4 ms·

huh? which specific features or use cases are you referring to where WP7 has leapfrogged iPhone or Android?

by magsafe 16y ago

unp3rs0n 16y ago
WP& is playing catch up so clearly it has not leapfrogged the competition -- even accounting for Mango. But I think usability and UX will be the differentiator for WP7 when it does gain feature parity.
kenjackson 16y ago
A few caess: 1) It appears that WP7 has done multitasking right. They have this notion of "Live Agents" which are agents that work in the background and are scheduled independent of the foreground process. I think I had proposed a similiar idea here on HN many moons ago -- maybe they read it :-) It gives you the benefit of good battery life regardless of rogue 3rd party apps, while also giving you virtually unbounded multitasking scenarios. 2) Expanded hubs throughout the platform, so apps can be associated with Bing results. This was demoed with going directly from a movie to IMDB. 3) Being able to pin specific pieces of functionality from an app to the home page. Probably a tag on a Silverlight page. Will be very useful. And there's virtually no scenarios where Android or iPhone surpass WP7 anymore. The main hole is app selection. Which is important, but given that WP7 has closed pretty much every gap, including in the SDK -- plus added stuff like Silverlight and XNA integration, I think we'll see some interesting times.
- magsafe 16y ago
  "And there's virtually no scenarios where Android or iPhone surpass WP7 anymore" AirPlay, printing, unified Inbox, HTML5 browser, 3G tethering, visual voicemail, local notifications, FaceTime, regular updates that users actually receive, and the thousands of apps like Groupon, Layar, YouTube, Skype, Google Voice, Citibank, Amex, TripIt, etc.
  - kenjackson 16y ago
    First, I conceeded 3rd party app selection in my post, so to spend half of your post pointing that out is... well pointless. It's important, but I already mentioned it. So now lets look at the actual support: 1) AirPlay. Well WP7 does support DLNA and some phones expose it, such as the LG. So if you want it, you can get it. 2) Unified Inbox. That is missing, although I suspect by design. It's a feature that would be nice to toggle on, but default off is the right design. 3) HTML 5 browser. It's part of Mango. 4) 3G tethering. It works, just not a supported feature. 5) Visual voicemail. This is actually one gap. It's suspected that it may be in Mango. They've had a registry entry for it since first release. 6) Local notifications. Live agents give a superset of the functionality of local notifications. 7) FaceTime. Supports Skype. 8) Regular updates. Users do receive the updates. ATT is just taking longer than everyone else. What WP7 does do though is push the updates as they're ready. This obviously causes some pain for those whose carriers are slower, but its better than waiting for everyone to be ready and ship all at once, giving the impression that everything happened at the same time. So visual voicemail is the biggest scenario I see here. And if you use Google Voice you get that for free too. Again, at one point in time the holes were huge. Now, they're small and niche. You can no longer dismiss WP7 based on feature set at all. Sure, it has strengths and weaknesses, but the platform as a whole seems stronger than Android/iOS. 3rd party apps are the biggest gap, and I do think with the improved tooling we'll see their app store continue to grow (and its already the fastest growing app store relative to open date).

huh? which specific features or use cases are you referring to where WP7 has leapfrogged iPhone or Android?

by magsafe 16y ago

huh? which specific features or use cases are you referring to where WP7 has leapfrogged iPhone or Android?

WP& is playing catch up so clearly it has not leapfrogged the competition -- even accounting for Mango. But I think usability and UX will be the differentiator for WP7 when it does gain feature parity.

kenjackson 16y ago

A few caess: 1) It appears that WP7 has done multitasking right. They have this notion of "Live Agents" which are agents that work in the background and are scheduled independent of the foreground process. I think I had proposed a similiar idea here on HN many moons ago -- maybe they read it :-) It gives you the benefit of good battery life regardless of rogue 3rd party apps, while also giving you virtually unbounded multitasking scenarios. 2) Expanded hubs throughout the platform, so apps can be associated with Bing results. This was demoed with going directly from a movie to IMDB. 3) Being able to pin specific pieces of functionality from an app to the home page. Probably a tag on a Silverlight page. Will be very useful. And there's virtually no scenarios where Android or iPhone surpass WP7 anymore. The main hole is app selection. Which is important, but given that WP7 has closed pretty much every gap, including in the SDK -- plus added stuff like Silverlight and XNA integration, I think we'll see some interesting times.

magsafe 16y ago
"And there's virtually no scenarios where Android or iPhone surpass WP7 anymore" AirPlay, printing, unified Inbox, HTML5 browser, 3G tethering, visual voicemail, local notifications, FaceTime, regular updates that users actually receive, and the thousands of apps like Groupon, Layar, YouTube, Skype, Google Voice, Citibank, Amex, TripIt, etc.
- kenjackson 16y ago
  First, I conceeded 3rd party app selection in my post, so to spend half of your post pointing that out is... well pointless. It's important, but I already mentioned it. So now lets look at the actual support: 1) AirPlay. Well WP7 does support DLNA and some phones expose it, such as the LG. So if you want it, you can get it. 2) Unified Inbox. That is missing, although I suspect by design. It's a feature that would be nice to toggle on, but default off is the right design. 3) HTML 5 browser. It's part of Mango. 4) 3G tethering. It works, just not a supported feature. 5) Visual voicemail. This is actually one gap. It's suspected that it may be in Mango. They've had a registry entry for it since first release. 6) Local notifications. Live agents give a superset of the functionality of local notifications. 7) FaceTime. Supports Skype. 8) Regular updates. Users do receive the updates. ATT is just taking longer than everyone else. What WP7 does do though is push the updates as they're ready. This obviously causes some pain for those whose carriers are slower, but its better than waiting for everyone to be ready and ship all at once, giving the impression that everything happened at the same time. So visual voicemail is the biggest scenario I see here. And if you use Google Voice you get that for free too. Again, at one point in time the holes were huge. Now, they're small and niche. You can no longer dismiss WP7 based on feature set at all. Sure, it has strengths and weaknesses, but the platform as a whole seems stronger than Android/iOS. 3rd party apps are the biggest gap, and I do think with the improved tooling we'll see their app store continue to grow (and its already the fastest growing app store relative to open date).