Monday, September 26, 2011

My first disappointment in Windows Phone 7

I was relatively late to the Windows Phone 7 game...
I've been using the portable versions of Windows since Windows CE 1.0 (I had a Casio Cassiopeia A-10) up to and including Windows Mobile 6.0. I got over it all.

I've had a tonne of iPhones, and have been insanely comfortable with them. They did EVERYTHING I wanted to... (or so I'd pretend).
I do love open source, so I picked myself up a Nexus S to explore the apparent bliss that is Android, but it just didn't feel right to me (yet).

So pretty much because my brother in law had this massive beautiful screen on the HD7, and a mate (you Phil) had been talking it up, I eBay'd myself a HTC HD7.
I got it post NoDo (yay, cut & paste) and pretty much jumped straight on to the Mango (I call it Mangoat) Beta. Everything has been pretty freaking awesome with it... its pretty, its well organised.

BUT

Ahhh, calendar support for invitations. Balls.
Who doesn't support ICS files natively on the device? :-(
Turns out lots of people.
I get people to send invitations to my Gmail now instead of my MobileMe, but nothing works nicely together. I want my phone to see the ICS and magically work it out for me.
I'm not asking for too much.

So I figure, "hey, screw it, I know C#... I will fix this gaping hole in calendar support by making an app that can load ICS files and populate a new appointment dialog for me. That's close enough"

It wasn't until I started reading through API documentation and reading through StackOverflow questions similar to the ones I had asked that I realised that Microsoft didn't get around to exposing the API's for writing to the calendar or calendar dialogs.

To quote from the Whats new for 7.1 RC on MSDN:
"The Windows Phone SDK 7.1 RC now gives you read-only access to the user’s contacts and calendar data. You can now differentiate your applications by querying and interacting with the user’s data in ways such as letting the user choose from a list of their contacts and sending them emails, searching for contacts’ birthdays, and others."

Makes me sad... I'll still have to keep hacking through event invitations through dodgy web interfaces until then.

Ok two more things I hate. IE9 mobile is terrible (or maybe just that it identifies itself as IE is bad, NO one makes their websites look nice for it. e.g. All the Google stuff doesnt work half as nicely as it should)

And BING... dont get me started on how terrible Bing is.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/09/22/apples_iphone_has_89_retention_rate_next_nearest_hardware_is_htc_at_39.html


Back to iPhone Fuzzy

8->

Anonymous said...

ice work on finally putting a new post up. i'm waiting with baited breath for your Pre 3 review...

Fuzz said...

I still have my iPhone... I just found Objective-C terrible.

Mind you, I dont exactly love Silverlight / XAML. I really have to give them more of a try

But the WP7 phone is just a delight to use, its really quite beautiful

As much as I hate to say it!

Fuzz said...

I should point out that if I had my own Exchange server, everything would be beautiful.

but in the real world people send invitations to me from Gmail, MobileMe, and Exchange. ICS is the only middle ground

Brie said...

I'm sticking with iPhone 'cause I'm addicted to Instagram :D And I couldn't be bothered learning to use a new phone anyway. Apple must love lazy suckers like me!