Luke Mathis wrote a great review of Windows Phone 7 that has been passed around the White Male Tech Bloggers Network over the past few days. In it, Mathis drew many of the same parallels I did in my review Windows Phone 7. It’s a fantastic first release, but is being held back by lackluster hardware and a poor app catalog.
I’ve been using my Samsung Focus as my primary phone in lieu of my iPhone 4 over the past few weeks since Microsoft (finally) shipped the NoDo update and I love the platform even more as I use it. It’s still a ways from being the polished experience that is iOS, but its social integration and design aesthetics are refreshing.
Microsoft recently passed the 20,000 app count in its catalog. Though I consider app counts to be a poor metric for a platforms success, it’s hard to deny that its a decent milestone for an upstart platform that isn’t even a year old. Unfortunately, like any platform with thousands of apps you have to sift through the junk to find the true gems. My general rules is that for every 100 apps in an App Store, one of them is truly good.
I don’t have 200 good to great apps on my Windows Phone, but I do have a few that I am really enjoying and would like to highlight for anyone else who happens upon a Windows Phone in the wild.
My Trips – A TripIt client for Windows Phone that sticks pretty close to the Metro UI guidelines. It also has a live tile that updates with your flight details so you can just glance at the start screen without having to actually launch the app.
Rowi – As with any mobile platform, there isn’t a lack of Twitter clients. I am pretty sure I have tried them all and my favorite is Rowi. It only supports a single account, but its UI is minimalist and it supports live tile updates and push notifications so I can see when I have new direct messages or mentions.
4th & Mayor – I am not a heavy Foursquare user, but I keep it on my phone for those times when I do want to check in or see what tips are available for a specific venue. The official Foursquare app for Windows Phone is severely lacking, and I really prefer the independent effort by Microsoft developer Jeff Wilcox. It should be held up as an example of how to build an app for the platform. It’s top notch.
BART Rider – Given that I’ll be in San Francisco for WWDC next week, I needed an app that had the train schedules on it for my phone. There are three available, but BART Rider has the best experience of them all.
WonderReader – An RSS reader that supports syncing with Google Reader. This was one of the first apps I downloaded and it’s still one of my favorites. It’s one of the more full-featured apps I have found on the platform.
Improving The Third Party Experience
Mathis took the time to highlight some of his frustrations with the platform. He listed scrolling performance, the lack of multitasking, paid versions and performance as his biggest issues.
I agree with all of those and hope that the forthcoming Mango release will speed up the performance of many apps. My biggest frustration with Windows Phone apps, however, is how many of them block the interface when performing a network operation.
Traditionally when performing a network operation such as grabbing a list of tweets or loading a web page, you are supposed to perform that network operation on a background thread while your user interface remains responsive on the main thread. If you send the network operation on the main thread, your user interface is unresponsive until the connection completes. There are a few apps that do this on iOS, but on Windows Phone it seems like every app has a habit of blocking the UI with network activity rather than passing it to a background thread.
I don’t know enough about the .Net stack to guess as to why that is, but I really hope it is something that improves as the app marketplace matures.