yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[Windows Phone 7 General] N8ter:
I think lots of Android fans just don't know how good Zune and ZunePass is.

Also don't forget Windows Phones have a Standard Way of Synchronizing Data from a PC - Zune Software.

This is a sore point for Android still today.

If Google thinks I want to upload my music, etc. to the cloud then I got another thing coming (a WP7 device).

Google has also been busy implementing fluff features, not licensing things that could really benefit their users, and lagging on features that are basic necessities these days.

Things like Push Messaging, Proper Exchange Support (reference to HTC's buggy Exchange clients they have a habit of putting on their phones), media codecs, etc.

The LauncherPro guys can make a decent UI, but Google can't?

I am completely in love with WP7's "Panoramia" too. I didn't think i'd like it as much as I did. It's ridiculously snazzy.
[Windows Phone 7 General] ericc191:
So if I bought a Zune Pass, am I locked into it for a year or something? What's to stop people from just buying a month of Zune Pass, downloading their entire library of Limewired music, and then canceling Zune Pass?
[Windows Phone 7 General] powersquad:
no, the shortest pass is 1 month then 3 months and then 1 year

1 year, you only pay the cost of 10months. last 2 months are free. so even cheaper to buy a year long subscription and you get to keep 10 songs/month for yours to keep.

zune pass music is DRM. so if you cancel your zune pass subscription, then after a month or so, the zune pass music library will stop playing unless you renew your subscription. the 10 music downloads that you get to keep will stay and play fine on your machine though.

1 year subscription makes the most sense. it costs $150 so you are only paying $12.50/month and considering you get to keep 10 songs per month which are $1 each, you are only paying $2.50/month for unlimited music which you can stream from your xbox, wp7, zune player in pc/laptop or off the web (zune.net) if you are at work or friends.

nothing comes close or beats zune pass.
[Windows Phone 7 General] doministry:
One reason for Android:

Opera Browsers.

Will WP7 ever allow other browsers to be developed for this?
[Windows Phone 7 General] MartyLK:
I couldn't agree more with your statement. I see WP7 as a super refined and carefully created masterpiece of a mobile OS. And from just one day's worth of exploring it, it will be something Steve Jobs would be jealous for. It doesn't have all the desired features yet, but Microsoft will be doing the OS upgrades rather than carriers and they will be adding the needed features as the system matures.

I use Android on my HD2 and find it a very user friendly experience, but it is, just like another poster said, "a Ford" compared to this Cadillac OS of WP7.
[Windows Phone 7 General] addicus:
The issue in the Windows Mobile vs iOS debate was Microsoft had a gigantic amount of legacy users to answer to - mostly on the business end who had forked out gigantic amounts of money to use MS's products while Apple basically had a fresh slate to do whatever they felt was right. Google had the same opportunity as Apple and chose not to follow it. In retrospect Google should have kept the power to update the software in house.
[Windows Phone 7 General] vangrieg:
They couldn't possibly pull this off. Technically they have little control over the end product because it's heavily customized by OEMs and MOs, just like WM was. They just can't guarantee that their updates won't break all those devices. Politically they didn't have much of a product in the beginning so they attracted OEMs by giving them all the freedom they wanted, and they'll get a lot of push back if they try to change it. And finally, they don't care. They need as many people to access their services as possible, and they want to destroy the layer between themselves and you. To that end they make a free OS and the number of its flavors doesn't matter. Heck, they don't even care if you know what their OS is. They just don't want you to buy a phone because it has Windows on it.
[Windows Phone 7 General] addicus:
Please explain how Windows Phone 7 is not new? It is vastly different than what was being created as Windows Mobile 7 and what we now have as Windows Mobile 3-6.5.x. I would like to know more.
[Windows Phone 7 General] arturobandini:
Why take WP7 over android?

The music player for instance...

Zune is absolutely great. Android has no decent music player.

This is what decided me to chose a WP7 device rather than the Desire HD.
[Windows Phone 7 General] addicus:
I know your point, but they had the opportunity to do this from the beginning and the precedent was already started by Apple so it wouldn't have been extremely difficult since ground was previously broken on this matter. In retrospect, WM should have never been fragmented either as MS never upgraded the pc software that way. They always made the software upgrade available by download or purchasing it in the store. Phones OS's should have never been at the whim of the carriers and I'm glad Apple figured this out no matter how much I hate that damn company.
[Windows Phone 7 General] harolds:
If all you use your phone for is listening to music, then maybe. Your better of buying a device designed specifically for listening to music, you'll get more listening time between charges, and a great interface/player.

But if you use your phone for 100's of other things as I do, Android is far better since WP7 only does about a half dozen of them.

If I wanted an Apple I'd get an iPhone.

Hopefully in the very near future (fingers crossed), WP7 updates will address most of these missing things.
[Windows Phone 7 General] lumpaywk:
why choose wp7 over android well-

Zune - not just a good or better but a different league to anything else out there let alone androids poor excuse of a player

Xbox Live - yes it rules though tbh it be even better if the avatar in the hub was animated like i thought it was going to be as well as in the extras.

office - cant beat ms for this

looks - android looks like linux acts like linux basically is linux so it does lots of neat powerful things yet still looks like something from the 90's

quality - some android phones are amazing desire/galexy s but as a whole there is no standard android is in anything and thus you cant be sure of quality where Microsoft has some strong rules to keep manufacturers in check.

yes i will admit i miss wireless tethering though tbh it used to annoy me with my wife always going hay hook me up so i can use my ipod. The browser is way better in android but is a battery killer much like the rest of the os. But for me and it really is a personal choice at the end of the day i wont look back i miss my desire sure but my hd7 kicks its ass.

ps it should note though that i think ms isnt after android that's us techy folk i personally think there going after symbian and ios. Android is a different beast altogether and has its market like bb does and once people get over the its the in thing they will move on. Look at it like this i know a load of people with blackberrys who got them cos they thought they where great but dont use much email and deffo not business so they don't get anything out of it and find out the rest of the os does not stack up. The problem is most people know squat so they go for what they hear people saying and what they swarmy phone shop man needs to flog off that month. MS has a great product for most users its by far the best for extreme users (ie must have multi task for what they do etc) i would recommend something more tailored for them but the success lies with how well they get the name into the heads of the public.
[Windows Phone 7 General] vetvito:
You just answered your own question. Yes it is different than WM, but different doesn't mean new. Metro is not new.

Don't misunderstand me I like Microsoft but this is a slap in the face to loyal users.
[Windows Phone 7 General] vangrieg:
I don't believe they had the slightest chance to do this from the beginning. Certainly not with the product they had at that time, and even if it were better, they still couldn't do it. There's absolutely no way all these OEMs would to a Google's platform that would not let them "differentiate" by "adding value" as they like to call it. Verizon wouldn't spend tens of millions of dollars on ads if they couldn't rebrand Android in their own way, hoping to own their flavor of the platform by adding their own markets, changing search engines and what not - tinkering with it where they can and wish.

Apple can do it because they make their own phone (they don't need to worry about OEM deals), because it's only one phone (no matter how popular it is, it won't have 90% of the market, so it's not seen as a threat by MOs), and because it's Apple (a brand promise of a "cool" something that will create lines of followers from day one, so while MOs can frown upon it they still smell bucks). Already for MS it's much more difficult because they want to "own" the end product and market it more directly to end users, making MOs and OEMs less important (thus you'll never see a Nokia with WP7, or a dedicated "Droid"-like campaign from any operator). And for Google at the times of G1 it was outright impossible.

As I vaguely understand, desktop Windows is vastly different in terms of architecture from a mobile OS, and MS has to spend a lot of time and resources to let this happen, building in abstraction layers, reference drivers and all that stuff. Even then it causes blue screens, performance penalties and so on. People with more knowledge about embedded systems tell me unequivocally that it's plain impossible on ARM-powered OSes like WinCE - every device is unique and you have to deal with it, and there's not enough power to support desktop class hardware abstraction. So technically it's either tight control and limited ability to tinker with the OS by OEMs or WM/Android style fragmentation.

From the business perspective, both WM and Android are products made for OEMs, not end users. Neither pre-WP7 MS nor Google really cared. For the latter it's a "numbers game" as they call it all the time - getting it on as many devices as possible as fast as possible.
[Windows Phone 7 General] vetvito:
Nice ass post Vangrieg.
[Windows Phone 7 General] MartyLK:
Believe it or not, and I find it loony, but Google was reported to say they got into the Mobile OS market to avoid an Orwellian type future...lol

That in itself would cause them to do thing more openly than what they could have done.
[Windows Phone 7 General] Tom Servo:
A majority of WP7 is written in managed code (e.g. C#) and Iris UIX is a managed framework.

Actually, from what I've seen in Reflector (a pretty powerful MSIL disassembler), it's quite similar to WPF/Silverlight in how it works, i.e. a huge managed framework that builds render graphs and a native code rendering component.

Anyway, the web browser is likely a mixed component, where the UI is managed code and the actual HTML renderer is a native component used via .NET interop.

The normal case is more like activating it and stuffing it away, for instance on a hike or a bike tour. Then review the data when back home.

I meant that independently from the lack of these controls. If you start a project and create a blank page from the page template, then immediately run it, if you compare it to the system page layout, you'll notice that fonts and positioning are off. Here's a screenshot of it, which I submitted to the Visual Studio beta program:

http://www.storageserver.be/images/vsblendtemplate.png

Might be a minor gripe, but that shouldn't happen.
[Windows Phone 7 General] vangrieg:
I remember an interview with a couple MS WP7 devs on Channel 9 where they were asked about Iris. Their response was "Er, what is it?" Funny. Anyway, it doesn't look like something that's planned to be released anytime soon, if ever. Maybe it's a branch that'll merge with WPF/SL with time and only used internally for some projects. Maybe it's one of the things that are only used internally, MS have those - look at Office UI, for example. Even if it's relatively well developed there are lots of requirements for a public release that may never be met. Hard to say.

Yes, these things definitely shouldn't happen. Let's hope they will iron them out by either adjusting VS templates or the components within the OS.
[Windows Phone 7 General] Windcape:
It's the framework used for the Ribbon in Office 11, and the Zune Desktop Client.

I've not seen any proof of it's used for WP7.
[Windows Phone 7 General] Tom Servo:
It's not used in Office.

And if you'd check the contents of a WP7 image, you'd notice these UIX.* DLLs.

Supposedly, it's a fork of the UI framework of Media Center. The XML markup is pretty similar. I don't see it being merged into WPF/Silverlight tho, since the object model appears to be completely different, from what I've gleaned in Reflector.
[Windows Phone 7 General] IM0001:
At launch WP7 is going to have some strong features (and lack others) that could swap android users/potential buyers. But the main thing here is we are still comparing a OS that has gained traction over the last 2 years where WP7 is not even out yet.

I believe WP7 will be pretty darn good out of the box (unlike Android in its start but it grew) and WP7 will continue to grow and improve just like Android did. If Android can outdo the iPhone in only 2 years, WP7 can regain traction as well. I will not say what it will surpass with the mass of amazing tech and OS'es coming out these days. But it will gain traction that WP6.5 has lost over the last year or so (I blame 6.5's downfall this year mainly to the lack of new handsets (No CDMA HD2, :( as well as loss of dev support since everyone know WP7 is on its way.)

Either way I think it is still way to early to cast judgment on anything WP7 atm and wait and see what Microsoft really has in store for us over the course of 2011. Microsoft has learned a lot over the last few years throughout its company and I believe they will get a lot of things right with WP7. The only thing they will have trouble with is entering such a critic infested market where people are already waving Android and iOS flags. It will be a Battle more or less, but one Microsoft looks geared up to bring in some superweapons of their own.
[Windows Phone 7 General] efjay:
Sir, this is not the place for reasonable and well thought out posts like yours. Suggesting that WP7 has any chance is heresy and will not be tolerated. Your post will remain as an example of how not to contribute to the constant bashing and "WP7 will fail" posts.
[Windows Phone 7 General] eknutson:
The post, in addition to being well thought out and reasonable, also lacked personal attacks - which made the poster seem to be much older than 5th grade. Quite unusual in this sub-forum. Without name-calling, how can we be sure you know what you're talking about?

Also, by staying on-topic and avoiding a holy-war mentality, the poster of this comment leaves the casual reader unable to assess whether or not you believe what you say. Please be sure to allude to catastrophes, death, pestilence, and inbreeding in further posts, helping the reader to avoid carelessly choosing a phone / OS that fits them, and instead to make a choice the best way possible: A hate-filled (dis)popularity contest.
[Windows Phone 7 General] Fermat:
The best thing about Android is that it can look like WP7

I LOVE the WP7 design!

(oh and I threw that theme together in 20 minutes, yes I know it's not perfect and the widget sizes are not the same ;))
[Windows Phone 7 General] vetvito:
^ You don't have to swype to get to your information? It's all there? You can play and change music on your screen?

That's better than WP7.
[Windows Phone 7 General] havox22:
I think thats what im gonna miss most once i get a wp7 device is the different UIs...I get bored with them quickly, but its good having options....yes the theme is similar to wp7, but i think where wp7 really shines is with the animations, plus wheres your avatar/xbox hub :D
[Windows Phone 7 General] havox22:
you dont have to swipe on the wp7 start screen & to change songs just hit the vol button then pause or change tracks, even tho that is an extra step it will be available thru out the whole os so no need to return to the start screen or music app
[Windows Phone 7 General] vetvito:
^ How about that twitter information?
[Windows Phone 7 General] gom99:
It's not about looking the same, it's about functioning the same. To judge wp7 sololy on looks is to miss the point.

Can you:

-Pin just about anything to your start screen?

-Can you move those tiles around just holding and dragging?

-Is looking the same going to create hubs for you?

I can continue, but you get the point. There are plenty of wp7 themes for wm too.
[Windows Phone 7 General] havox22:
any twitter app will be able to be a live tile if pinned, plus i dont use twitter so it wont be on my start screen anyway
[Windows Phone 7 General] Fermat:
It's Twitter, Facebook, SMS and Mail. Everything right there.

Honestly it functions even better. It doesn't look as good but the functionality is better.

Yes. Not "just about" anything but anything.

Of course.

No, but I prefer accessing everything directly instead of having "hubs" in between... what are they for anyway?

Oh and can you choose the sizes of the tiles in WP7?

What about scrollable tiles?

Yes, but it's hard work to do that on WM. You have to create a complete homescreen replacement.

Those screenshots, I did that in 20 minutes... I know it's not perfect yet, but try doing that on WM ;)

You'd have to implement the tiles, the moving around, pinning other stuff to the home screen etc. - that's a lot of work to do on WM, but on Android everything is right there, all you have to do is a bit of skinning (and you can still make your own widgets or even your own launcher if you want).
[Windows Phone 7 General] Fermat:
I can tell you what's awesome about WP7.

The Microsoft services: SkyDrive, Office Live, Zune...

The UI design: Typography and squares... best UI design I've ever seen (though it needs some functionality improvements, like making some headlines smaller so that they don't take half the screen).

I hate the iPhone and sadly, the rest of WP7 is pretty much an exact copy of the iPhone.
[Windows Phone 7 General] paperclips:
Eh, that type of functionality isn't really important to me. It looks cluttered which would annoy the hell out of me.

On Android, you can't pin anything to your desktop as easily as you can in WP7. For example, it takes a second to pin a playlist to my home screen, or a web page, or an album, but on Android... I'm actually not sure how I would go about doing that. I own an Android device, but am not sure at all on how to do it.

Hubs are there so you don't have to constantly switch between apps. For example, you're in contacts, you can swype to what's new instead of exiting the app, going to facebook, or going to twitter. Why exactly would I want a scrollable tile? That's not even necessary.

On WP7, moving tiles is just as easy as it would be on Android but it looks better and it's more responsive. Skinning is easy, but making your own widgets and launchers isn't exactly something most people can easily pick up.
[Windows Phone 7 General] paperclips:
So besides the Microsoft exclusive applications, services, and the design of the UI it's an exact copy of the iPhone? There isn't really much else to an operating system.
[Windows Phone 7 General] PreVayl:
hit the nail on the head. TEN POINTS. great point you mentioned about wp7 phone dual boot with android but not visa-versa. since thats the case, and they get android to work great, then the question is WHY NOT WP7 phone with android dual booted, the most recent leak states HTC HD3 with 16 GB internal mem, + 1 gb rom 1 gb ram, loading the android on the internal mem (16gb) would run so much faster then running off the sd card and at the same time you add a 1.5 ghz snapdragon to the equation OMFG im gonna pass out. both os will run insanely well. best of both worlds.
[Windows Phone 7 General] iamcrazyfire:
How about iphone and android exclusive application ?If iphone no apps ?who love iphone?If android can't user google service ?who ****ing love android?

anyway ,I can't see anything wp7 UI copy of the iphone:confused:
[Windows Phone 7 General] mmelo76:
Cleaning done, thread reopened until next flame, fights or attacks.

Cleaned offtopic comments or rude, or attacks or responses to attacks ....

Please let's keep the tone of the conversation in a minor key, and no flames or offtopic.

if there are new flames, will close permanently.

I appreciate the cooperation of all..
[Windows Phone 7 General] addicus:
That is a very clarifying post vangrieg. I still contend that Google could have followed Apples direction and made a solid phone with one carrier and pushed it out with a massive advertising budget (Nexus 1 type). T Mobile USA would have jumped on it. Beyond that my point was more about their software fragmentation being avoided. They could have owned the update control if they actually chose to have that as part of their long term strategy. They didn't look that far and/or didn't care.
[Windows Phone 7 General] vetvito:
If Google is winning without any advertising, imagine what can happen if they did. Just food for thought.
[Windows Phone 7 General] vangrieg:
Google isn't advertising the OS, but the handsets were/are heavily advertised. Android itself just doesn't mean much, its a bunch of very different devices with very different capabilities.
[Windows Phone 7 General] doministry:
What is also good for user who is able to choose from different propositions.
[Windows Phone 7 General] N8ter:
Only if they don't care that an application they need doesn't support their phone because of the issues this causes.

Google had the Nexus One. They recieved a ridiculous amount of free advertisement from the tech press and it still didn't sell all that well.

The fact that it was only available off-contract doesn't really matter, given you could use it with a plethora of carriers and iPhones cost more than Nexus ones off contract. People are willing to pay almost a grand for those, and more people bought off-contract iPhones than Nexus ones.

Android is winning the same way Symbian is winning. It's cheap and available for low-end through high-end devices, so everyone is going to use it. People use it in tablets and crap even when they can't get market access, as well, because it is not heavily regulated and cheap to use.

As far as usability and consistency is concerned, it's not winning anything.
[Windows Phone 7 General] vetvito:
^ I agree with you up until your last statement.
[Windows Phone 7 General] paperclips:
iPhone has iPod and iTunes. Android has no apps like this really, its appeal is that it's open source. So I'll take Zune, Xbox Live, Microsoft Office, and perfect Exchange support. I didn't say WP7 copied the iPhone... your comment is very confusing.
[Windows Phone 7 General] RustyGrom:
Android's appeal is that it's a functional smartphone OS that's not iPhone and not on AT&T (for US people). 99% of people don't care or even know that it's open source.
[Windows Phone 7 General] paperclips:
Actually it's not just that it's a functional OS. It has many hardware variations, it's customizable, and has Flash support. I chose Android not because I wanted to leave AT&T or that I hate the iPhone. I chose Android because the Droid Incredible was the closest thing I could get to a Nexus One on Verizon.
[Windows Phone 7 General] markus_del_marko:
i can remember when i owned my touch vogue and the devs here just ported android to it. i kept trying it and i hated it for some reason...i dunno maybe fear of change? but im telling you since i bought my sprint hero & evo i have been in love with android and could never go back to winmo. wp7 will never change my mind on that.

i still think wp7 will be a failed launch and microsoft will pull their hat out of the mobile device field. they should stick to pc's, they have a winner with windows 7.