Windows Phone 7

The HTC Trophy

As an advocate of Microsoft technology i have to say that professionally the windows phone 7 is a great idea, and they have done many things to really distinguish it from its precessors – but the real question is, is it enough?

Yesterday i got my hands on a handset for the first time and im going to be playing with it fairly extensively over the next month or two and really putting it through its paces. The handset i have is the HTC trophy, which is a mid range phone, though in the case of WP7 i am told that performance doesnt vary much between the different handsets out there becuase microsoft has such strict requirements for hardware – and it shows – it is responsive, with fluid scrolling.

First problem i had was living in sweden – one of the fist things you have to do when you get the phone is register a live id – and mine is bound to sweden – this means that i cannot use the marketplace, so even free updates to my phone couldn’t be installed. It took about 5 minutes to get around that problem – by adding my old UK live id, and then adding my existing one as a secondary account – of course it means every time i send a mail i have to chose which account to send from which is only a minor annoyance. I dont have Zune, or access to any of those services, and i am a touch dissapointed at the lack of information out there – the message the marketplace isnt available in your region is unfriendly – and online there are messages going all the way back to 2010 from people asking when the marketplace will appear in different places. Microsoft has been very quiet about this which i think is a bad move. If i had brought the phone as a normal “geek free” person i would be really annoyed right now.

Looking through the networking options i couldnt find any options for connecting to cisco vpn which is a bit dissapointing – that limits the usefulness of the phone within my current organisation without resorting to some fairly dubious network routing. Im only just starting to look at the sharepoint hub, which so far looks good – although i dont know if its enough at the moment to justify the handset as a business expense – i can get the same functionality at apple (with native VPN support).

The graphical design is sometimes a messy but all in all i think its a fairly likeable phone. Theres not a huge range of apps on the marketplace yet but that will come with time. The handset i have is solid, and i do like the tiles and general navigation – it feels a little like a beta phone at the moment, so im not really sure if i would recommend it just yet. Ive not yet plugged it into exchange, or really pushed it yet though, these are just first impressions. on the plus side its really forcing me to tidy up my contacts in windows life and facebook – the integration there seems good so far.