WP worth a buy? Need suggestion.

Hi all,

I've been waiting for the lauch of WP7 for a long time. Now the price is relative acceptable for me. But a lot of issues still exist. I work in Russia, so I need a unlocked phone which is very hard to find in United States. People always complain about the sync of contacts. I want to use WP7 to receive emails but I don't want to put my business contacts on Windows Live. Pros & Cons made confused. Is WP7 worth a buy now? Do you have any recommendations (HTC HD7, Dell Venue Pro, etc)? How to buy a unlocked phone?

Any sugggestion is appreciated!

I've been waiting for the lauch of WP7 for a long time. Now the price is relative acceptable for me. But a lot of issues still exist. I work in Russia, so I need a unlocked phone which is very hard to find in United States.

Get one in Europe, where in most places it's possible to get a phone SIM-unlocked legitimately, but be sure to check with the carrier first.

People always complain about the sync of contacts. I want to use WP7 to receive emails but I don't want to put my business contacts on Windows Live.

Windows Phone 7 supports having multiple EAS accounts (Exchange and Hotmail are both EAS services, Microsoft claims Google is too) so that shouldn't be a problem. So you can continue to keep your personal and business lives separate (but then, why are you using Hotmail for business?)

Pros & Cons made confused. Is WP7 worth a buy now? Do you have any recommendations (HTC HD7, Dell Venue Pro, etc)? How to buy a unlocked phone?

I would not personally buy a WP7 device. The OS still falls short of what iOS provides, and Microsoft's hardware mandate needs updating. If you had to get a device, the HTC HD7 is highly regarded by critics.

You can buy an unlocked phone (or a locked phone you can trivially unlock legitimately) from pretty much anywhere in Europe.

Any sugggestion is appreciated!

Get an iPhone. Seriously. I've been using Windows on devices since 2001 (when it was called PocketPC 2000) and my iPhone (which I've had for only a month now) fits into my near-homogenous Microsoft/Windows-only environment fine.

Failing that, get an Android. At least those two platforms have a large ecosystem around them. The developer community around WP7 seems to be on artificial life-support from Microsoft.

I used an iPhone since the day of release and its a great phone.  But I switched to WP7 when it came back and never looked back.  I'ts a nicer UI IMO.  Major pros and cons (for me):

Pros:

• Nicer Ui
• Better integration (XBOX,Office,Facebook etc)
• Great development environment (VS/Blend)
• Great development support (Ch9,MSDN,BizSpark etc)

Cons:

• Not as many apps.
• Less revolutionary Apps? (ie most app ideas already exist on the iPhone)
• Apple has a great story!

So my personal recomendation is a WP7 phone (I like the HD7 for screen size and the LG Quantum - for keyboard and great bundled apps)

I think that while it is true to say that the WP7 ecosystem is still emerging the story looks very good and has the advantage of being

• Less fragmented than Android
• Less bespoke than Apple 

For best value get a second hand device from eBay (check out COM and CO.UK and DE).

It will cost you next to nothing to get it unlocked over the web in a matter of minutes.

I'm looking forward to seeing a Nokia running WP7! Purchasing will be getting a new request come release of those!  

25 minutes ago, CaRDiaK wrote

I'm looking forward to seeing a Nokia running WP7! Purchasing will be getting a new request come release of those!  

A Nokia device would be just like the others by Samsung, HTC, etc. The hardware quality from the others is fine, I don't see what Nokia can add we can't already get from other companies.

@CaRDiaK:Would you mind asking purchasing to get one for me while you are at it.  Thanks.

@RoyTellect: I'm personally pretty happy with my Dell Venue Pro, it works great as a phone, music player and "keep in touch with people" device. The only "missing feature" that personally affects me significantly is that there's a severe lack of music-related apps compared to the iPhone/iPod touch, which is partly due to the lack of an exposed native API to enable low-latency interaction. But I also have an iPod touch v4 so it doesn't bother me much...   

However, I've also heard that outside the US (where I live) some of the key services, like Zune, associated with the phone aren't available yet, so some of the advantages (the Zune Pass service is pretty great) don't apply. So if you're in Russia it might be better to look elsewhere (or wait a year, since the Nokia deal will probably improve things in this respect).

If you can't wait, then get an iPhone

If you can wait for a few months, then have a look at HP has to offer with the new WebOS line

If you can wait another eighteen months, then have a look at what Microsoft/Nokia have to offer with the not-so-new WP7 line.

I have a WP7 phone and while the UI is the best, it is just not ready to take on the competition yet.

A few days ago, the phone rang and no matter how much I flicked the screen or pressed buttons, it wouldn't let me answer it.

Bizarre.

@Ray7: I've had the same problem. also randomly sometimes on my HD7 the screen goes mad with all the colours going green and parts of the screen getting all mashed up with each other flickering on and off.

I tend to restart my HD7 much more than I ever did with my iPhone 4 or 3GS for that matter.

Still, I do like alot of aspects of WP7.

fwiw, I've never encountered any problems with phone calls or "flickering" on my Venue Pro. Though I have had a few Marketplace crashes over the six weeks I've had the phone, and one IE crash. At least it reboots in 15-20 seconds ...

My iPod touch has mostly been free of this kind of problem (over ~3 months?). Though once it somehow got into a state where it froze up thinking it was trying to sync or something, but wouldn't actually sync, so I had to reboot it.

20 hours ago, W3bbo wrote

Phone 7 supports having multiple EAS accounts (Exchange and Hotmail are both EAS services, Microsoft claims Google is too) so that shouldn't be a problem. So you can continue to keep your personal and business lives separate (but then, why are you using Hotmail for business?)

 

Oh, really! I didn't know that. Sounds good!

Failing that, get an Android. At least those two platforms have a large ecosystem around them. The developer community around WP7 seems to be on artificial life-support from Microsoft.

Yeah, I agree with you. I'm an enthusiast of MSFT too. But I have to say there are still so much things to improve and I don't know why they can not simply make it better at first time. I still want to buy a WP7. Hopefully MSFT can make a good patch of it. And our enthusiastic community can make more contribution to it.

18 hours ago, Ian2 wrote

I used an iPhone since the day of release and its a great phone.  But I switched to WP7 when it came back and never looked back.  I'ts a nicer UI IMO.  Major pros and cons (for me):

Pros:

• Nicer Ui
• Better integration (XBOX,Office,Facebook etc)
• Great development environment (VS/Blend)
• Great development support (Ch9,MSDN,BizSpark etc)

Cons:

• Not as many apps.
• Less revolutionary Apps? (ie most app ideas already exist on the iPhone)
• Apple has a great story!

Thank you very much, Ian2!

Seems WP7 doesn't support sync of documents without skydrive. That's so weird. When I talked to my friends about WP7, they were so surprised about the missing feature even a 90s' old mobile has.

@contextfree` Thanks. Venue Pro is cool! But seems it's more difficult to unlock it than HD7 or surrounder.  Since Dell kick people off to TMo and TMo punch people to Dell...

@RoyTellect:

All cell phones in Taiwan are all unlocked because there is no lock to begin with. Meaning, you can buy HTC Surround, HD7, Samsung, etc and none of them are locked. You need to tweek the connection setup, so, HTC actually has an app to help you doing that.

I got my HD7 unlocked from here  - I got the code back in a few minutes and it took seconds to unlock, very painless.

In other news I just discovered that LG phones apear to be faster than HTC - might be worth looking in to as they also have a great story with their bundled software and support DLNA, (which is surprisingly useful).

@webbo Seriously? 

They won't be alike one bit if you ask me. Nokia have always had very impressive hardware and fantastic designs with their devices. I'm looknig forward to a smartphone with Carl Ziess lens and Xenon flash for starters... You'll only get this from the likes of Nokia. These LED flashes on the camera's these day are only useful as a torch and imaging seems to come as an after thought to everything else. Which is a shame if you ask me becuase clearly both can be done. Someone just needs to merge the two?

Your choices these days are a decent image phone or a decent social/smart phone. 

There isn't a 'one device to rule them all...' although now, potentially, there could be  

Ive been very interested in WP7 since announcement, and now it looks like MS are finally on the right path in my opinion.

This is such a good move for both Nokia and MS. Exciting times indeed! 

Roll on the twin lense 3D XBOX 1080p Super Video Zoom Zunephone from Nokia.

is all I'll say for now ..

@Ian2:

I think Lumix has better zoom among all competitors though. Slim and real 12x optical zoom and 25mm wide angle. When it came out, no one was able to match that awsome real optical zoom at same form factor. I would prefer a real bad * camera, hehe. Exclude ultra bad * gigantic 2000 bucks manual crazy cameras.