxi waiting, and Brian and myself take a train to Leeds.

13th Day in India - Ahmadabad

Breakfast at 6am, the taxi arrives shortly after 7am. Sunil has carefully noted down the directions to our hotel in Ahmadabad - Comfort Inn Sunset, and we arrive safely at the hotel around 8:45. First we head to the Calico Textile Museum, which Brian was keen to see. Very large selection of fabrics, and a tour explaining the complicated manufacturing techniques which requires exclusively hand craft work. The admission procedure is a bit strange: since we do not have a reservation, we have to wait in a queue - only 10 people without reservation are allowed to visit the museum, and this can only be done 10:00am - 11:00am. We have to hand over our mobile phones and cameras to the officer at the entrance. The tour takes until shortly after 12:00. No pictures can be taken, and they have run out of postcards to sell... so the world here will not know much more about this marvelous place.

Following a suggestion by our friends we visit the restaurant Saffron. Have to take 2 rikshahs, as 4 people are not allowed in one. Great food. Then we hire another two rikshahs to drive into the old town. Nobody whom we ask seems to understand the term "Old Town". That was the same time during our last visit 2 years ago; for some reason it appears not to be worth anything to the locals. But to us it is: a wild mix of rikshahs, hidden architectural heritage gems, and colourful bazaar atmosphere. But one thing is quite negative: the pollution. Even in the smallest street there are auro rikshahs and motorcycles competing with streams of pedestrians. Miraculously no collission occurs, but the air is very heavy of exhaust smoke.


At 15:45 we hire another auto rikshah to drive us back to the hotel. This time the rule of no 4 people in a rikshah does not apply... but Deborah has to move into the luggage compartment of the vehicle. At 16:15 we are back in the hotel and take a nap.

I doze off on the bed, but when I awake I am shivering: the AC had been onto max, and it is now freezing cold. The shower is just lukewarm and does not help, so I keep shivering, and I feel my temperature rising. So finally my immune system had given in to all these threats in the air, and I got a throat infection. I am not hungry and decide to skip supper, having an early sleep. Fortunately I have some lemsip with me, which I prepare on the tea cooker.

12th Day in India: Feedback Session and Good-Bye

On Wednesday morning we had a feedback session at 10am at the HP Patel Institute where we discussed the project and our stay. The resume was overall very positive, and we decided on a few action for the future.

Afterwards we went with a rikshah to Anand, meeting Chhaya and Mitali for some more gift shopping. We got hungry, and I could not resist trying something extravagant: a cheesburger with fries and Pepsi. The cheeseburger was indeed unusual: instead of cheese inside, the cheese was grated above the burger. The veggie part inside the burger was not a patty, but were actual vegetables: cucumbers, tomatoes, and a kind of green pesto. Very unusual, but quite good.

Then I use the last few hours in which I have access to the USB 3G stick for uploading a few more pictures. Tomorrow we will be in Ahmadabad, where possibly I might have another few hours of internet access.

11th Day in India: A Book in 8 Minutes

The workshop was supposed to begin at 11:00. However, only a few students were present at that time; more started to trickle in, as they were commuting and came back from the holidays. It reminded me of my lectures that I gave this semester at LeedsMet each Thursday morning - many students usually also started then to trickle in a bit late. In this area there is definitely some room for improvement on the students' attitude... although I must say that our taxi pick-ups and all the travel arrangements during our stay had been spot-on in time.

When finally the last students come to the lecture lab around 11:20, Brian begins the lecture. The first part is about the students writing in Gujarati language on paper a short paragraph about "My Place is Gujarat", which would be intended to be a textbook for Gujarati children. Each of them has to do this within 8 Minutes, and then they read aloud and translate this paragraph into English.

Then comes my bit: Each of the students should now put down their story/paragraph online, to share it with the world. I show them how to use the page I have set up and how to get pictures from
my Flickr archive, then the start typing. In the end we have collected 23 pages, which automatically were collected on the web page: www.theriversmovement.org.uk/bi8m/ViewBook.php.

In the evening we have invited all our friends to the restaurant "Flavours", and we have a great farewell dinner.

Tenth Day In India: Writing a Web App

On Tuesday we will give lectures at the HM Patel Institute, and these need some preparation. Gina and Deborah will give lectures about education, Brian and I will give a workshop on writing a "Book in 8 Minutes", involving collaborative technology. For this I have to write some software, enabling the joint authoring. So on Monday I devote the whole day to this, sitting outside near the entrance of the guest house and hacking away on my computer. The goal is that the students should be able to write a very short story related to the topic "My Place is Gujarat", amended by a photograph from my online collection. We did not want them to use other pictures because of possible copyright issues, therefore we focussed on my collection only. There was now one technical problem to solve: a few years ago, one could directly right-click any picture on Flickr and get the true URL. This has changed: right-click on a picture does not provide means for saving it or getting its true URL; for this one needs to use the Flickr API. So I had a quick look at it - straightforward, one first needs to get an API key, then call a specific function in the FLickr API to get all the info about the picture in an XML response, then parse this to build the actual URL. I did not want to write a parser for XML, so I was looking for something that would make this job easier, and I found phpflickr: this provides the tools for getting info of any Flick picture, just by passing the picture ID to it. Then there is another function for building the URL. So I began writing a little PHP script, using that phpflickr library: to the script the picture ID would be passed, then the image URL for a medium-sized image would be returned. This script in turn would be called from JavaScript on the main page, using AJAX. What the students then had to do when they would want to embed a picture in their page: they would copy the URL of the picture page into a field, click on a button, and the page would receive the unique image URL from where it could be passed on to a web form for storage in a database. All I had to do now was to write a parser to get the image ID from the Flickr image page URL.

This worked fine: the result is here: www.theriversmovement.org.uk/bi8m/. I did some more minor edits later in the night to have this ready for Tuesday.

At 17:00 we went to Asha Makheesha's C Z Patel College of Business, where an official awards ceremony took place. Gina and Deborah had gon there already earlier, Brian and I wanted to join just before the event would begin. I did not know where the college was, and Brian had missed one turn... so we were a bit lost, when suddenly we met a friend from the HM Patel Institute who recognised us. She engaged another motor cycle rider who was around, and then each of us was riding on the back of a motorcycle heading to the nearby College of Business. The floors on the halls were decorated with graphics made out of coloured powder or sand. The main event venue was outside on a roof terasse, under a large fabric tent roof. The honourable dignitaries were sitting on a podium, waiting for their time to speak. Then the official event started, Asha moderating the proceedings. Brian started to cough, probably a consequence of rushing to this event earlier, and also because of the dust and pollution in the streets. He left the proceedings and went back to the guest house for a brief rest. When he came back 2 1/2 hours later he just came in time for the closing of the official events, after all speeches and prize awards to the students.

Since Brian did not feel very well, we decided to not attend the following dinner and instead head back to the guest house, where I could finish my software for the workshop on Tuesday.

Ninth Day in India: back to Vallabh Vidyanagar

At 5:30 one of the guest house clerks knocks at the door, brings tea for breakfast. At 6:00am we assemble in the lobby and get into the car, to drive through the morning darkness towards a remote temple site on a hill for watching the sunrise. We are there shortly before 7am, driving up a very steep road (probably 30% slope). as we reach the top, a very surprising site: a wall straight ahead, and behind it we see - boats! We think this is a Fata Morgana, boats on the top of a hill. But there is indeed a small reservoid / lake on which a few boats are floating. As we get out of the car, a cold wind is greeting us. We climb up the wooden covered structure from where we can see the plain below slowly becoming visible through the darkness. I head back into the car for a while to warm up. Then, as the orange disk of the sun appears at the horizon, we all assemble on top of that wooden observation point and take pictures.

Afterwards we are heading back to Vallabh Vidyanagar towards West. Passing through a few lively towns. Small rikshahs and trucks are loaded with people: usually there are at least about 20 people per small vehicle: sitting on the roof, hanging from the back, squeezing themselves inside. On the way we see a road accident that must have happened just recently: a white car is damaged at the front, while a truck is lying in a ditch at the side of the road, the driver's cabin smashed by a tree.

We arrive safely back at the Vallabh Vidyanagar guest house and have a rest. I can upload a few pictures, then we head out again for dinner: at 18:30 Sunil picks us up in his car, and we drive first to Kiran Chauhan and his wife Sarika for a tea, where also members of his family are present. Then we all together move to Sunil's house where his wife Viraj has been busy the whole Sunday to prepare a meal for us: a mix of traditional Indian cuisine with Western and Mexican components. We enjoy the company of the family and friends: Surendra Gohil and Juhika are there, as well as Kiran Chauhan and Sarika.

Back at the guest house around 22:00 we quickly fall asleep after a busy weekend.

Eight Day in India: Champaner

We get up at 6am, have breakfast at 6:30, then our taxi arrives at 7am. Dr Piyush Joshi and Dr Falguni Bharateeya accompany us, and all four of us are in the travel group. We head off in the direction of south-east, to the heritage site of Champaner. Before we visit this archaeological site with its mosques and stone carvings, we first drive into a wild rural area and visit a temple that is hidden away. Photography is forbidden there, which irks me a bit - well, then the world will not know about this fabulous temple site with its strange red idol god (which looks a lot like a cartoon character).

We then visit Champaner: a large mosque, where I also meet a group of people from Switzerland (easily recognisable by their unique accent) who are on a family visit in Gujarat. There is another mosque, and there is a large fortress. Within the fortress walls there are people living in a village.

We head up the nearby mountain and visit a site with seven arches, from where we enjoy a great view over the plain down there with the Champaner site. Driving further up we end up in a queue for entering a parking lot. Cars are parked here for going further with a cable car to another temple site. It is quite difficult to enter and exit, and the exiting cars block the entering cars. Finally we get a spot, and then go to the restaurant to have a meal.

Afterwards we have the privilege to see a panther who has recently (4 weeks ago) been captured from the wild. It has killed 4 people, and so they had to put it into a cage. It is not a black panther but a yellow one with black dots. In my opinion this would count as a leopard, but then I have been told that leopards are larger. When we approach the cage, the panther ferociously bites into the metal bars of the window, and she hisses loudly and angrily. The strategy to deal with this panther is to feed her very little so that she gets weaker, and then would not be a danger to people. In my opinion this is completely wrong: a hungry panther is so much more dangerous than a well fed one. There are enough cows running around which are of no use to anyone (because nobody here eats meat anyway), and they could feed this panther with some of those cows to make her really fat and lethargic. Then the panther would also be more happy. But my suggestion seems not to be welcomed...

We drive further, and after a few wrong turns and detours we reach the town of Lunavada, where we visit a friend of Piyush and Falguni who is a doctor. We have a tea, and he prescribes something to Brian against his chest cough. It is getting late already, and the sun has set as we take off for the final travel segment to the guesthouse which is located near a dam.

Very simple accommodations... our ladies share a room: the VIP Suite #3, and Brian and myself share room #7. Both rooms differ slightly in their amenities and their funishing.

We go to sleep early as we will have another early start tomorrow.