Pre-review of WP7 on HTC HD7

While I had been thinking I would wait for the next generation iPad to appear I changed my mind and decided to take the dive into the smart phone pool now.

I've used and absolutely love Sandi's iPhone 4. It's a fantastic little device that I really cannot stoop to calling a "phone." It does just about anything and everything. But I have to be different and since I have become enamoured with Windows 7 I decided to take an alternate path. I purchased my HD7 running Windows Phone 7 OS and am waiting for it to arrive.

Anxious to know if I made the right decision (oh, I read a lot of reviews and opinion pieces on the web) I visited the T-Mobile store in town today to try out an HD7. The phone in stock was dead (battery that is) so he had to remove it from the security lock and plug it into an outlet at the side of the store. After a minute the phone would start and it booted into the familiar (well, at least familiar in the sense that I have seen pictures of it all over the internet) start screen. I grabbed the phone from him and started playing.

The interface was smooth. It flowed nicely and I could navigate it with some confidence (it is pretty basic, fairly intuitive). I didn't get much time with it, but I played with the on-screen keyboard and fired up an application or two and found the whole experience satisfying.

More to come when my phone arrives.

IE 9 (vs Chromium)

With the second release of IE 9 BETA I decided to make it my primary web browser. IE 9 offers good performance, low memory usage, HTML5 compatibility and hardware acceleration.

But how does it really stack up? My previous primary browser was Chromium 9 with hardware acceleration turned on. Chromium is the "beta" version of Chrome (and Chrome in general has been my primary browser for a few years now, since it came out).

IE 9 really is fast, compared to all previous IE versions, and it does actually render very nicely. IE (and Firefox for that matter) does tend to apply antialiasing a little too thickly and sometimes text can appear fuzzy, whereas in Chrome it is always crisp. But other than that it looks great; pages format well, fonts render well, etc.

IE comes with a new Javascript engine that touts it's speed and while it IS quick, I've found a few problems with it that cause me to, on occasion revert to Chrome/Chromium for a moment. I wouldn't make a big deal about it but, truthfully, Chromium feels "finished" in comparison. But that is probably because the Javascript engine in Chromium is actually quite mature.

Other than those few, minor quibbles, IE has performed quite well and does not feel like its ancestors in any way. It works with MOST online applications and it feels pretty snappy. I will continue to use it and perhaps in a release or two review it, maybe compare it to Chrome.