[Windows Phone 7 General] Aphasaic2002:
Hi, OP here! Glad to see this topic has stirred up so much debate! I'm glad to see other people have a similar issue to me, and am surprised that so many people being so defensive / touchy..

I am running the latest 7712 Mango beta. The jump list, searching and voice opening all don't fix the issue, because as stated in my first post - the problem is I don't remember the names of all my apps. Sure I remember the most frequently used ones, but occasional ones I use once or twice a week - no way can I remember their exact name. Nor as user should I be expected to.

This is not laziness or forgetfulness. Sorry but no human can memorise the exact names of 50+ apps.

If you don't believe me, try a simple test; without pulling out your WP7 device, can you name every app and game you have installed on it? You can probably name the most frequently used 5-10, then it'll start getting tricky.

If you can't remember every single app name (and spelling must be correct) then chances are you're doing alot of browsing through that damn app list before you start tasks. Therefore this problem affects you.

I agree with this. The design of the app list seems to be an after-thought.

It almost seems like Microsoft focused all their efforts on the home-page and livetiles. Then they realised "you can't have every app pinned to the home-screen, how can we present the rest of them?". A grid of icons would look too similar to Iphone, Android and would be confusingly similar to the home-screen, so they went with the simplest most basic UI - an alphabetised list.

Bingo! Check my original post again - this is exactly what I was suggesting!

The grouping feature in Mango is very nice in that it allows you to see just the status updates of XYZ friends. But it also has an unexpected benefit; it's much quicker to find a specific person when I want to call or email them. Say I want to call my mother, this is how it works pre and post Mango update:

Before: Bring up contacts list > click M > scroll through M entries until I find "Mother"

After: Bring up contacts list > tap "Family" > tap "Mother".

Looks like the same number of steps, but scrolling is hard - it takes your full concentration to find an item. Tap tap is just so much more intuitive.

Now imagine the same Groups feature being added to Programs:

- When you add a group, a new item "Games" or "Productivity" is added to the top of the list. Click it brings up a sub list of apps you have added to that category. Exactly like people Groups.

- The list is still there below. Just a few items are added at the top. Nothing has fundamentally changed, it doesn't not make it more like Android or IPhone in *any* way.

- If you don't like the feature, you don't have to use it. Groups are optional, if you want just 1 giant list you can still have it.

- Being able to pin these app groups to the home page, and aggregate their notifications / livetile updates in one group live-tile is a great idea! Not sure how this would work, but would be sexy.

Anyway I really like the WP7 experience except for this one thing. Suggesting that I shouldn't have bought the phone due to this one issue (which I couldn't have known about - my phone was bought for me as a gift) is not productive. I just want a better mobile experience, saying I should switch to Android or Apple is NOT a solution!