Windows Phone 7 - This Week's Unexpected Joy

My Windows Phone 7 phone arrived this week in the form of the HTC 7 Trophy. After the joy of iPhone 4 and the unexpected sluggishness of my HTC Desire HD, how would the new phone stack up - and how easy is it to develop for?

In this image Nick holds his HTC 7 Trophy Window Phone 7 handset.

Firstly, the phone was easy to set up. It downloaded all the appropriate cellular settings (such as voicemail number and data connection info) from my cellular network, 3, quickly. Then it was a case of linking to my Windows Live ID / XBox Live account which I have had setup for my Xbox previously.

Next, the phone's setup wizard guided me through linking to my various email accounts and associated contacts lists, which updated speedily. Linking to Facebook was just as swift - and afterwards many of my contacts had images just as they had before on the Android phone.

The WP7 then amalgamated all my contact/friend information into a 'People' app which is easy to use and joins up Facebook comments to contact phone numbers. The linking worked well. I could take individual people I contact regularly and pin them to the home page to form their own square for quick access.

The 'home page' of the phone is a series of boxes - mostly square but some rectangular - that act as mini-screens for the apps they represent. It was easy to move the squares around, unpin them, and pin other apps from the list. The squares themselves are rarely static, instead sliding up images of friends, email counts or the weather symbol and temperature.

I noticed how speedily the phone operated, with smooth graphics and a sure-footedness when finger-swiping that was often lacking on the two android phones I have owned (Google Nexus One and HTC Desire HD). By this I mean that on the android phones, I would often have to swipe twice or more to get an icon to move to operate a function. I did wonder if this was HTC hardware, but I have never yet experienced this problem on this HTC 7 Trophy phone, so I'm focussing the problem towards android itself.

Even more interesting is how sensitive this phone is to mobile signals (from the 3 network) compared to my HTC Desire HD. Not only are the signal strength bars reading stronger but I can use the 3 network throughout my house whereas the Desire only works upstairs - and poorly at that.

If Apple iPhone 'insists' on the presence of iTunes, then the WP7 'desires' (not insists on) the presence of Zune, Microsoft's equivalent media syncing application. Unlike iPhone, the WP7 phone works straight out of the box once you install a SIM, whereas the iPhone has the stark 'connect me to iTunes' graphic and is locked until you do so.

However, like iPhone (but unlike Android) the WP7 phone cannot perform its own system updates unaided. I am impressed how Android can perform its own updates. I needed to update WP7 twice using Zune - a short February update and and a very long March update, the latter which took the phone out of use for over 30 minutes. However it was worth it for the copy & paste capability that then appeared. This morning another update arrived, which took about 10 minutes to complete.

As we know, there are a lack of apps in the Zune Marketplace at the moment, although the ones I use a lot such as eBay, Twitter and Kindle were present - oh and two Tesco apps of course! The apps that are there are useful - such as the London tube network journey planner. More apps will come (and I will help by developing myself!) - time will resolve this problem.

So to development: Oh wonderful! A download of the Windows 7 development tools and then into Visual Studio 2010 and my beloved C# programming language. Not the hugely cut down .Net Compact Framework either but a really big subset of the full Framework.  So a spot of C#, a smattering of easy Silverlight XAML, 2 minutes and I had an interactive app running in the WP7 emulator phone. Five more minutes and £65 poorer, I had joined the Microsoft App Hub application development portal which, on activation, will unlock my phone so I can test apps directly on it (much like the iPhone development system).

I did wonder if Windows Phone 7 could match iPhone and I declare them equal apart from the app count - and no need to develop using a low-down and frustrating programming language such as Apple's Objective-C - thus my "unexpected joy". I also see clearly that Android seems to need more power than the same hardware affords it compared to the other phones. 

So Windows Phone 7 is a hit with me and this phone is now my primary handset - that's saying something. Well done, Microsoft; well done!

On the Microsoft and Nokia mobile deal

Few things have excited me as much over the last few months than the work that Microsoft has done to create Windows Phone 7 (WP7), and the news that came in last Friday announcing that they have teamed up with Nokia (or Nokia has teamed up with them, or both!) brings me yet more joy.

My enthusiasm comes from two points of view:

1. The excellent user interface. Abandoned (finally!) is the attempt to make the phone interface look like a Windows desktop. The WP7 interface is different, engaging, and pseudo three-dimensional. As the owner of the US-edition of a Zune HD player, I had an early access to the new look and I absolutely loved it from day one. The reason is that your mind can get used to the many options across the various screens quickly because the 3D-esque interface acts either as a turning page or as a zoom-in to each lower level / zoom-out to each higher level. I never lose sense of where I am. It looks good, too.
2. The joy of programming it! Sometimes I pull my hair out when I'm programming in Apple's Objective-C (the iPhone's computer language) and have to set running special 'objects' just to join two text strings together. Microsoft's C# (Java-like) language for the variant of the .Net Framework for WP7 is just set at the perfect level - "high enough" to cope with coding I don't need to think about (e.g. joining two text strings together by simply coding "text string 1" + "text string 2") but "low enough" to get down and dirty with efficient algorithm programming when needed. I code all my R&D projects in C#/.Net - and the Tesco API is coded end-to-end in it. Its reliability and performance is astounding.

So why my additional joy at Nokia joining the party? Simple: I think Nokia make the most reliable hardware - honed and tuned from years of skill and experience. My Nokia phones could be dropped, sat on, thrown about and they still work to this day. I think they still make the best looking hardware as well - I still have the gorgeous Nokia 8110 slide-phone as seen in the movie The Matrix - and it still works wonderfully albeit on only GSM 900 networks (O2 / Tesco and Vodafone in the UK) despite its heavy use in its day, and a few years left on the shelf with its battery still connected.

So, bring Microsoft and Nokia together and... well I better start saving up 'cos I'm going to be first in the queue.

Meet the developers behind our Windows Phone 7 app

I'd like you to meet a couple of people - Sangeetha Rao and Rajiv Agarwal.

Not heard their names before? Well that's about to change - indeed not only will you know them - you're about to trust them. After all, if you have a Windows Phone 7 mobile and you download our Tesco Groceries app onto it, it's their code you'll be running!

So I better introduce them to you:

Image of Sangeetha and Rajiv next to their development machine

(photo taken by Vishwa Kiran)

Sangeetha and Rajiv are part of the Tesco.com Strategy and Innovation team based both at Tesco.com HQ in Welwyn Garden City, UK and in our development centre in Bangalore, India. It has been their considerable task to take Ribot's design and make it real on Windows Phone 7. They did everything: XAML, C# code, multi-threaded architecture, the lot. What's more they did it in record time to match Microsoft's unmovable launch deadline and they delivered code of such a high standard that it passed Microsoft's rigid phone testing procedures with flying colours.

Sangeetha and Rajiv are graduates from India's exceptionally high quality university talent pool. Their thoughtfulness, intelligence, and passion to push the boundaries of innovation have really blown me away. I'm deeply proud that they have delivered such an exceptionally good app that Microsoft are saying that their phone can be aimed at Tesco shoppers.

Their boss (and mine), Vishwa Kiran, Head of IT Strategy and Innovation, has been deeply impressed too. In an email to the team Vishwa said, "A successful mission for the Innovation team. Great effort all around. Thanks and congratulations !!".

Windows Phone 7 Design

Ribot and our innovation team at Tesco.com have really done us proud in the design and development of Tesco Groceries for Windows Phone 7.

If you imagine that the phone's screen is a vertical window over a portion of the application, then this is what the full screen would look like (click for larger version):

It's an absolutely clean and fresh design, and you access its various elements by swiping your fingers left and right across the phone.

(Incidentally 'Becky' is our very own Rebecca Pate who has helped project manage this application from the marketing and design perspective. A job well done I think!).

Tesco Groceries app logo on Windows 7 Phone

Great still from a BBC video of the Tesco Groceries logo sitting nicely in a square on a Windows 7 Phone.

See the full video of the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones interviewing Microsoft's Ashley Highfield here. Thanks to Twitter followers for pointing this video out to me!

Tesco Groceries - for Windows Phone 7

Yes we've made a Tesco Groceries app for Windows Phone 7!
Designed by Ribot, built by our newly formed mobile development team (well done guys and girls).

Watch the live webcast here - the Tesco app is part of the demo in this webcast.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/windowsphone/liveEvent.aspx

I'll update the link to archived footage showing the app when Microsoft make it available.



(Android - Android - Android .... work in progress...!)