The Windows Phone bloggers have been active recently, for good and bad reasons. Just yesterday, the ESPN ScoreCenter app finally was released for Windows Phone so I thought it may be a good idea for me to look back at what I thought were missing features/apps for me going from iPhone to Windows Phone.

The list was something like:

1. Corporate email: I still don't have access to my work Exchange server and that is the single-biggest issue I am facing. I am completely handicapped without knowing what my next meeting is about and where it is. I am dying to get *some* access to my corporate Exchange server. (note: access to Exchange server is available but my company does not allow it outside of McAfee EMM app or Good Technology's app, neither of which are available on windows phone yet)
2. Notifications: I was looking for Boxcar type, clean and universal notifications. I did not get that yet, but a lot of the apps are slowly building some sort of indicators (Live tiles, toast notifications) and it can only get better. I am not missing it as much as I thought I would be.
3. ESPN: Done! Finally, it is here.
4. Hipporemote: There are many remote desktop apps but since I have my iPad with Hipporemote, I have not bothered to try any other apps. Don't miss this one too much.
5. Amazon: Done! Came a while back.
6. In-browser video/Flash/HTML5: Coming in Mango at the end of the year. Or maybe sooner? Who knows. Not there, but coming soon.
7. Hidden wireless networks: Not resolved and not sure if NoDo is going to resolve it. But I guess it's fine for now.

Now, what I am missing today:

1. Bank of America app: This has been made visible in public but I am not sure what the hold up is.
2. E*Trade app: This is not in order, but this is one app that I can use which is not yet in the Marketplace.
3. Liveshare is one app that was released for iOS, Android and Windows Phone at once. I would love more apps like that, especially the social ones (Instagram, anyone?) so that I can include my friends on other platforms in my mobile sharing life :-)

Not going to look at features that I feel are missing because that will make this a 15-page post :-)

Check bing's homepage footer today ... Windows 7 Phone? Please. Change the name. Now.

Those who were complaining about the in-your-face promos on other shows, here's a nice cameo by the Samsung Focus on the iPhone-dominated show, Chuck.

Go to 33:18 where Vivian is in the vault.

http://www.nbc.com/chuck/video/Chuck-vs-the-First-Bank-of-Evil/1305851

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch

I saw the post over at wmpoweruser.com asking its readers to come up with the dream Windows Phone ad. I have some ideas but I don't want to show my personal information, and I don't want to reset my phone to show dummy data, so here are my ideas.

1. Theme - to show how adding Facebook account lights up the phone: The shot starts with an extremely happy new owner of a Windows Phone. The next shot should zoom into a shot of the phone with the guy narrating what he is doing. And that is, entering his facebook information. The account setup is saved and he goes into the People Hub and sees facebook status updates and pictures. He then goes on to like a picture and comment on someone's status. And finally, he goes into the "Me" tile and updates his own status.
2. Theme - to show pictures hub: Again, the ad starts with a new owner excited about his phone. He tells his wife (or the wife tells her husband) that he is going to set up his windows live account which he had already linked to flickr. As he is saying this, the ad shows some screens from a PC showing windows live linking to flickr. Next shot shows the windows phone zoomed in, and him opening the Pictures hub showing all the past albums and pictures (swiping left and right should illustrate the fluidity of the OS). He then tells his wife how he didn't even remember uploading some of those pictures and is delighted to see them. Some sort of tagline should follow, saying how "glance and go" trumps app-in-app-out.
3. Theme - to show Music and Videos hub: Shot starts straight with the phone zoomed in, a la iPhone/iPad ads. The user goes into the Music and Videos hub and starts playing local music. Then he goes to Shazam and gets a song which has a link to the Zune Marketplace and that is clicked, to stream the song directly. Then show a YouTube video in the history which shows paused and starts from the previous spot. The glance-and-go tagline ends the ad.

Similarly, ads to show the unified calendar (not sure if showing some Google Calendar snippets will help), Lock screen info, XBOX hub (games, including turn-by-turn vs XBOX or PC), Maps, Office, and a general ad showcasing the apps like Cocktail Flow, Twitter, Yelp, etc. should be made.

Basically, I think the "Really" ads need to be extended, to show what comes next. As in, why are people with Windows Phone spending less time immersed into the phone screens.

I have written earlier about how I love windows phone enough to swap my iPhone, what I like about it and what kind of apps and games I have on it. It is time now, after about 2.5 months of use, to talk about what I don't like about it. 

It has been well documented how windows phone 7 is neither windows nor 7. Having said that, as a user of a smartphone I still have the right to talk about what I don't like, from a functional standpoint and from a company/communication standpoint. Some of these points are minor, some major. Some are critical, and some not so critical. However, these are all the things that annoy me on a day to day basis, and hence they are listed here:

1. Marketplace search: It provides results from apps, songs, playlists, etc., and there is no way to filter. 
2. Zune/Podcasts performance/crash: I listen to podcasts on the Zune player. There are times when I want to skip a few minutes forward. If I skip too many times, the Zune player crashes and the only way to get out of it is to restart. 
3. Zune player last played mark: Often, after some type of crash, Zune player forgets where my last played mark was and resets to an earlier last played mark (or beginning of a podcast if it was not played before). That is very annoying. 
4. Answering a phone in speaker mode: I don't like that I have to answer the phone and then click on the dropdown and then switch to speakerphone. Considering that I would do that typically in the car, that extra click on the dropdown is painful. 
5. Live tiles are not really real-time updates. This could be an application developer problem or a Windows Phone restriction, but things like stock quotes need to refresh as close as possible to real time, and they don't. 
6. Not enough Live Tile love. I don't know why, but there are not too many apps with Live Tiles and the ones there are, don't have cool-looking Live Tile updates. My benchmark was set with the Music tile and Pictures tile which updates itself with the last artist played and the last picture taken. Why can't, for example, a Google Reader client update with the favicon of the last feed? 
7. Marketplace crash: The Marketplace crashes quite often and like the Zune player crash, the only way to get out of this issue is to restart the phone. 
8. At-rest encryption, VPN: These are two "enterprise" features which I need to somehow connect to my work Exchange server. I sorely miss the inability to see my work email and calendar from my phone (after iPhone and Blackberry in the past, I am addicted!). 
9. Slowness (or in this case, lack of) updates: Before the launch, I was led to believe that this thing is going to be run nimbly and that updates would be flying left and right. Sadly, it has been almost a quarter since launch and we only hear of the updates "coming in the next few weeks/months". Such open-ended timeframes are not only bad from a customer confidence perspective, but also show that the nimble and agile assumption I made was perhaps absolutely wrong. 
10. Browser: So many things to like about the browser, but this is an annoyance post, so what I don't like is the lack of HTML5 (and related, <video> tag) support and being able to share links from the browser to twitter or facebook. There is a share button but I can only share to messaging but not to twitter. 
11. Capacitive buttons: I cannot remember how many times I have inadvertently pressed the search or back button while doing something else on my Samsung Focus. The buttons should be forced to be activated while an app is open, so that they don't get pressed by mistake. 
12. No universal silence mode. The ringer can be turned off with one button but if I want complete silence, there is no way to do it. 
13. Related to the point above, if I reduce the volume to avoid loud sounds, for example, then my alarm volume also goes down. The alarm should have its own volume, to say the least. 
14. Search in app list. The physical search button is supposed to the context-sensitive, but I have so many apps, that when I go to the app list from the home screen, often I just want to search rather than scroll. Not only does the search button not work there, but also, there are no letters to let me jump quickly from a to b to c, etc. Both, context-sensitive searching and the letter paradigm are Windows Phone's unique UI ideas. Why are they not implemented on the app list, I don't know. 
15. GMail-Exchange-Archive-IMAP: I don't know who is at fault here but for whatever reason, I cannot delete (sent to trash) messages in my gmail account. I was somehow able to get that going on the iPhone but the effect here is to simply archive the message so it is out of the inbox but not from All Mail. 
16. Report Spam: Again, I am not sure who is at fault here but I cannot report to Gmail spam from the mail client on the windows phone. I understand if that is not implemented as a standard EAS/IMAP feature, but I don't know if that has or has not. 
17. (Edit: added 1/28) Screenshots, send link to twitter, etc.: There are so many times I like an app so much that I want to take a screenshot and show it to the world. There is no way to take a screenshot. Also, there is a share app option but it is only by email. I would rather share via twitter along with a link to download. There is no way I can evangelize the platform because the OS limits me in how far I can go with sharing.
18. (Edit: added 1/29) Videos taken on the phone have this weirdness that the "date taken" keeps getting set to the date when you download the images to the PC. Not sure when this changed, because a few weeks back I downloaded a whole bunch of pics/vids from a trip and those dates are intact. Very strange, which makes it extremely annoying.
19. (Edit: added 1/29) I may be in the minority here but I just have not been able to get my sync setup correct. I want to be able to sync music, pictures, videos, apps, etc. (everything except podcasts) with my home PC and *only* my podcasts with my work PC. While a guest relationship for syncing is awesome for those times when you need to quickly move stuff in and out of a PC which you don't normally use, the limitation of being in a normal sync relationship with only one PC makes it hard to do what I need to do. iTunes at some point made that change and allowed me to sync different items with different PC's (well, two at least) and it worked quite well for me. Hope Zune desktop changes in some way to allow me to automatically sync podcasts (only) with a second PC. I know I can do it manually within a Guest relationship, and I am going to do that, but it would be nicer if it works the way iTunes used to work for me. Zune sync-ing and the nightmares I faced, is a topic for a different post, after I master the nuances :-)
20. (Edit: added 1/30, based on input from @aharpaz): Forwarded emails send the original email as an .eml attachment. My note: reminds me horrifyingly, of the outlook express days :-)

I can't think of anything else that bothers me enough to put here. If I remember something else, I will keep updating it. 

[flickr video=5328352185 show_info=true secret=fef37ce5af w=500 h=281]

(I forgot to mention the games I have on my Windows phone in my earlier post. Here is that list (most of the games, I have tried first before buying, but at this time, I only one have trial on my phone):

Assassin's Creed (trial)
Bejeweled LIVE
Carneyvale
Need for Speed Undercover
Fast & Furious Adrenaline
Flowerz
Fruit Ninja
Artisan Glow
ilomilo
Monopoly
Oregon Trail
Pocket God
Project Sunburst
Avatar Gadgets
XBOX LIVE Extras

Blackjack Metro 21
Hangman (by JPG Solutions)
Hearts
Hungry Castaway
Puzzle Touch
Tic Tac Toe by Ximad

It is about 6 weeks and here is my update on my windows phone.

More on recommendations later...

I wrote on Friday about my switch from iPhone to Windows Phone 7. I am now a proud (really proud) owner of a Samsung Focus Windows Phone from AT&T. (side note: see how easy it is to refer to Windows Phone? No need to say Windows 7 Phone, Windows Phone 7 Phone, Windows Mobile 7, Windows 7 Mobile, etc. Just go with Windows Phone. That easy)

I had talked about what I use on the iPhone and here is my list of things I have done on my Windows Phone:

1. First and foremost, I cleaned up my hotmail contacts and also hooked up facebook, flickr, linkedin, yelp, wordpress, and more. (This was done earlier, in anticipation of my move to Windows Phone.)
2. I signed in with my Live ID and set up my personal account (google apps) for email, hotmail for contacts and email, facebook for contacts, photos and feeds, other gmail for email and calendar. All went well and in a few moments my phone was being "lit up" with information from various places that I did not even have to care about.
3. I downloaded the common, popular apps like:
   1. YouTube
   2. Facebook
   3. Twitter
   4. Seesmic
   5. Adobe Reader
   6. Breaking News
   7. DirecTV
   8. Fandango
   9. Flixster
   10. Foursquare
   11. Last.fm
   12. IMDb
   13. iheartradio
   14. Netflix
   15. Shazam
   16. Slacker Radio
   17. TED
   18. UStream Viewer
   19. Weatherbug
4. Then I went and downloaded a bunch of games from the Marketplace - happens to be that most of the games (perhaps all) are XBOX Live enabled. I am not an XBOX user yet so I was aslo able to set up my own XBOX Live Avatar.
5. Most of the games I downloaded, had a trial mode and I did go with the trial mode for those games. I have converted to paid on a few games already. Trial mode is simply fantastic, especially for games and especially for kids games where I can see if it is going to fly with the kids or not and then decide to put the $ down.

As you can see most of the big, common apps are already there and I am really not missing a beat.

I can say my needs are completely met (and exceeded in a lot of cases) except the following apps/scenarios:

1. Corporate email. Of course, my iPhone was a huge factor in my corporate email/calendar management. I am going to miss this feature the most. However there are multiple things to consider here - I have an iPad which is provisioned for corporate email and calendar, so I can use that when I am not at work. Also, it is only a matter of time before Windows Phone gets the at-rest encryption which will then make it feasible to get corporate email on it. Not a huge concern, in general.
2. Notifications. Even though Windows Phone provides multiple types of notifications (toaster alert like the SMS app does, Live Tiles like the Weatherbug app does and push notifications), common apps like facebook and twtter/seesmic have not implemented any notification method yet. This is an app maker's problem so I am positive the next iterations of these apps will take care of this issue. However I like the simplicity and features of Boxcar and I hope they get their app over to Windows Phone.
3. ESPN. I did not realize how much I used the ESPN ScoreCenter app on the iPhone. This weekend I wanted to keep track of multiple close Pac-10 football games and the website was simply not as efficient as the app is. I wish this app comes really fast and given how cutting edge ESPN has been until now, I don't doubt at all that a sexy-looking app is coming soon.
4. HippoRemote. For now I am not concerned much because the iPad takes care of it.
5. Amazon. Again, like ESPN I feel the app is much more efficient to use than the website and again, I am pretty sure these guys will release the app soon.
6. In-browser videos/flash-HTML5. This is quite an annoyance because even browsing to the ESPN website for example, from the iPad, plays videos in the page because they have made those videos HTML5-compliant. But the mobile IE browser does not support HTML5 and Windows Phone does not support flash or silverlight in the browser. So this is truly something I have to wait for Microsoft to deliver, hopefully in their next update.
7. Another big problem in the OS is that it cannot connect to wireless networks that are hidden. I do not broadcast my SSID and now I have to, hopefully again, only up to the upcoming update.

On the other hand, there are plenty of small things on the phone that made my smile. Simple stuff like the back button - I opened twitter, clicked on a tweet which had a link, clicked on the link and opened the browser. After I was done reading, I closed the browser and clicked the back button and I came back to the opened tweet in twitter. Small thing, but so cool.

Another thing - the voice command and voice search is FANTASTIC. I have not had a single incorrect interpretation of my voice command. Love it.

I could go on and on about how awesome the phone is, but this post is not about that. As you can see, the switch from the iPhone is going to be a good one and hopefully in the upcoming WP7 update as well as some of the app updates (or releases) most of my pending concerns would be addressed.

So, “replace” may be a misnomer. But I wanted to write down what I am
giving up, what I am able to get which I don’t have now and what is
equally replaced.

[youtube www.youtube.com/watch

Hat Tip Mobileburn, @wmpoweruser

Awesome game …

Wish all apps would look and work like this - simply delicious!
http://ecn.channel9.msdn.com/o9/ch9/6925/566925/WP7DesignDaysAppDeconstructed_ch9.wmv

Poll is at http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2010/07/28/what-smartphone-os-update/