[citation][nom]silkman[/nom]M$ should give these phones for free if they want to penetrate the market, not asking for my hard earned cash.I won't go into details about the apps in windows phone marketplace (how many are there, maybe 4?) but I will go into details about what happened to their previous platform, ie windows phone 6.5Let me name a few: Crappy support from the beginning, no full phone backup, little and crappy apps, synchronization is a mess (m$ in their infinite wisdom decided to completely omit outlook "other phone" fields from synchronization, this meant that whoever owned a nokia before and pcsynced it to outlook their numbers wouldn't go into windows mobile device), no x64 updates for win7 and office x64. And to top it off, I got an email from m$ stating that support for windows mobile 6.5 (the previous generation that is, not a platform from 1990) is stopping from april 2012. Nicely done microsoft.The fact that M$ has bing as a default and only search in wp 7.5 makes me think they still have the same practices that will doom the windows phone 7.5 platform worse than its predecessor. Hence my comment at the beginning.Used to own an HTC diamond 2.[/citation]
There are more than 4 WP apps. Bing is an excellent search engine nowadays, although it isn't too great for geography, it is good for pretty much everything else, although I tend to use Google and others anyway. The WP7 smart phones are excellent phones. The apps are a problem and there are a few others, but for multipurpose phones, they do the job very well. Before WP7 (such as 6.5), the Windows phones did suck. However, the WP7 and up phones are far better than their predecessors.
Last I checked, there were over 80K Windows apps.
M$ doesn't need to give these phones away for free, although M$ actually does give many of them away for free. You'd know that if you actually kept up with the news about them. Well, at least with the news from a few months ago or so when they started doing it. Someone's really out of the loop here.
[citation][nom]ss[/nom]i have it now for almost two years (yepp). I find it as a pure phone with occasional app use better than iphone (I never used android) - it's faster to call, contacts synch well.Bing is not as good as Google for search (I do fairly specialized searches) - I got sent to the middle of the city, because Bing couldn't find the street, more than once, more than in one city (once it was bad, I was late to a business meeting- it didn't even say that it didn't find the street, it just took me there).Biggest let-down: watching video doesn't output to bluetooth headphones, making it useless to take to the fitness club - I have to switch between phone during weights lifting and ipad during cardio.Second big let-down: the tiles annoy you after two years, they are just too boring, you can't even choose other colours than the predefined (I've been through all of them).Third big let-down: the hardware of my htc hd7 is not bad, but is still worlds away from the iphone4, sometimes it feels that I paid so much money (about 80% of the price of an iphone4 back then) for not enough quality.Fourth big let-down: zune sucks. it looks great, but doesn't show texts of songs that are long, has quirks updating the library and it's not adequate for large libraries (neither is itunes actually, but it's still better)Fifth big let-down: the bloody search button. i press it more often than not when playing games (leaving the game, no save, etc.), or even when just putting the phone on the table. no more virtual buttons for me, iphone does it right.[/citation]
Bing isn't a GPS. If that's such a problem, then why don't you use Google Maps or Mapquest? Normally, when I have a problem, I solve it or at least work around it instead of being lazy about it and just letting it happen over and over again. Also, there is a Google Search app for WP7, so no, you're not locked into Bing if you don't want to be.
Now I don't have Zune myself, but everyone who I know who has one always says that it's better. In fact, the people who I know who have iPods, but have tried out a Zune even say that the Zune is better. I've only played with some of the newest Zunes so maybe you have a problem with an older one, but I can say that at the least, the newer Zunes don't suck and are actually very good.
Also, I have had several phones with virtual buttons and I rarely ever hit them on accident. Maybe you simply used a WP smartphone that I have never had nor used and it has a problem that I'm not aware of, but I would not say that hitting buttons accidentally are the phone's fault unless they are very poorly placed.
All in all, I prefer my Droid over the WP smartphones, but they are still great phones. Really, the biggest reason for my Droid preference is simply the Android Market and the usually better hardware (although some of the newer WP7 and upcoming WP8 smart phones have some very good hardware, unlike the practically junk that the previous WP smart phones had).
The Bluetooth problem is a valid complaint, but can't you simply use wired headphones? I use them when I work out. However, even something such as the Nokia Lumia 900 (which, with a contract, is only $99 and without is $449, last I checked) does support many Bluetooth wireless headsets and more. I could check some other models, but it probably isn't the only one with Bluetooth support, 4G support, Wireless B/G/N support, an FM radio, and more. It also happens to have a single core Snapdragon at 1.4GHz, so the newer WP smart phones obvious aren't skimping much on performance. Going beyond single core seems fairly worthless unless you are a performance junkie (such as me) who likes to push every device you have to it's limits.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram