[HD2 General] xaccers:
Had another look at the WP7 in the O2 shop next door, and I tried, I really did try, but I'm just not impressed.

It feels so slow to open anything, ok slow isn't the right word, long winded is probably better, but it feels so slow.

The HTC hub takes ages to load, yes you get a pretty and travel sickness inducing animation, but on my Leo I tap something and it appears.

Played with the weather, made the mistake of touching the screen to go back and we're flying again as it'd decided I wanted to look up the weather in tokyo.

Don't think about having any "saucy" photos of your gf on the phone, nor could I find a setting for slideshow or more annoyingly "auto rotate to fit" as landscape photos are shown in portrait. Now the phone was on a stand which while it could spin and wobble a bit, you couldn't hold the phone on it's side so I don't know if it turns when you turn the phone.

Talking of settings, if you see an emo kid with one of these, don't ever let them into the settings menus if sharp objects are around, they are so depressing I wanted to slit my wrists. Settings menus which make you need prozac? That ain't good! It's just so damn depressing.

There was of course no sim in the phone (although the usb lead was removable, must remember that if I'm ever passing an O2 shop and need to charge my Leo), so the internet features weren't available, but I could go into the xbox hub, to be greeted by an annoying animated charactor. I'm 33 not 3. It's annoying on the Xbox, it was bloody annoying in Office and the old Windows search, just take me to the damn list of games!

Oh god, MS do love their lists. Yes you have the first screen with it's duplo brick buttons depressingly dull, and yes you can pin apps to it giving you more duplo bricks, or fewer if you like black.

I don't know about you, but judging by the amount of wallpaper threads on this forum, most phone users like a good picture on the background, and icons tend to get in the way of that, so for me, something like SPB MS does the job, I have a few transparent icons on my desktop and a single button which takes me to my favourite apps, and from there I can get to the rest.

WP7 the duplo bricks get in the way of blackness. Hmm, maybe we need to think outside the box, take the image we want, break it up into duplo bricks, and set them as the icons for apps! Ok there'll be a thick grid disrupting the image but by god it's got to be better than MS's offering.

I hadn't tried something on the keyboard last time I'd checked out the phone, so I gave it a go today, held down one of the top row keys, and while it popped up a row of alternatives, none of them were numbers. So while on my Leo I can just hold "e" down and get a "3", not on WP7. Again as the phone was held down I couldn't see if the keyboard has a landscape mode, only the 1/2 screen portrait mode. Like the home screen, it seems designed with the morbidly obese in mind.

On my Leo, if I press the call button (missing from WP7) I get a list of people I recently called, and the keypad. WP7, you get three teenie tiny icons, I have to confess other than the keypad one I've completely forgotten what the other 2 are, the interface was just too depressing.

So making a phone call is several taps away. Like I said, everything on this phone seems long winded.

Certain aspects of the interface left me feeling like I was staring into the face of a Dementor with no option to manifest a patronus, other bits just felt cobbled together without much thought.

I think I'm going to have to go out again and buy some chocolate to recover.