I've been using Windows Phone 7 full-time for about a month now, and I like it a great deal. It's a very livable operating system that's been thoughtfully designed and well put-together. So much so that it's almost a surprise that it came from Microsoft.
But perfect it ain't, and there's a lot Microsoft could do to make using Windows Phone 7 even better.
Expand the hubs
The hub concept is one of the major features of Windows Phone 7. The People hub is a unification of contact data from Facebook, Exchange, Hotmail, and Gmail. The consolidation of contact information and easy access of status updates and a wide range of communication options is fantastic.
Unfortunately, the system is rife with limitations. The hubs depend on interconnecting different sources, but there are interconnections I would like that don't exist. For example, if I am viewing one of my contacts, I would like to have quick access to my latest e-mail and text message correspondence with them. The People hub should serve as a central entry-point into a wide range of tasks, but at the moment, it doesn't: if I'm interested in what I said to someone I have to trawl through several e-mail accounts and text messages by hand.
Give us more data sources
The other way in which the hubs fail to really achieve their full potential is that they're currently extremely limited in terms of the data sources they can use. The main sources of data are Windows Live and Facebook (contact and calendar data can also be pulled from Gmail, Exchange, and so on, but for the full wealth of photos, status, and so on, we're looking at just those two). Now, those two are significant, but they're not the only sources out there.
An obvious omission is Twitter. Many of my contacts have Twitter accounts, and I would like to show their Twitter statuses in the people hub—they're usually more timely and more relevant than their respective Facebook statuses. A similarly obvious gap is Flickr; Flickr is my preferred photo sharing site, and I would like it to be a first-class citizen. But it isn't.
Some of these missing sources can be somewhat worked around. Windows Live can function as an aggregator—albeit only a read-only aggregator—consolidating data from a broad selection of social networking sites. But this relies on people actually linking up their different accounts. Of all my contacts who use Flickr, I think only one has actually joined his Flickr account to Windows Live. The result is that I essentially can't see any Flickr data in the hubs.
Even if my contacts were consistent in keeping their accounts linked to Windows Live, that doesn't help me with sites like Twitter. Microsoft and Twitter have a long-standing dispute over Twitter integration—it used to be aggregated by Windows Live, but it isn't anymore because Twitter isn't happy with the way that Microsoft presented tweets. Ultimately, I'm the one who loses out, because although there's an excellent Twitter application, I don't get the hub integration that I really want.
The one-way nature of Windows Live aggregation would be a stumbling block even were this dispute to be resolved. If someone tweeted to me, I wouldn't be able to tweet back, because Windows Live's aggregation doesn't work like that. It can suck data in from these various sources, but it can't publish it back out.
Using Windows Live as an aggregator isn't, in practice, good enough. I need to be able to directly point at a much wider range of data sources, and I need to be able to publish data to those sources. This is the level of integration the system already has with Facebook, and it's great—it just needs to be much more widely available.
Make the online services a part of an integrated whole
The aesthetic of Windows Phone 7 is nothing if not striking and exciting. The aesthetic of Windows Live is nothing if not banal and uninteresting. The mismatch between the two is stark. It needs fixing.
Microsoft's own phone-specific online services feel very much like an afterthought. There are essentially two predecessors (at least spiritually) to the current iteration: Microsoft MyPhone, for Windows Mobile, and KIN Studio. Both were better, in different ways, than the current Windows Phone 7 online service component.
MyPhone was better simply because it did more; not only did it offer the Find My Phone and contact management features of the current service, it also offered an extensive phone back-up facility. Though most of this might be technically superfluous, as e-mails, photos, and so on are probably published to one or more cloud services, I don't think it's all superfluous. My text messages, for example, aren't found in my e-mail (or anywhere else), so I would like them to be backed up to the cloud—lost phones are, after all, a fact of life.
KIN Studio was a rich, capable, media management Web application, written in Silverlight. It allowed easy sharing and redistribution of photos and videos taken on the KIN phones. Its styling mirrored the look and feel of the phones themselves. KIN Studio made KIN phones true cloud phones, giving easy, uniform access to all your data regardless of whether you were using the phone, your computer, or someone else's.
The current Windows Live services aren't as good-looking, they aren't as capable, and they aren't as conceptually coherent as the KIN was. KIN Studio set the standard, and Windows Phone 7 should meet that same standard.
Seamlessly interoperate with the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem
If I put a Windows Phone 7 handset onto a network with Windows 7 PCs and Xbox 360s, I should be getting rich functionality. I should have DLNA playback from the phone to the other devices. I should be getting remote control, including media browsing, of the other devices. I should be able to play back content from the other devices on the phone.
That's the kind of experience I get between Windows 7 and Xbox 360 already, thanks to Media Center and DLNA support. But at the moment, the phone can't participate (unless you get an LG handset, as LG has built some amount of DLNA support into its devices). This is not good enough. Seamless interoperability is the experience we should be getting. The iPhone and iPod touch make excellent remotes for iTunes—Microsoft should have parity here and then some.
Messaging: not a hub, but it probably ought to be
The SMS/MMS messaging component is pretty barebones at the moment. Elegant, but barebones. SMS handling on phones is kind of a weird beast. Windows Mobile used to treat SMS as if it were basically another kind of e-mail. You had an inbox, an outbox, a sent items folder, you could do all the e-mail type sorting, it was very mail-like.
At the other end of the spectrum, we have webOS, which treats SMS as if it were, essentially, instant messaging. webOS 2.0 treats SMS/MMS, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk and AIM as if they were all basically the same.
I personally prefer the "e-mail" approach, but I know a lot of people prefer the more conversational IM-style approach—I think both have strengths. If the concept is going to be conversational messaging, then I think Microsoft needs to go full-strength for that concept, and do what webOS does: bring together SMS and instant messaging into a singular, unified messaging hub—after all, "messaging" is what the tile is called.
And honestly, I want an e-mail style view. I don't want all my messages grouped according to sender. I want easy access to messages stuck in my outbox, and I want to be able to filter the view to just show me unread messages. I can't do any of this with the current messaging feature.
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