Nerdology

I wish I could have gotten this up quicker (like yesterday when it was announced) however I’m on the road for work and I just didn’t have the time to devote to it.  Here are some thoughts… I tried to be brief, but we’re talking about an entirely new OS here so this is as brief as I could be.

I will say this, I’m excited about the idea of a new mobile OS entering the fray.  I will also say that keeping minimum hardware requirements on Windows Phones will allow app developers to make the best programs by preventing the market from splintering into a thousand different versions… like Android (whose biggest problem is there are too many devices running too many versions of the Android OS).

The first thing that sands out for me is the look of the home screen.  There’s a lot of dead space on the top and right side. Why? Is there some screen resolution discrepancy? Or did you make the buttons too small.  Oh, and while we’re on buttons some are square and some double wide (ie: Zune and Photos)… that’s strange.  I haven’t read if you can customize that but it would be nice.  For me calendar is more important than photos, I’d like to be able to make that button as big as I can.

I am a bit weary about an OS with heavy social network connection.  It pulls information about my contacts from other services like Twitter and Facebook (and I guess Windows Live… do people update that?).  Do I always want their photo to be whatever their Facebook photo is? I’m not actually sure.  You can also update multiple status’ in one swoop with the “Me” card.  It seems useful if you have to manage yourself on different sites. If I was a social networkaholic I could see this being useful, but it’s not for me.

What I can get behind is having my GamerTag with me all the time, and earning achievements on the go.  I fully support that.

I can also get behind a dedicated search button.  I’d say 80% of the time that I’m going to my browser I am going to be searching something in Google. Having a dedicated button that will pull up search (in this case Bing) from wherever you are in the UI is a great idea.

That’s all I’ve got for now.  Oh, last thing, I am holding back my judgement of the speed of the OS until we see actual devices.  All of the videos have been on prototype devices and aren’t running final versions of 7 Series so saying ‘it takes too long to load contacts’ isn’t fair yet.

[Telegraph, Gizmodo and Engadget]