Further Impressions of the HTC Trophy

I've now had my new phone for three working weeks and have had some time to get used to it, so not that anyone asked, but here are some more thoughts on it a few weeks in. In general, I'm happy with the phone. As a phone, it seems perfectly fine; call quality is good, and though I haven't given the battery and endurance test for time, It seems like you could talk for hours without any problem. So, as a device other than a phone, here are my experiences so far.

Right out of the gate I should say that this is my first "smartphone." I've never owned an iPhone, Blackberry or any of the various Android phones. While I was shopping for a new phone I did examine examples of each of those in stores, but without extended testing I don't think it would be fair for me to compare Windows Phone 7 to any of those. However I think it is fair to say that, unlike Android, using Windows Phone 7 is a very different experience from using iOS.

As you might expect from a Microsoft product, Windows Phone 7 has very tight integration with both Microsoft Office and XBox Live, however I don't use either of those so I can't speak much about it. I don't have an XBox (or any plans to buy one). The XBox Hub is where you go to play games, but I didn't really get the phone as a gaming platform; the only game I've downloaded so far is a trial of Red Bull Racing Challenge, a Formula 1 game.

Office consists of mobile versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and integrates with SharePoint. While I can't see ever wanting to create a new document on the phone (I tried it, it works fine, but why?) it makes sense for receiving, editing, and resending documents. If you use Office extensively for business, I could see this being a killer feature. I suppose if you also have a pocket projector you could load up your PowerPoint slide decks and project them right from the phone for meetings, saving you the trouble of lugging a laptop and projector around. (Theoretically I guess you could also project from NetFlix... that would be cool). OneNote seems to be a cloud-based note sharing application (I'd never heard of it before). It might be useful if I used a version of Office that had it,¹ and if a friend hadn't introduced me to EverNote shortly before I got this phone. The only SharePoint site I tried connecting to used an incompatible login protocol, so I don't know what's the deal with that. I don't think much of SharePoint anyway.

One of my big concerns before getting a new phone was the keyboard; I really wanted a physical keyboard rather than just a virtual one. I don't think much of touch as an interface; tactile feedback is very important to me and in general the touch-based interfaces I've worked with in the past simply aren't very accurate. You might be wondering why I got this phone if I was so determined to have a physical keyboard. There are two reasons:

1. Lack of options.
2. $0.01.  Money trumps a lot of considerations.

In a general sense, my opinion of touch as an interface still holds. The screen on the Trophy is much more accurate than I expected, I have to say, and isn't bad at all, but it's still not anywhere near as precise as a mouse. Of course a mouse isn't a viable interface for a phone, and everyone hates trackballs, so I'm not sure what the options are. The keyboard is much better than I feared, and is pretty good as long as you don't go too fast, but I'm a very fast typist and I do end up with some mistakes, especially when trying to hit the keys on the bottom rows, strikes intended for the third row seem to trip the bottom row too often, resulting in spaces where are meant to be c's and b's. The thumb board (portrait-layout keyboard) is actually much better than I was expecting, and pretty darn easy to use, although obviously significantly slower since you're only using one finger. The only recurring problem there is the 'm' and backspace keys which are next to each other and you have to bend your thumb pretty significantly to hit either, it's uncomfortable and often you get the wrong one.

Thankfully, at this point Microsoft is absolutely wizard at spell-checking; as you type suggestions appear below the editing window (so as to not be a distraction). Should you mistype a word, you just tap it to highlight it and pick one of the correctly spelled words below to replace it. Or, if you botch it so badly that the phone has no useful idea what you're trying to type, you can type right over your misspelling. It's an efficient and unobtrusive solution to typing errors that are seemingly inevitable on a touch-screen interface.

The touch interface itself is okay, the screen is almost too smooth though, it feels almost slippery. I've caught the wrong app more than once because my thumb just slid past its intended target. I guess that's something you have to get used to. I am also an avowed detractor of swiping, so I'm glad that the interface heavily integrates tapping as an alternative. It's also nice that when scrolling through a long list, a top on the screen stops it dead, something my old phone did not do.

Contacts/People
In my initial impressions, I discussed the significant problems I had getting my contacts set up in the people hub, and the interference from the Facebook integration. I sort of got the hang of it at this point, but it was a pain. I disconnected my Facebook account and imported my contacts, and then once those were in place I reconnected FB. Once that was done the system did not automatically dump everyone from FB into my contacts list, instead it linked whatever matches it could from my contacts to my FB friends.² This is actually kind of useful because it updates the contact record with whatever information the person has in FB, so you don't have to worry about updating their contact information yourself, if they do it you've got it. It also uses their FB profile picture as a thumbnail, and shows their status update in their record, though I don't know what good that is. I'm certainly not going to look through my people list one-by-one to see people's updates, I'll go to the adjacent "what's new" screen (MS calls them pivots) or use the FB app. You can also pin people to the home screen just as you can apps, which is nice for people you're in contact with often. For example I have my wife right on the home screen because she's the person I call or text the most. Linking can also be done manually if the phone doesn't make a connection automatically, which is nice, and you can link multiple profiles to one person. The only downside to that is the possible display of duplicate records from multiple sources.

The phone does make you conform to their way of doing things, though, which I'm not all that thrilled with. On my old phone with a standard contact list schema, I would group people together; for example my parents were in the same record with one home phone number and two mobile numbers. You can do this in WP7 by linking multiple FB profiles under one "person", but it gets really confusing because it only shows the icon for one, and doesn't differentiate. Also in some cases it seemed to lose phone numbers when I grouped people together. It's really meant to be one record for one person I think. So I wonder what happens if you get a call from a number that's in more than one person record? How does it know who's calling? I still need to experiment more.

Music and Media
I also mentioned in my first piece the problem I had with using Zune as the media management software. I haven't had time to get that fixed yet, but there are two small bits of info about it I have to share. The first is that I did manage to get one album onto the device and listened to it with headphones, and the sound quality from the media player is really good; I think it's actually better than my dedicated music player. That's also true when using streaming music apps; excellent sound quality. The other note is that the OS and Zune software support wiresless syncing, something Apple just announced will be part of iOS 5, and Android to my knowledge doesn't have at all. You have to set it up with the device connected to your computer via USB, but once it is, the device will sync in the background any time it's connected to your wireless network and the software is open. The only caveat is that the device has to be docked³ or plugged into the wall charger. I have no idea why that is, and I hope they change it in the upcoming "Mango" update.

SkyDrive and the Camera
SkyDrive is Microsoft's free cloud-storage system, and it's tightly integrated into the phone, which is frankly annoying. By default any pictures you take are automatically uploaded to SkyDrive. You can disable that in the settings, or switch it to any other online photo service you use, for example Facebook in my case, and I bet Picasa as well if you link your Picasa and Windows Live accounts. When I was first using the phone, even when I had automatic uploading turned off, whenever I looked at a picture a overlay would come up asking if I wanted to upload it, which is stupid and irritating and pointless, since it's an option in the menu for every picture. This screwed me up when trying to take multiple pictures in succession. (In the week since I started this post, this behavior has stopped occurring, but I don't know if that's because of something I did or not.)

Also with regard to pictures, when you connect the phone to your Facebook account all of your FB pictures and albums show up in the pictures menu. Someone please explain to me what the point of that is. I post pictures to FB to share with other people, not to look at them myself. Why in the world would I want them on my phone? All it did was force me to go into my FB account and delete some old picture albums so it wouldn't clutter my phone so much. To me this "feature" makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, and at the very least they ought to have a toggle that lets you turn it off.

On a positive note, the phone has a dedicated camera button that even wakes the phone directly to the camera when locked, so you don't have to go through the rigamarole of putting in your pin to unlock it and go to the camera app. Unfortunately I kept forgetting this when at a concert the day after I got the phone; Colin Meloy of the Decemberists walked right by me in the crowd, I mean he was right next to me and all I got was a picture of his back because I wasn't fast enough on the trigger. Were I more used to my phone at the time, I'd have had some great pictures.

Etc.
The web browser is apparently based on Internet Explorer 7, so it's got some compatibility issues. Thankfully in the upcoming "mango" update it's being replace with a browser based on IE9, so it should be much more standards-compliant. Other than the occasional website that won't load properly it's fine. Nothing exceptional, but it's better than the Android browser on my nook color, which is drek.

The last thing I want to talk about for now is apps, or specifically the lack thereof. One of the big disadvantages Windows Phone 7 has in trying to gain market-share against the iPhone and Android is simply not coming first; WP7 is less than a year old and therefore hasn't had time to build up nearly the quantity of available apps that iOS or Android do. At last count there were something like 20,000 apps in the WP7 marketplace, whereas Android had in the hundreds of thousands and iOS half a million or some ridiculous number like that. This is considered a "drawback" of Windows Phone 7.

To a point I understand that; I don't know what it's like in the rest of the world but Americans love their statistics and numbers are a an easily-understood metric that everyone can get their head around. More is better, right? But honestly, when discussing numbers in the thousands, or hundreds of thousands, is that really a big deal? Is anyone really going to load 50,000 apps up on their phone?

Of course I'm not a big app user; I've found a few that are neat, but for the most part my phone is a) a phone, and b) a messaging device. I certainly can appreciate utilitarian apps like Maps and directions or the weather or the aforementioned Evernote, which allows me to take shopping lists with me on my phone rather than kill a tree. I even see the appeal for some of entertainment apps that don't serve any practical or necessary purpose but are nice to have at your command. But I have a hard time judging a phone operating system simply by how many apps are available for it. A better question when evaluating the system might be, "What apps that I would use does the phone have or not have?" In this respect WP7 probably comes up short, simply because it hasn't been around very long and isn't proven to developers. For example, my bank has iOS and Blackberry apps, but none for WP7. The answer to that question is going to vary from person to person.

And when you come right down to it, that last sentence sums up the smartphone market completely, doesn't it? As someone who isn't a heavy app user and doesn't see their phone as a toy, Windows Phone 7 works pretty well for me. With some exceptions it does what I want it to do and otherwise stays out of my way. If that's what you like, a phone that makes it easy to call, text, e-mail or browse the web (or if you're a big XBox or Office user), you would probably like the HTC Trophy or one of the other WP7 handsets.. If you're a heavy app user who runs your entire life out of your phone, then likely not, I suppose.

---

¹ We don't have OneNote rolled out at work and at home I use OpenOffice, because as a consumer Microsoft Office is too expensive.
²I just discovered that this is a setting you can toggle in the settings menu. I guess I tripped it before I re-connected my FB account.
³ I'm not even sure anyone makes a dock for this thing. It's silly, really.

New Phone Impressions

If you're close to me you probably know that my old phone, an LG Voyager, has been on its last legs for a while. The microphone was broken, making it useless as an actual phone unless I used bluetooth, the battery life was rapidly diminishing and recently it would take several hits to the activate button to wake it up from sleeping. I'd been searching for a new phone for a while but hadn't found one I really liked. Then last week Microsoft had a special sale offering the HTC Trophy for Verizon for $0.01 (yes, it was on sale for a penny). That was one of the phones I'd been looking at so I took the plunge. Here are my initial impressions.

The handset itself is nice, it's a bit heavier than I thought from playing with one in the store, but the grip feels good and the screen is very vibrant and attractive. The sound quality is good. Basically, no issues with the hardware at all. It's fine. The Trophy runs Windows Phone 7, Microsoft's new(ish) smartphone OS designed to compete with iOS, Android, Blackberry and HP WebOS.

Pro. It's very snappy, there's hardly any delay in activating an app or waking the phone.  It only took a few minutes of playing around to figure out how to customize the home screen, navigate through the menus, etc.

Con. BIG con: Importing my contacts from my old phone was a complete P.I.T.A. Such a pain in fact that the people at the Verizon Store couldn't even pull it off. For some strange reason (maybe MS won't allow it) Verizon doesn't have a version of their Backup Assistant system for this OS. So despite the fact that my contacts were all backed up to Verizon's servers, there was no way for the new phone to get at them.

Worse yet is that this OS is designed to heavily integrate into other systems, like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, etc and when you activate those accounts it imports those contact lists to the phone. The problem is those are different contact lists - I use my different e-mail accounts for different purposes and I don't want those contact lists on my phone; I want the contacts from my old phone. I had to go in and delete the contacts that were imported from Yahoo! and Google, then figure out how to turn off contact syncing in those accounts. The FB integration was so pervasive I had to turn it off; I don't need updates from restaurants and sports teams in my contact list. That makes the phone completely useless as far as FB goes, because the native FB integration overrides any other app. So Seesmic, my Twitter/FB app of choice on the nook color, is rendered obsolete here because it's not allowed to do FB and the native Twitter app is perfect.

I was eventually able to import my mobile contacts by exporting them from Verizon's Backup Assistant to a .CSV file on my desktop and then import them into my Windows Live Account, then sync that to my phone. It turns out I could have done the same thing with my Verizon e-mail account, but for some reason Verizon's web-based e-mail contacts aren't in sync with the Backup Assistant. Go figure.

Pro: There's some nice apps here. Netflix is built-in and includes streaming video (NICE!!) The ESPN Scorecenter app is sweet, as-is The Weather Channel's App.  (These are all free, btw) Also the Web Browser (IE Mobile) is really fast and renders everything well, and has tabs, which is nice.

Con: The media player is the Zune Player. That's fine, except to sync music to the phone you need the Zune software. That would also be fine, except the Zune software uses the Windows 7 Media Libraries, which are incredibly buggy. On my computer months ago the library stopped recognizing any of my music files, despite the fact that I can navigate to the network folder where they're stored and play them one at a time (but they will not be added to the library). The end result is I can't sync music (or video) to the phone, making it useless as a media player. Granted I think the problem here is with my computer OS (or my network setup) not the phone, but IMO having systems so heavily interconnected that when one piece fails the whole thing breaks down is a major flaw. It's probably going to take hours online with MS to get the problem sorted, and when am I going to have time for that? (Not this month, that's for damn sure.)

I'm not sure if it's a pro or con (yet), but the way Windows Phone 7 does messaging will take some getting used to. Instead of individual messages, it displays "conversations" based on from whom the message was sent or received. For people this is great, because you can see everything you've written back and forth when replying. For message from something like Twitter it's a bit weird, because all the messages are in the same conversation no matter who the author was on Twitter.

And also a suggestion for Microsoft: the App List gets really long, really quick. A way to group apps into sub-menus (or sub-lists, if you're trying to be all non-technical about it) would be much appreciated.

Hiatus

As you no doubt have noticed by now, this blog has been on hiatus since last August.  That's going to continue for a little while longer.  I should be back with a new style for spring.

Quechee Gorge

I'm sitting on a rock at the bottom of Quechee Gorge in Vermont. I hear the rush of the rapids. I smell water and pine and earth. My soul is refreshed. My life bar is refilled.

Sound Check: Broken Bells by Broken Bells

The first time I heard of Broken Bells was when I saw a blog post about a cool new video starring Christina Hendricks of Mad Men (and to a lesser extent, Firefly) fame.  I enjoyed the video, thought the song was decent, and then  promptly forgot all about it.  I'd never heard the band name before and didn't know anything about them, so... out of sight, out of mind.  Christine even asked me at what point if I'd heard them, but I didn't remember.

Eventually though it came back up, and I learned an important bit of information:  Broken Bells is Dangermouse and the lead singer of The Shins.  I'm not a huge fan of the latter, but Dangermouse was one-half of the awesome Gnarls Barkley, so I figured the band was worth further investigation.  I was right.  I listened to a few more songs on their MySpace page, and then Amazon had the album available for download for five dollars, so I figured I couldn't go wrong at that price.

The album sounds like a sort of futuristic mellow indie-pop, exactly what you'd expect from the cross of a DJ and an indie darling band, I guess.  A few songs do pick up the pace a little, but this is a great album with which to just chill out and relax. If I were going to see this band live, I'd want it to be at a small club where I could sit and have a drink while I listened. It's not something to which you're going to be dancing.

Standouts: "The High Road", "The Ghost Inside", "Mongrel Heart"

Broken Bells is available now, probably wherever you get your music.  It is definitely available via both Amazon and iTunes.

Here is the video that got me onto this band in the first place, for "The Ghost Inside," in my opinion the album's best song.  I also think this video is a work of art - I didn't think anybody really put effort to make videos like this anymore.