Starting next week, I'm going to swap to a Windows Phone 7 phone (that still sounds awkward) as my primary device for a bit. I picked up the Samsung Focus on a whim but really haven't spent any time with it to judge it either way.

Anyone have any questions or things they would like answered about it? I'll be setting it up from scratch this weekend.

Not really, but on a related note I remember the thread you made a while back on wanting to test out the Android platform. I've read the entire thread but I'm still wondering how the overall Android experience was for you? (like a 'conclusion' post ) I'm still in dubio weather my new smartphone will be an iPhone or an Android.

Personally I find Android slow. It can take up to 10 seconds just to bring up my text messages screen sometime. And it's not intuitive, my wife can't pick it up and use it without getting frustrated at it. That's usually a pretty good indication that something is not intuitive. I will be switching to Windows Phone 7 as soon as I can.

Depends on your phone model and what else you're running. Not all Android phones run the same OS version, have the same applications or UI layers.


Again, depends on your phone as most Android phones have manufacturer specific UI modifications.

The Android OS world is fragmented which is a big problem but you can't tar & feather the entire OS because your specific phone is slow. It would be like me saying that OSX is slow but not mentioning that I'm running it on a PowerPC Mac Mini with 256MB RAM and every application possible running at the same time.

I didn't do a full summary, but did have a conclusions post of sorts here. Since you're interested, I'll make a longer post sometime this weekend more directly comparing the iPhone and Android to see if it will help your decision. I've had some new insights into both sides since then.

Back on the WP7 topic, I'm also going to ping a friend of mine who picked one up about a month ago. He's a big Microsoft guy, so I'm kinda curious to see how we see things differently, and what we see eye to eye on as far as the benefits and downsides.

My friend pick up whatever W7 phone it is that came out on Orange and they seem happen with it. They had some HTC Android phone previously. I used it for a few minutes and it was weird but I just assume it was because I'm not used to it.

Sorry I don't buy this. My old Windows Mobile 5.5 phone would load the text messages screen instantly- even when I had literally two years of text messages from someone I talk to frequently on the screen. This is just bad design period. And I'm using an HTC Hero which is supposed to be one of the "bread and butter" Android phones, not super fast but not the slowest either.

I've used a craptastic Xperia X10 on 1.6 and 2.1, Motorola Droid, an original Nexus and a Nexus S. All of them managed to bring up the Messaging application instantly.

If the Android OS was to blame then wouldn't I have had issues with it?


The HTC Hero was the first HTC Android phone with their Sense UI so I wouldn't call it a representation of the stock Android OS which you're blaming. What version of Android is on your HTC?

I'm sorry to say this, but yes, that is the slowest of Android phones. It has the same CPU as all the first-rounders just like the G1. Compared to the Snapdragon and Hummingbird phones out there today and the phones set to come out soon, it's quite slow...

It also uses HTC Sense, which is not plain Android, and one of the manufacturer skins that's blamed for creating a poor user experience on these phones.

I will never buy another Android phone unless it has the plain Android experience on it. It works beautifully on my Nexus One, so I'm happy.


Re: WP7, I'm very curious to hear your results, Tom. I do think Phone 7 looks like a very nice OS, and I give MS all the credit they deserve for daring to completely ditch their old OS and start fresh. Then again, I gave the same credit to Palm. I think MS has more weight they can put behind the products, though, and they don't have most of the same problems Palm did (however you feel about the WP7 commercials, they're nowhere near the failure of the Pre ads).

How well does the phone integrate with the services you use? I know that was a big issue with your Android phone. Heck, how exactly do you use it on the Mac? Is there MacOS software?

Good to know I have the slowest of Android phone and that HTC has slowed everything down. As usual poorly-built third-party software ruins everything.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to put down your phone or anything! I'm impressed it's still working well enough for you to stick with it. I had the G1 and I'm very happy that I traded up, even though my phone is outdated too at this point.

From what I can tell, it looks like your phone may have been upgraded to 2.1. Is that so? If so, you're unfortunately still not getting the speed benefits of Froyo, which are actually quite substantial. Have you considered a 3rd party ROM?


Wow, that doesn't look very sturdy. What is your experience with it like?

A friend of mine has a Droid: the original. It was updated to Froyo ages ago, but he commented that he didn't see much of a performance benefit.

Turns out that not all Froyo builds got the JIT that we got with our Nexus Ones. I don't know why. Maybe CPU architecture? Anyway, the Droid didn't get it. There's, unfortunately, no reason to expect that other Froyo builds did. I mean, I'm sure some did, maybe even most, but definitely not all.

One of our TA's has this and he loves it. He spends most of our meetings playing "Fruit Ninja".

I don't care for what I've seen of the UI at all- but I think I'm just used to my iPhone, which I love.

Ok, to get this back on topic for Matt, I moved off the gaming subthread. Today is going to be day 0 for the phone, setup and initial syncing. I know right up front 8GB of built in storage won't be enough for me, so I'm currently researching what MicroSD card to buy. The Samsung Focus has a slot (since it's just a tweaked Galaxy S phone), but due to the way Windows Phone 7 works, it's very picky on cards. From what I can tell, the phone will stripe the onboard storage with the MicroSD, so the card becomes unremovable. The benefit of this is the phone will just have one solid chunk of usable space, with no need to manage what goes where. The downside is that it makes it harder to slap any old SD card in, as putting in a slow one (read/write or latency) can kill performance, or just make the phone not work at all.

I'm going to initially try the Mac software, but may end up switching over to a VM to manage the phone. The connector does allow me to transfer stuff from iTunes and iPhoto (good), but the downside is that I don't gain access to the Zune music subscription service. The phone comes with 3 free months, so it is something I want to try out. I guess as long as Windows 7 is contained in a small box on my OS X desktop, I'll tolerate it for now :-)

Tom, will yuo tell us how the memory expansion goes? I've been considering WP7 for a while, but one think that is keeping me from it so far is that I would really like to use it to replace my Zune as well, and 8 or 16 GB is by far not enough.

Also, what is needed? Do you just reset the phone and it will wipe everything, reboot and see the extra memory, or do you need to flash the device from a PC?

*sigh*

Came home after being distracted by the nice weather here, and it seems my Windows 7 VM decided to die. I'm going to just nuke and reinstall. This may delay the start of my use of the phone a bit.

As far as expandable memory goes, the Samsung Focus has had problems with various cards causing slowdowns, crashes, or data loss. No cards have been officially certified yet, but I found a forum discussion it, and most people have had luck with the SanDisk Class 2 cards, so I got one of those in 16gb size today. They also mention registry tweaks to make it work better *groan*.

Yup my phone is upgraded to the latest version of 2.1- speed isn't really a noticable issue anywhere else- it just takes 10-15 seconds to bring up text messages. Maybe there is something else going on. I do plan on rooting and installing a 3rd party ROM at some point- mostly because I want to get easy Tethering capability.

I was using a friend's HTC Wildfire last night, HTC Sense and a slow CPU. Text messages opened just about instantly.

I expected it to be slow phone, but in fact everything was snappy. The screen however was far too small for a proper touchscreen smartphone. 240 x 320 just isn't big enough for a phone that has an on screen keyboard.

Also the font rendering in the browser was very poor, not sure what was going on there.

Yes I agree the screen's much to small. When I really get down to texting I have to turn the phone on it's side just to cut down on the inevitable touch-screen mistype. My touch screen error rate is very high- I have to rely heavily on the autocomplete which sometimes makes for odd text messages when I'm not paying attention..

I didn't have much problem with the keyboard itself, more the tiny sliver of screen that was let to view the app for when the keyboard was visible. Made it very hard filling in the settings* for an IMAP account.

*not helped by the layout of the settings page. You get half way down the page, find a button saying "Manual settings" (or something like that), press the button and the extra settings don't appear below the button on the page, but somewhere further up the page and thus not visible. Very confusing design.

Just as a quick update, this is on hold for a little longer. I need to decide on how I'm going to sync contacts and get some setup done first, and a trip this weekend will be occupying most of my time.

So, how do you practically expand memory? Sorry if it has been said before, but I can't find it. Say you get a Phone with 8 GB and find a 32 GB compatible, fast enough miniSD. What do you do then? Power off, remove old card, plug in new card, and then? Just curious...

If you change cards, you have to do a hard reset of the phone and let it format the flash space. The internal and SD storage are then joined together into one contiguous space. Microsoft uses the "secure" part of SD to also lock the card to the phone, preventing accidental writes if it's put into another device. If you want to reuse the SD card later, you have to completely wipe it out too.

From doing research on it, it's not raw sequential read/write speeds that are critical. It's more important to have better random access and seek times. Some users reported really bad instability with the "fastest" class of SD cards due to them being optimized only for sequential.

Thanks. Ok, so it's good there's no need for PC software to do this. I think I found on line somewhere a list of "known good" SD cards. I'll post it here if I can find one.

My work contract may include a WP7 phone or a RIM, in which case I'd go with WP7 and expand it as much as possible.

Keep in mind the known good cards may vary between devices too. The Samsung Focus I have seems to be very picky, and owners have discovered registry settings (yes, Microsoft even has a registry in their new mobile OS) that help. Mostly related to how the phone deals with power management of the SD card.

If the phone doesn't like the SD card, it may resume from sleep slow, run slower in general, or have stability issues. The really bad SD cards will also cause the phone to reset, and in certain cases, data loss as well.

Just because a card is on a list, doesn't mean that the insides are the same on your card. I'm more pointing at the fact that the controller and flash may not be the same and not the fact there are many fakes.

First hurdle, trying to get my contacts into Windows Live and keep them synced. I have a Windows 7 VM, installed all the Live pieces, Zune, and MobileMe. MobileMe lets me sync to Windows Contacts (the equivalent of Address Book on a Mac). And I have a Windows Live Mail program that also shows Calendars and Contacts. But the contacts there are from when I used MSN Messenger in the past, and aren't my Windows Contacts.

Also, it looks like I managed to blow up my MSN contact list somehow. I saw people online, made a change to use my miniinfo.net e-mail instead of the 11 year dead e-mail address I had previously. Everyone is in my list still, but no one is online now. Every time I try a new mobile OS, I blow up IM stuff, as something similar happened to Google Talk. *sigh*

Day 1: Left the phone plugged in via USB to my machine overnight, and verified the phone was still charging when the machine was asleep. So far so good. Woke up, and the phone is showing around 20-25% charge.

Brought the phone and the USB cable to work, and it's sat plugged in for 3 hours, and the battery bar isn't moving at all. I haven't applied any of the power tweaks for the SD card, I wonder if the phone is just spinning and draining the battery now that it has content on it. Going to be hard to test this thing as my daily phone if it can't even hold a charge. Beginning to think it might just be wise to avoid any Samsung phone regardless of the OS, as I'm seeing tons of similar charging complaints even without the SD card.

Been using the phone daily this week as my only phone, and so far it is going well. The main difference between this phone evaluation and the Android attempt is that up front I know this won't replace my current iPhone. With the Android side, I was lead into believing Android was on par with the iPhone, and I found that to be greatly untrue based on my use for a smartphone. With a more honest start to the evaluation, I'm having an easier time looking at the platform's strengths, instead of being frustrated with the parts that don't live up to my expectations.

Still not sure why the battery won't stay charged if I have the USB cable attached to a computer overnight, but for now I've moved to just using the wall adaptor. That seems to be the only way to ensure the battery will be at 100% when I leave in the morning, instead of nearly dead.

Some initial impressions:

Notifications that work. The phone shows a lot of info on the unlock screen, such as an alarm indicator, the next appointment on the calendar, and indicators of how much unacknowledged e-mail exists on each account. Also the indicator on the home screen works the same way. Instead of trying to show unread e-mail (like iOS) or never clearing notifications (like Android on IMAP), it shows how many new messages exist since the last time I checked. If I open a mail account, and then close, the notification clears. Really handy for being able to just skim topics, and not have to read the full message to clear it, thus allowing me to decide if I'll read it fully on my desktop.

Also another nice thing about email when compared to Android, I have an IMAP and an Exchange account set up. Both work equally well and are treated as first class citizens. IMAP folders are handled well, and overall it's a good mobile e-mail client. I'm not feeling like an Exchange or Hotmail account is required for the best experience. Android really made me feel I had to be using GMail and nothing else for the best experience.

Internet Explorer so far has been disappointing though. I understand that down the road the phone will get a version of IE 9, and it's clear it needs it. The rendering of smaller items is pretty bad, and made worse with the PenTile OLED screen this particular phone has. I'd prefer even the older iPhone over this for browsing. And the iPhone 4 screen and browser solidly beats the browsing experience here. Rotating the phone also takes about 2 full seconds for IE to reorient the view properly, compared to half a second on my iPhone. Rotation in other places like Mail is only a second, with most of that delay being due to the slow eye candy effect.

I am using the Windows Zune software for syncing to take advantage of the Zune Pass. I really don't like the software, the interface just seems wrong. Browsing, downloading, and even just generally working with the program, it takes a while just to figure each task out. I do like the syncing though. If the phone is on my WiFi network and charging, I can sync. It also seems to do multiple syncs. With the iPhone, I have to make sure I sync in the morning, otherwise I miss the podcasts that came out after I docked my phone the previous evening. Just now, I opened Zune, and it downloaded 15 songs it thinks I'd like. As the download was still going, it saw the phone on the network and also began syncing. Really hoping Apple copies both the idea of wireless syncing and a subscription service.

I'll probably go more in depth into the marketplace this weekend. So far my use has only been of the native apps. It does work fine as a phone, and SMS seems to work properly too, with nothing really special for either thing. I haven't used the camera yet either, but I do like the dedicated camera button. If you push and hold it, the camera app opens, even if the phone is locked. And every time I've opened the camera, it's ready to take a picture after only a short delay. Both the iPhone and the Android phone seemed to put very little priority on getting the camera ready.