Why I really hate my Windows 7 Phone

A while back I replaced my ageing iPhone 3 with a Windows Phone 7, the main reason being that I wanted to develop and test Silverlight apps for it. Specifically, I wanted to deploy my flow game on the Windows Phone.

Below I’ll outline why I hate my Windows 7 Phone and why I will never recommend anyone buying one, now or in the future.

• My first major concern was that I couldn’t develop and test software on my phone – because my Windows Live account was registered in Sweden. Only developers with accounts registered in the US, Great Britain, Germany, Spain or France were actually allowed to deploy software to their phones. I have no idea why. It’s just stupid. It’s my damn phone!
  Eventually I was told by multiple Microsoft fanbois that this wasn’t actually a problem, all I had to do was register a fake account with a fake name and a fake american address and I’d be good to go. That’s not an acceptable solution. Only the duped would think that that is good enough.
• The volume control for the ring-tone and the music player is the same control, raise one and you raise the other. Lower one and you lower the other. I miss all my phonecalls because I listen with the volume set to the first bar – and I never remember to turn the volume up after I’ve stopped listening to music. So the ring volume is really really really low.
• For the longest time, map search didn’t work – when I’d search for a location that I wanted to show on the phones map, it would take me to the regular Bing search. No map.
  Again, I was told by Microsoft fanbois (the same ones, actually) that this wasn’t a problem, all I had to do was change my “Search Language” to English would allow me to search for locations – even in Sweden with Swedish location names. Now, why was that so completely impossible to do with swedish as the search language?
• Microsoft charges 30% of the sale price for apps sold through their market. The only reason is that that’s how much Apple charges, and why would Microsoft charge less? I’ll tell you why;

Imagine you walk into the skaniest bar you ever saw, on the seedy edge of town where only the nightcrawlers frequent the streets. You sit down and order a beer. The bartender goes “Sure, that’ll be $20”. You go, “What? No, 20 bucks for a beer? The place is EMTPY, smelly and everyone hates you. And your beer sucks. How can the beer be $20?” The bartender replies “Well, you know that wonderfull place down the center of town that’s always packed and has a queue around the block? Where all the models hang out and love is in the air?”. You go “Sure”. The bartender goes “Well, they charge 20 bucks a beer, that’s why we charge 20 bucks a beer!”

• In case my analogy above doesn’t clear, I’ll outline my arguments against microsoft charging 30% of their applications
• – Apple has millions of users, if I develop a product for the Apple app-store, there are millions and millions of potential customers.
• – Microsoft Phone 7 has eight users.
• – Microsoft is not selling the same product that apple is selling, theire marketplace is a sad joke in comparison – they should PAY developers a percentage to develop software for their phone, until the market is actually there!
• For the longest time, I couldn’t download software from the app-store. I could surf the web, I could download email and everything was fine and dandy, but the app store would give me no love. And the error code was a very unhelpful “The Live ID service is currently unavailable, please try again later”. I was able to track down an error code after a while, don’t ask me why, and after some googling on the error code (an 8 digit number – they’re planning for a lot of errors!) it turned out that I had to have my MMS settings correctly configured. Yeah, that makes sense. What’s MMS got to do with downloading software from the app-store?
• And the latest insult; I want to upgrade my phone to Windows Phone 7.5, to see if I’ll hate it less, but I can’t. Remember on point one where I had to change my account to fake an american account to be able to upload software to my phone? Well, turns out I can’t use the phone on my computer anymore, becase the computer is set to swedish but my Live ID account is set to american. And we can’t have that, can we? Why not? Why can’t I access an american Live ID account from a swedish computer? What would happen if I did.

I miss my days with my iPhone – I had issues with it also, but no-where near as bad as the Windows Phone 7.