Windows 7 Mobile – The Love / Hate Relationship
Image via Wikipedia
Since this is a post about Windows 7 Mobile devices I thought it would be fitting to actually try and write it on my device, but sadly that idea failed at around 2am this morning after writing most of this post on a touch screen – the problem will be stated later on in this post.
The love relationship I have with Windows mobile devices spans back to the Windows PDA’s (running Windows CE) and from there I went on to own 5 different Windows mobile (Cell to you Americans out there) phones – all of which made by HTC (the best mobile device manufacturer in my opinion), but never have I felt such exclusivity when owning a mobile than I do with my Windows 7 mobile – why? Because everyone has iPhones or Android powered devices.
The first time I realised just how exclusive the Win 7 Mobile actually is was when I was at PubCon (Internet Marketing conference) in Vegas where in the closing session Mr Google (Matt Cutts) took the stage and started asking the 3000+ crowd what mobile phone they had – first up was the iPhone which had around 65% of the crowd raising their hand, followed by Android which received the around 45.03% and then Windows 7 got the shout and I proudly put my had up and looked around – I was the only one, that’s 1 in 3000 that actually owns these devices.
There are many reasons why I love this phone so much, but at the same time there are things that leave me asking questions of the dev team over at Microsoft so let’s dive in and find out why I like the phone so much that I want to throw it at a wall every day.
The Good Stuff
- Great UI design
- Microsoft Office pre-installed – life saver
- Outlook pre-installed with the ability to have separate apps for each email account
- Zune Player pre-installed – great media player
- High quality HD Camera
- You don’t get told your holding it wrong when trying to get a signal
- Xbox Live gaming platform – genius move!
- Bing maps fused with GPS – it’s so accurate that I don’t need specialised GPS software now
- Exclusivity (1 in 3000)
- Standardised design for all apps – no more trying to work out how an app works
- I.E Mobile – it actually works!
- Its built around the Cloud – stuff backs up to Windows SkyDrive automatically
- Calendar auto syncs with Exchange – keeps me on track
- No system lag – it’s so responsive at all times
The Bad Stuff
- Screen lock disables half the screen since the last OS update (can be annoying trying to unlock the phone)
- When writing this blog post via my phone the app didn’t auto save and I hit the Bing search button by accident which led to me losing the first draft of this post
- The SD card cannot be upgraded and is located within the guts of the phone
- Lack of apps when compared to other platforms
- It chews data and can lead to huge phone bills – using around 300Mb per month with 2 email accounts auto pushing mail (now got 300Mb free usage on my contract)
- It uses Bing as its primary search engine – meh
- Battery life is a bit random
So if you’re looking for a mobile device that makes you feel, special, confused, entertained, angry, happy and poor look no further than the Windows 7 mobile device.
