Thoughts on Windows Phone Mango
Via the magic that is the internet, I’ve been running a beta build of the Mango update that’s supposed to go out to all Windows Phones later this year. (In a couple of months, actually)
These are my thoughts. (I’m running it atop a Sprint HTC Arrive, or 7 Pro to you guys across the pond.)
Despite being beta software, the OS is rock solid and is good enough to be a daily driver. Not even kidding about this. I’ve been using it on my production device (well, whatever you’d call your main phone that you conduct business on) with nary a hiccup or crash. The only problem being the occasional stutter (and by occasional, I mean like, once in a blue moon), and obviously no apps have been written that take advantage of the multitasking. Other than that, it is indeed a rock-solid build of WP7.
There are some things I do take issue with that I hope are fixed in the final build of the software. The most glaring of them all is the 160 character limit for CDMA devices. Mango is slightly more mannered about this, however. It’ll let you keep typing, but once you go past 160, it just states “Message is too long” and won’t let you send the message. All your text is saved, however.
Messaging still doesn’t support drafting, so if you happen to hit the Start or Back button inadvertently, you’ve done lost everything you typed. However, if you hit the Start button, you can always hit back to get back to where you were, text entered and all. At least if Microsoft wouldn’t let you leave the text field without confirming you want to do so would solve this problem entirely. Just don’t assume I want to throw away the entire message I typed and meant to send. Automatic drafting would be the preferred way. Because on Android, I can be in the middle of a message, tab out, check something, tab back in, continue right where I left off.
While the volume and playback controls got a slight revamp, I’m still really astounded as to how easily the volume can be messed with. Especially when music isn’t playing. If the phone unlocks itself (or wakes for an incoming message), all something has to do is hit the volume key and it’ll either turn itself all the way up or down. Effectively, this silences your phone. Including your alarms.
What I would like to see here is something akin to what Android/iOS does: Only allow the ringer volume to be manipulated when the phone is fully unlocked, not on the lockscreen.
Besides any of these things though, I have to hand it to Microsoft: I almost cannot believe this is a Microsoft product. It’s stable, it’s fluid, it’s very easy to use. It’s crazy fast, it runs well despite running on top of “dated” hardware.
It’s just a shame none of these things are marketed well at all.
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Notes:
1. I do know that 160 characters is a limitation imposed by CDMA carriers. But there are ways to sidestep this; Android does it. The iPhone on Verizon does it. I could imagine it would be as simple as caching the overage and sending the entire message in a delayed manner; IE sending the first 160, waiting for the successful send of that, sending the second 160, etc.
However, once Sprint/HTC actually gets their hands on Mango and actually adapts it for these phones, they might code in sort of workaround for CDMA networks. I hope they do.
