WP7 on HTC HD7

It already seems like a week, but it has been only a day that I've been in possession of my new phone. I really like this device, as much as I hoped I would and I am even a bit surprised at how much I enjoy it.

I'm sure you've read the various online reviews if you had any interest in WP7 and I won't go into too much detail but I will offer my experience with the phone as compared to other review[er]s.

I chose this particular model because of the size of the screen. It is large at 4.3 inches diagonal. It's a[n] SLED screen, older technology and I feared it would appear dim and lack color but I have been pleased with how bright it is and the colors on screen. Not nearly as bad as some reviewers led me to believe. The blues are blue, the reds are red and streamed video looks great. The viewing angle is good as well, despite what you might have read elsewhere.

As you can imagine, the phone itself is large and while I have no problem handling it, someone with a smaller hand might.

I'm not a big photographer but a 5 mega-pixel camera was nice to have as well. The camera does have some issues which might be resolved in a future firmware update (it's not an operating system issue, but hardware). As many reviews mention, it washes out photos with its dual flash, can be difficult to focus, etc.

My phone came with the basics. A USB wall charger, a separate USB chord and ear buds. I also bought a screen protector pack, but have not yet used any of them. The ear buds were broken (sound only came from one side).

So much for the basic hardware.

Windows Phone 7, the new MS phone operating system, is quite nice to work with. MS rushed it out the door to have phones ready by Christmas and some aspects of the OS are missing, but MS promised them in a future (January?, February?) update.

All screens work on the basic premise that you are looking through a horizontally scrolling portal at a larger page. Once you reach a portion of an application you want, you can then scroll vertically as well. Not ALL apps available to the phone work this way, but the better ones do follow this basic design principle (as laid out by Microsoft). At first you might think that is a lot of scrolling and hunting but as you scroll the pages jump a page at a time (smoothly) and the swiping motion is natural and not uncomfortable. The OS responds very well to the touch and the amount of pressure or swiping to get reactions feels "just right."

The front page is sort of like an application unto itself. It contains your "favorite" applications and one quick swipe to the left (or tap the arrow icon) brings the FULL list of applications to bear. Any application that supports it will have useful information display on the favorites screen. These are called "live tiles." Again, the application you place there has to support live tile updates to provide information, but many of the ones you would want to do that, do (mail, zune, people, photographs, messaging, etc.)

One complaint I've heard and have already dismissed is the status bar at the top. It hides. In fact you only see it if you swipe down from the top or if the phone needs to get your attention (for example of the battery is very low). I like this, I don't need to see that information all of the time... but some people might.

So far I've already spent far too much money on applications. They range in price from FREE, to $0.99 to $14.99 with most apps costing $1.99 or $2.99. The "Marketplace" (Microsoft's "App Store") has a lot of useful applications in it, but is still very sparse compared to what's available for the iPhone. For example, I really wanted "Star Walk" but it just is not available. I am hoping the developer will port it to WP7.

So what are the apps I have and how are they?

The apps that come WITH WP7 are quite useful. MS Office, Mail, IE, etc. The usual suspects, plus the People and Photo hubs, stuff like that. Hubs, btw, group similar data in one place. For example, my people hub has my Windows Live and Facebook data all in one place, including access to photos, threads of discussion, etc. The Pictures hub is similar but just focuses on photographs. Beyond that I also downloaded 3 Bibles, a news app, 2 weather apps (with live tile updating on the home screen), a couple of games (frogger, need for speed), some other weird apps like "Congress" which tracks the goins on of your own senators and reps and provides you multiple ways to communicate with them, silly apps like "days to christmas", the official Facebook app, Twitter app, last.fm, maps, a level, unit translators, picasa, a piano, a periodic table, remember the milk, youtube, etc. Oh, and it came with Netflix as well, and some other video and radio apps (it has a built-in FM reciever, did I mention that?)

Are the apps any good? Mail works very well, I have my Windows Live and GMail accounts in it, and so far it has been flawless. IE is surprisingly fast and renders fairly well, I've noticed some bad handling of the latest CSS 2.0 specs, but not bad over all, and the zooming is super-smooth. Netflix works well, but you are best off using WiFi with it, not 3G (same goes for the other video streaming apps). Zune is fantastic. I absolutely love it. It could not import all of my iTunes songs, only the non-DRM ones, but I purchased a zune pass to see how that goes. That gets you free music access for a month at a time and allows you to keep 11 songs per month as tho' you had purchased them outright. You can also simply purchase songs (and video, like TV shows) outright as well if you want, and the Zune store is actually pretty darn cheap.

The Bible apps I got, one was free, two cost money. One that cost money added abilities to tag scripture with your own notes and stuff like that, but otherwise they all had pretty intuitive interfaces, one required a web connection to download scripture.

I have the Weather Channel and Weather Bug apps. I use Weather Bug as it is less buggy and provides TONS of data including maps and local webcam images.

Maps simply locates you and slaps a map under you... nothing too spectacular there, but I believe it uses Bing maps which is pretty good.

The calendar app is simple, not much to talk about. Google calendar integrates with it.

The "Need for Speed" game is fun and uses the phone's motion sensors to turn your phone into a steering wheel with specific, but simple touch motions for brakes, turbo speeds, etc. Frogger is a pain as it always was, in my opinion. It's nearly impossible to get a frog into the left-most slot. Drives me nuts.

MS Office is nice, allowing you to read and write all sorts of MS documents (doc, excel, one-note, etc.) but I prefer using remember the milk or calendar for tasks. I also downloaded Adobe PDF, already came in handy when someone sent me a PDF doc in mail.

I also like AP Mobile (news feed)... it is nicely laid out (I think) and easy to navigate and contains a ton of data.

I grabbed EBook Reader... but haven't used it yet. I did do a search and found "Ethan Frome" on it. But I probably won't read that story.

The most expensive app I purchased was Geocaching... the official app for geocaching.com. I love how slick it is!

The Pocket Piano is pretty cool too. Anabelle likes it. Slacker radio is nice, but Zune has similar features so it seems redundant.

Twitter is twitter and the Facebook app is a complete Facebook app on the phone. Perhaps a little TOO much, and redundant as Facebook support is built into the People hub. Twitter will be built into it in the first update as well, so I hear.

YouTube is... YouTube. It's the mobile version (the interface) and nothing to write home about, but it works. By the way, I already added Facebook and other links to my Windows Live account so some of the information I am getting is duplicated and I need to decide how to handle that, perhaps remove it from Windows Live, not sure. I'll see how much it bothers me over time.

And that is it for now. All in all my first day with WP7 running on my HTC HD7 has been a lot of fun. I would heartily recommend this phone and operating system to anyone looking for a new smart phone. It's really good, and it will only be getting better.

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.

Panic and relief

I was reading an article about a game (Bioshock Infinite) when I noticed my arm... it had white hairs in it. I freaked out and ran to Sandi "Oh no! My arm hairs are turning white!" She pitied me but then straightened me out: Those aren't your hairs. Those are Cookie's hairs.

Whew! I had been playing with my dog and her hairs were all mixed in with mine.

Ha ha. The joke is on me.

So a month ago I started having problems with my [old] PC. It was overheating, specifically the graphics card. The NVidia 470 had performed flawlessly up to that point and all of a sudden, at IDLE it was running at 79 C.

I was baffled, I tried cleaning it out; I took it apart and reseated the heat sink (scraped off the old paste and applied arctic silver), etc. Nothing worked. When I played games it got up to 100 C!!

So I decided, alright, I'll install MSI Afterburner and apply a custom fan plan (basically the thing was whistling along at about 60% to 70% to keep the temps at a reasonable value). This has been a great machine and has served me well, so I wiped it clean and reinstalled Windows 7 planning to give it to my son... and wouldn't you know it: The card was idling at 41 C. It had to be some kind of driver issue? I don't know. But now the machine is running great. I am updating Windows... perhaps if it starts overheating again I can roll back the updates to determine what caused the problem.

Anyway, Isaac is getting a smoking machine. Here are the relevant specs:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550
8 GB RAM @ 1066
NVidia 470

I think Anabelle will get the Aluminum iMac and I'll maybe sell her G5 iMac on Craigslist or something.

Apple support gets worse by the year.

For some reason, iTunes things the address I am entering for my credit card is not valid.

It hasn't changed for 5 years. My credit card information (number, etc.) has not changed for as long.

So I call Apple only to find out they NO LONGER OFFER PHONE SUPPORT FOR ACCOUNT ISSUES.

This is all very disappointing. Anyway, I submitted my email to them via the provided form and hope to hear back from them within the stated 48 hours.

Can't we all just get along?

I've been in a sort of on-going conversation in (of all places) a tech forum about the disrespect paid to Americans (or anyone).

It started with a post about the FM radio chip issue (if you are not aware, a couple organizations are lobbying to have legislation passed to have FM chips put in cell phones - sort of). The editor (one of a few, and a European one) tends toward the dramatic and in this case had to slam "Americans" for being panic-prone. But not in such kind words.

I protested in response and it began like this:

Why do non-Americans find it necessary to comment (and not generally favorably) on purely American issues? (Surely you don't believe this issue will somehow affect Europe?)

Yeah I know, our government has its nose in everyone's business (which I don't agree with and vote against accordingly during elections). So that makes it O.K. to make glib comments about Americans in general?

(I vote Libertarian, btw, and fully buy into Teddy Roosevelt's "walk softly and carry a big stick" idea. Our focus needs to be internal, not external).

The responses I got back (mostly from people from the Netherlands for some reason) were along the lines of "because Americans are always commenting unfavorably about Europeans!"

Really? There have been no (zero) posts by the American editors with inserted slander against any European country or person. None. Yet this is not the first time such posts have come from the European sector. I pointed this out. The response was "that's because your media never reports on European affairs and ours (European media) is constantly shoving American issues in our faces and paint Americans as "ignorant hicks."

Lovely. Really. So that means you should carry that tradition on by barraging Americans with insults at every opportunity?

I then proceeded to point out that the PEOPLE here are no different from the PEOPLE there. Sure there are some cultural differences but we all get up, brush our teeth, kiss our kids, go to work, come home and eat, hang with our families then go to bed. In other words we are all human, no one better than the next.

What I don't get is where these people are coming from. A new generation in Europe? I worked with Europeans (specifically Irish, French and German) for several years while at DEC. They were wonderful (the people I worked with). One even invited us to stay at his house if we ever planned on vacationing in France. So what is changing? Why the hate? Why do they despise a group of people... can they not separate our gov't from us? I don't know. I guess I don't really care except that it causes me to lose respect for THEM if they cannot see through all the rhetoric in the news and from politicians and roll individuals up into their opinions based on such tripe.