Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Windows Phone 7 in-depth preview

engadget.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 45 posts

Re: Windows Phone 7 in-depth preview

#21

Post by trezor »

pavs wrote: post #3

I don't know... Unless MSFT starts paying phone manufacturers or developing their own hardware, I don't see this catching up as much as Android or IOS. There is nothing intuitive about the OS and honestly very underwhelming, I doubt a consumer who is aware of IOS and Android and have the option of choosing either one of the three will end up with Windows7.

I was at one of the early developer sessions for Windows Phone 7, and even as a professional .NET developer I wasn't convinced I wanted to develop for this phone.

I'm replacing my iPhone (3G) now and it's not for a Win7 phone, it's for an HTC Desire. Even to me, a .NET developer, Android seems like a better platform to develop for.

IMO Microsoft copied pretty much everything Apple did with iPhone,with a subtle taste of too little too late. Ofcourse I would love to be proven wrong, but for the time being I'm going for Android and Java, despite all its shortcomings compared to C#.

Re: Windows Phone 7 in-depth preview

#22

Post by trezor »

pavs wrote: post #9
endtime wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is nothing intuitive about the OS Could you elaborate on this?

Sure. The UI doesn't follow a conventional way how people use UI in any form of mobile devices. There are differences in IOS, Android, Blackberry and PalmOS but those differences aren't huge. If you use either of those devices/OS who should be able to pickup any of the other devices relatively easily. At least this has been my personal experience with Android, IOS and WebOS. What Windows Mobile 7 is doing is a fundam…

The UI doesn't follow a conventional way how people use UI in any form of mobile devices.

With this logic taken to the extreme, we'd all still be using phones with a typical Nokia-interface. I'm very glad we don't.

What Windows Mobile 7 is doing is a fundamentally different way of how you use a mobile device. You could argue that when IOS was first introduced it was also a different way of how people uses mobile phones. But it was different in the sense that it was not confusing, it was very intuitive.

Just noting I read this part and that I agree.

In contrast Widows7 mobile UI is a confusing mess and very bland to be honest. There no "Wow" factor.

Having used a Windows 7 phone I have to disagree. It's very simple to use. It may lack a "Wow" factor but it is sufficiently different to be interesting.

IOS with its new update introduced folder with the goal of giving you more screen real-state so that if you have a lot of apps you don't have to keep sliding and MSFT adds huge block of tiles

The Windows Phone 7 idea is that you shouldn't need as many "apps", but that apps should plug in to "hubs". I like this idea, but getting back to the actual implementation my personal complaint about this is that too few of the hubs on the phone are extensible by applications.

Re: Windows Phone 7 in-depth preview

#23

Post by trezor »

rodh257 wrote: post #15
ttrashh wrote: post #6

I wonder how the apps are going to play out. XNA is used for the games and there are plenty of shops out there creating for xbox. It looks like porting existing XNA games to the phone will be fairly straightforward. I'm expecting Windows Phone 7 to be a big player in handheld gaming because of XNA/Xbox. I'm primarily a .Net/Silverlight dev myself so I'm biased but the core development experience is better than Apple/…

This is where MS can get the upper hand. If they are open enough with their app store, they can get developers there as the developer experience is going to be very good. Its a chicken and egg thing though, most serious developers won't code for it until there is a market. Though they will get a fair few .NET developers who haven't done any Android or Objective-C iPhone stuff.

This is where MS can get the upper hand.

Yes and no. I have to admit I hoped for the ability to install any app you like (like in former versions of WinMo). Sadly that is no longer the case.

Silverlight/XNA development is fully OK for me, but it seems a tad restricted. Especially without the ability to run Silverlight in the browser, something which really, really surprised me when I heard it (at least that's what I got told on the Windows Phone 7 developer session).

Re: Windows Phone 7 in-depth preview

#24

Post by clark-kent »

The 2D UI is a big risk considering the competition. iPhone 1.0 had a nice 3D feel to it. The WP7 OS seems very responsive and snappy. But the lack of wow factor might be because of the 2D UI and monochrome color scheme. It lacks depth and looks plain.

Re: Windows Phone 7 in-depth preview

#25

Post by pavlov »

clark-kent wrote: post #24

The 2D UI is a big risk considering the competition. iPhone 1.0 had a nice 3D feel to it. The WP7 OS seems very responsive and snappy. But the lack of wow factor might be because of the 2D UI and monochrome color scheme. It lacks depth and looks plain.

Even though the graphic elements are strictly 2D, the interaction can have a depth component that's not obvious in screenshots. 2D layers can be animated in 3D space, and distorted to break the flatness.

The Engadget review mentions that the WP7 UI makes efficient use of a parallax effect where overlapping layers scroll at a different pace. That's a good example of a "2.5D" depth effect.

Re: Windows Phone 7 in-depth preview

#29

Post by GiraffeNecktie »

clark-kent wrote: post #24

The 2D UI is a big risk considering the competition. iPhone 1.0 had a nice 3D feel to it. The WP7 OS seems very responsive and snappy. But the lack of wow factor might be because of the 2D UI and monochrome color scheme. It lacks depth and looks plain.

3d is a little overrated. The most recent Ubuntu has gone with a very plain 2d look for icons and it looks very clean and polished.
Post reply on HN