Moved to Windows Phone 7 from 5800 - First Impressions

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zbelmontez24680

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I had been looking for a new phone to replace my 5800 (my wife's phone broke, and I gave her the 5800), and decided to go with the HTC HD7 running Windows Phone 7. This is just my first impressions of the differences between Symbian and WP7, and is not intended to start a "which is better" war. I find merits in both systems and wanted to point some of those out.

Symbian Advantages:
The WP7 does not even come close to the amount of control that the 5800 provided. I sorely miss my Auto-Profile switcher, my auto-wifi usage from opera, custom ring tones, etc. Coming from a Symbian world, it is very frustrating to have to explicitly turn on Wifi when I want to browse at home and then remember to turn it off when I am done. It outright sucks. Same thing with BT. I have to explicitly turn it on when I get into the car, and then remember to turn it off, else battery drains. In SYmbian, all I did was use an Auto-Profile switcher which automatically turned on/off BT. Heck, WP7 does not even have Profiles, forget about switching.
Also no Opera browser. No ability to sideload apps. No Cut-Copy-Paste (yet). No custom reminders for missed calls, texts, etc.
These dont seem big, but is enough to drive you nuts for the first few days.

WP7 Advantages:
With all its shortcomings, the OS is just beautiful to setup and use on the things that do work, with particular emphasis on setup. For example, to pull your Gmail email, all you do is provide gmail user id and password, and thats it. I have not tinkered with it once since then. Whereas with Nokia Messaging, its been a huge PITA for me. The other beautiful thing is consistency across the OS. Symbian 5 is sorely lacking in that respect. Everything is simple to find and use, versus having to dig 5 levels deep in Menus. The browser, even though it is IE, and has inherent flaws such as inability to type in an URL in landscape mode, is still waay better than the Symbian stock browser. Kinetic scrolling implemented all around and working smoothly


I am sure there are other pros/cons to both, but I just wanted to write down my first impressions on going from the 5800 to the HD7. I have not been a long time user of Symbian (around 2 years), but liked it a lot for its flexibility. WP7, even with all its lack of flexibility, is a joy to use, especially when compared to the 5800.

I posted this in the S60 thread because this is where I learnt a lot about Symbian, and thought this might help people who are trying to decide between Symbian and WP7. If this is not the appropriate forum, mods, pls move the thread to the Windows forum.
 
Goodness, WP7 is more basic than i thought, HD7 has some great hardware though, i hope that major WP7 update adds all the missing basics at the very least, thanks for sharing your experiences though, still cant wait to give WP7 a try.
 
It is very basic, almost "iphone-esque". But the interface is quite different than the iphone, and the things that do work, work beautifully. Oh, and it is very fast, and consequently, the experience is smooth. Can be attributed to the hardware to a great extent.
 
side-load apps will eventually happen but it is strange that they took away what was standard with previous versions.

What is Auto-Profile switcher? It comes with 5800?
 
I'm glad you like your new pone but I don't understand you beef with WIFI...

Mine works perfectly...I walk into the house -> wifey, I walk into work -> wifey, i walk anywhere else -> 3G!
 
Everyone is saying the paid wannabees (they're often bundled for free in many phones) are actually better than the poor facsimile of Office in those WP7 phones.
 
Wirelessly posted (Opera/9.80 (S60; SymbOS; Opera Mobi/1169; U; en-US) Presto/2.5.28 Version/10.1)



you don't have to use nokia messaging. you can use pop or imap without the nokia servers
 
This.

You don't need to turn wifi on and off. It'll automatically switch to wifi when you come within range of a known wifi network. Otherwise, it'll use the mobile data network. It's clever enough to not need an on/off setting :)
 
If you can, I'd sit tight and wait and see what they do because it seems like the WP7 team is working hard to push out the first update and have some interesting ideas for the rest of the platform. I could never use any of the current devices because none of the specs suit me at this point.
 
I bought and tried a HD7 phone for 5 days. Returned it for a full refund. I couldn't stand how basic the OS was and all its limitations, some of which were deal-breakers. No WAP security with WiFi networks. It could only sync with one calendar per account (I have multiple GMail and Exchange calendars). There were others, but those were biggies. It may one day be a good mobile OS, but right now, it's for people like my father, not powerusers. Hope your experience is different than mine...
 
So you leave it on all the time? My understanding is that when you do that and are not in range of your wifi network, the battery drains faster because it is always searching for the network. Is my understanding wrong?
 
True, but with the native email app, it only gets the headers at first, and then when you open the email, it would retrieve the rest of the message. Every now and then, I would get a pop-up message asking if I want to connect. At least this was my experience in Sym 5.
 
I have heard conflicting reports, but the consensus seems to be that the first update would bring cut-copy-paste and better searching for apps, faster loading (though it is already pretty fast), etc. There is apparently another update, code name Mango, which is supposed to be the BIG update, but wont be until the fall.
 
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