Mountains

by Aaron
Mountains

I took this with the camera on the phone I got at PDC and I'm pretty impressed with the result. It looks pretty dramatic... though, the subject helps a lot in that respect ;)

This is one of the newer photos on my photostream.

Windows Phone 7: Initial Impressions

by Aaron

I was at PDC in Redmond last week and the cool swag was an LG E900 Windows Phone 7 phone. I dropped in my SIM Card and have been using it as my primary phone for the last couple of days. What follows are my initial impressions.

The Good

  • The hardware is really responsive. This may be because I'm comparing it to a year+ old myTouch running Android 1.6, but the phone seems really, really fast.
  • The Facebook app is pretty awesome. How you feel about this depends on where you fall on the sliding scale of idealism versus cynicism with regards to Facebook.
  • There are actually games available (Yay XNA, I guess).
  • The design of the home screen is really nice.

The Bad

  • When the phone runs low on power, it just shuts off. No warning, one minute you're playing Bejeweled, the next you're staring at a black screen. Trying to turn it on again, results in an LG logo followed by a black screen. I would have thought that the: "Your phone is about to run out of power. You should plug it in now." warnings would be standard by now.
  • The mail client. Other people like it, but I don't. To be fair, that's because GMail has ruined me for all other mail clients forever. The reality is that if it showed me conversations instead of messages and had an archive button instead of a delete button I'd probably love it.
  • The device is a little awkward to hold. The search/back keys occupy the entire bottom bezel and I find myself accidentally pressing them while typing with disastrous results (... as disastrous as interrupting any Facebook interaction can be, that is). The power/lock switch is on the top of the phone making it difficult to lock/unlock the phone one handed.
  • Bing Maps < Google Maps.

The Ugly

  • The browser. It's some hybrid of IE7 and IE, but I gues you can't just jam WebKit on there if you're on Microsoft team.
  • The name: I've got a Windows 7 Phone 7 phone. Come on!1

Verdict

I need to update my myTouch and get something fast and sexy that runs Froyo ;)

More seriously, since checking my email on the subway into work and using Google Maps to find my way around the city are why I have a phone, it's probably not going to be displacing my Android in the immediate future (I'll still play Bejeweled on it though).

[1]Quick, which seven is the one that's not supposed to be there? It's easy to pick on names, but it's always good to remember that nobody could say Wii with a straight face for months, but Nintendo ignored them all while sitting atop the largest pile of money every assembled in all of human history.