[sc:mobile-category ]I’ve been running my TouchPad with the 3.0.4 update now for a couple of weeks and to say that things are better would be an understatement .

The update brings several big improvements:

• Phone connectivity for any Bluetooth phone
• Built in camera app
• STABILITY

Lets be honest for a moment, the initial release of the TouchPad had a woefully inadequate software stack on it.  it was missing lots of features and had a tendency to crash ever few minutes of usage.

3.0.2 was released to resolve some of these issues, but the stability was still somewhere between a clown balancing a goldfish bowl on a stick and someone learning to ride a unicycle for the first time.

3.0.4 makes a radical step forward in stability, to the point now that in the last two weeks I’ve only had two crashes, both of which were flash related.

This release should have been the one shipped with the TouchPad, it would have made a world of difference to the end user experience.  But that’s really a moot point as we know HP would have killed it either way.

The Bluetooth support in the voice apps is neat, but overall I don’t think very useful.  It supports receiving and placing calls but to support SMS it requires a specific BT profile that my phone (and from the documentation around the net, most phones) doesn’t support.

The new camera app really should have been there from the start, but better late than never.

Overall the TouchPad is more responsive and doesn’t freeze up nearly as much so I have to give it a big two thumbs up.

[sc:mobile-category ]Back when I first bought my Windows Phone I created an article with the first ten free applications I installed on it, now that Mango is out it’s time to revisit the apps on my phone and see what’s changed.

First off, this list will no longer be all free, some will be commercial apps.  Secondly I’ll highlight with italics any app that appeared in the previous list.

7Pass

On my desktop system I use KeePass Password Safe to store my various passwords and generate new passwords.  7Pass can read the same password database as KeePass which means I can always have a copy of my passwords with me on my phone.  The most complex part of this software is actually getting the password database on to the phone as MS has decided not to allow direct file access.  7Pass supports a couple of different options to transfer the database, including Dropbox, Webdav and a standard web server option.

Not wanting to place my password database outside of my infrastructure I opted for the web server option.  Unfortunately 7Pass doesn’t give much detail on how it expects the web server to be configured, but after a couple of attempts I managed to get it setup and working.

AccuWeather.com

I’m having trouble finding a weather app that I actually like and works.  In my original list of apps I had WeatherBug listed, but I found the Live Tile update to be really flaky (it stopped working for several weeks an that’s when I moved to another weather app).  AccuWeather is ok so far, its most annoying feature is that selecting metric instead of imperial causes the app to first display the details in imperial and then after a few seconds show the metric values.

I’m still looking for the perfect weather app, maybe I’ll give WeatherBug a try again when they do their Mango update.

Adobe Reader

I still have this installed, but I don’t recall ever using it.  Good to have though I guess.

Amazon Kindle

I haven’t yet really converted to ebooks, I just don’t read them that often to make it worth while, but I pulled down the Kindle app for WP and my TouchPad and played around a bit with it.

Birthdays (by Jesper Larsen-Ledet)

This is the app I have waited for since the release of WP7, a simple Live Tile that shows the next birthday from your contacts and also a complete list of birthdays.  I know pre Mango there was no access for developers to the contacts list so it was nice to see several of these apps come up quickly after Mango’s release.

Connected Media (HTC)

This is a DLNA compatible media player and streamer from HTC, it works, but quite honestly with the limited format support for video in WP7 it’s pretty much useless as a player.  I haven’t played with the streaming side as I already have my media library setup to stream from my server so there’s no real point on doing it from my phone.

Engadget

This is just the Engadget website presented as an app, which is cool, but I really don’t use it that much, I feed the RSS feed directly in to a folder on my Exchange server so I get all of the articles in my e-mail.

Facebook

I had Facebook on my original list as well and I still use it once in a while, but with Mango’s support for more feeds from other sites and my general malaise towards Facebook these days it’s not too often I launch the Facebook app.

Flixster

Another app from the original list and I still use it when I’m checking movie times, a great app.

GolfLogix

This is a free golf course GPS app, I don’t play golf very often but I thought that this would be a cool app to have when I do.  Unfortunately it turns out that trying to use your phone and play golf at the same time doesn’t work very well so the phone usually just stays in my golf bag.

Groupon

Everyone seems to be talking about Groupon, but I just don’t get it.  I downloaded that app and it works quite well, but I guess I’m just not enough of an impulse shopper.

HTC Hub

When HTC updated their apps for Mango, it included support for weather no the Live Tile, and as noted above I’m looking for a better weather app.  The HTC hub update is actually quite a significant one and is done well, but its best feature was that it lead me to AccuWeather.  So while it’s still installed, it doesn’t get loaded very often.

IMDb

It’s IMDb, how else do you look what movies someone you have never heard of before has been in?

Metronome

Ok, so a Metronome doesn’t sound exciting and it isn’t, but I had a use for it and this was a nice free one and hey, it’s got Metro right in the title .

Netflix

Still installed, still don’t use it on my phone, but I do use Netflix.

Network Dashboard

One of the items I complained about in my original review of WP7 was that there was no way to pin the network config and other settings to the start menu for quick access.  This nice little free app solves that.

OpenTable

I downloaded OpenTable primarily out of curiosity while I was on a road trip one weekend, it was help at that time and so it stays on my phone just in case.

Opera Link for WP7

As I’ve noted before on this blog, I use Opera as my web browser and this gives me access to all my bookmarks etc on my phone.  It has had a few issues in the past with Opera changing the API or other issues, but the developer does eventually fix it when it breaks so no complaints from me.

Poynt

Poynt has had a lot of press in Canada as it’s a Canadian company with over 6 million users, but I don’t find I use it very often, but like OpenTable, it stays on my phone for when I do need it.

SkyMap Free

I downloaded this a few weeks ago and I have to say it’s cool, not all that useful, but cool.

SmartWhois

This is just a Whois lookup app, it probably won’t stay on my phone.

TouchDevelop

This is a scripting app from Microsoft, it’s quite impressive what you can do in it, but not very useful on a day-to-day basis.

TVShow Lite

This apps always you to track what shows you watch and lets you know when new episodes are going to air, I used it for a while, but I find that my DVR does just a good as job and, you know, actually records the shows .

Twitter

Like the Facebook app, with Mango this one isn’t used very often.  It’s there just in case.

The Weather Channel

Another one of the long list of weather apps I’ve tried and not been happy with, just haven’t deleted it yet.

WeatherBug

The original weather app I liked, if the Live Tile gets fixed in the Mango update I might very well go back to it.

Wikipedia

Much like IMDb, this is just too useful not to have on the phone.

WordPress

This is the official WordPress app so I can delete all those spam pingbacks on this blog .

Yellow Pages Canada

Another app from the original list it’s not used much, but useful when needed.

[sc:mobile-category ]So Mango (or WP 7.1 or WP7.5 or whatever you’d like to call it) is here and I’ve been running it for a couple of weeks now, so it’s time to write down my thoughts so far.

First off, the update process was smooth and no real issues came up (you can read about it here).

Complex Password

I do want to make an update on the complex password issue I was having.  In Exchange 2010, you can set the password policies for mobile devices, the options look like this:

 

As you can see, when the “Require password” checkbox is disabled, the rest of the password related items are also greyed out.

When I originally setup the password policy I had assumed that this meant they were not enforced, however Mango does not behave this way.  Instead it adheres to the password requirements if you select to have a password.  Which actually makes perfect sense.  I suspect this is just a GUI issue in the Exchange 2010 admin interface.

Either way, it means I have have the complex password on my WP and still not have a password on my Touchpad, which works out just fine.

Overall I like the complex password requirement, its much more secure and only took a couple of days to get use to.

Multitasking

One of the big items in Mango was the support for fast app switching and background tasks for applications.  These both require updates to the applications to work and so far there has been a slow trickle of these updates coming.

The background tasks are nice for the applications so far.  Mostly they seem to be used for Live Tile updates which makes perfect sense.

The fast app switching hasn’t really impacted me yet, I find I forget about holding the back button to get back to my previous apps, but the few apps I have that have been updated do work quite well.

Twitter and LinkedIn Integration

Over the last few months I’ve been getting less and less pleased with Facebook and have been considering moving to Twitter instead.  The lack integration in Windows Phone had stopped me, but now with Mango this is no longer an issue.

Twitter integration is a first class citizen within Mango and seeing the feed in the People hub is quite nice.

I have been using LinkedIn only for a few months but it has been quite nice to have the integration now in WP as well.  The one thing I did notice was that pulling all the contact information from LinkedIn really polluted my contacts list with a lot of people I don’t contact very often (read ever).

This issue was easily taken care of as in the people setting page you can chose to filter out contact providers.  For me this was a perfectly fine solution as anyone I do contact I already have in my Exchange contacts.  For others this might be too much of an all or nothing solution.

E-Mail

The big changes to e-mail are the conversation view and linked inboxes.  Conversation views are assume, when they first appeared in Outlook on the desktop I wasn’t sure I liked them, but over the last year or so I’ve grown to appreciate them quite a bit.  Mango’s support for this just makes it even better.

Linked inboxes is another big feature of Mango, but I only have one mailbox (all my other mail addresses forward to this one) so I haven’t had any benefit from this.

One change that has occurred with Mango is the move of the folder button to the “more” menu instead of on the primary menu.  This is a little annoying and I’d like to see an easier way to switch folders (you can pin folders to the start menu now, but I don’t think that that is the solution).  Either bringing the folder button back to the primary menu or maybe making another pivot view to be the folder list would makes sense (perhaps the last one so a simple swipe to the left would bring up the folder list?).

Another improvement is how e-mail handles long URL’s in e-mail subject lines.  Previously they would often fail to create the entire link properly, Mango seems to resolve this and so far I have not had a URL fail to get linked properly.

Marketplace

The Marketplace has gone through some updates but in general I don’t know if it’s any better, just different.

The only issue I’ve had so far is that the Marketplace Live Tile seems to indicated updates are available when they really aren’t.

A strange choice is that the search button is now in the bottom menu instead of using the “Search” hardware button.  This obviously makes a more consistent implementation of the search hardware button (it now always takes you to Bing) but reduces the usefulness of the button.

Messaging

The biggest feature I was looking forward to was the integration of Live Messenger in to the Messaging hub.  Facebook chat also comes along for the ride and I have to admit this is a really cool feature.  It works seamlessly and is a welcome addition.

One small niggle with the implementation I have is that if you are in any status other than “online” you cannot see who else is online.

It will be interesting to see if MS allows other messaging providers to hook in to this as well or if they will remain a second class citizen.

Two nice small tweaks to the messaging hub is the use of different colours for the people in the conversation as well as converting text smiley’s in to graphics.

I haven’t tried the voice to text or text to voice features here, I don’t text and drive .

People Hub

The people hub pretty much looks the same, but you can now filter the “what’s new” view by accounts, which might be convenient.

The other nice update is that on the Live Tile will sometimes show a larger image instead of always showing the really small ones.  This of course has no practical impact, but I got a smile from it.

Music + Video Hub

This hub really didn’t get too many updates, but in music MS moved around the controls to be more consistent.  Now the next/play/pause/forward buttons now are in the same place on screen the music page as well as in the volume mini menu on the lock screen.  This makes a lot of sense.

The other buttons, heart/shuffle/repeat have also been moved to beside the album art and are visible all the time instead of having to touch the album art for them to appear.

Start Menu

The start menu didn’t really have much done to it, but two small changes do make an appearance:

• Searchable list
• Quick jump lists

You can now search the application list, which if you have a lot of applications makes sense.

The quick jump lists appears after you have a certain number of applications installed (not sure what this is, but on my first install of Mango I didn’t have enough, but I do now).  This is just like the music hub where the application list has letter headers which can be clicked on and then the complete alphabet will appears so you can jump to a specific place in the list.

This is a really nice feature and I don’t think it should only be enabled after a certain number of apps have been installed.  It should be enabled by default on any list over a single page long.

Battery Saver

This is a new feature in settings, basically it will turn off the wireless data connections when you battery gets low to preserve you batter.  This makes sense but is disabled by default for some strange reason.  Also it doesn’t say what it considers a low battery condition.

The best part of this feature is actually the fact that at the bottom of the screen is a textual representation of your battery status and estimated run time left!

Conclusions

While MS is calling this Windows Phone 7.5 in its marketing, every other version number in the build is 7.1 and I have to agree with this.  Many of the features added in Mango don’t really change the user experience but instead bring the initial release in line with expectations.

Mango is a fantastic update, its just too bad it took so long to get out.

Would I recommend Mango as a phone?  Yes.  Period.  Full Stop.

It’s just that good.

[sc:mobile-category ]Mango finally was released last week but I have been waiting for it to be deployed to my phone since the 27th.  I’m not a patient man for these kinds of things so doing a quick search provided me with a way to stop waiting and install the update NOW .

NOTE: I’m not going to go in to great detail on some of the new features of Mango (like multitasking) as I haven’t had it long enough to say to much, instead this article will focus on what I have found so far as I’ve had it for 2 days.

The Update

The instructions are pretty straight forwards, turn off the cell and Wi-Fi radios, connect to your PC and check for an update.  Wait a couple of seconds when the “checking for update” message appears and then disconnect from the Internet.

Zune will then find the update, reconnect to the Internet and proceed to follow the instructions for the update.

On my HD7, two updates are deployed (I assume a ROM update for he device and the Mango update itself).  Both went smoothly, though not quickly.  Total time was about a hour to get everything done.

First Boot

The first thing you notice with Mango is the color scheme is changed to red by default, I don’t know if this happens only if you still have the default blue selected before the update, but it’s a little annoying.  I quickly changed back to the blue, red just seems to angry .

Adding Accounts

The first thing I wanted to do was add Twitter and LinkedIn accounts to my phone, however when I went to the account setting page, I noticed Facebook had an error message on it, the details said it was error 0.   Searching the net seemed to suggest deleting the account from the phone and re-adding it would likely resolve the issue.

I deleted the account but then the error changed to 0x83cf1202, and indicated the account could not be deleted.  This error turned out to be much easier to find information on, MS KB2475837, gives details on how to resolve both errors.  In this case, signing in to live.com and deleting the Facebook link from there and then re-syncing both Live and Facebook on the phone allowed me to delete the account.

Once the account was re-added everything functioned as expected.

Adding Twitter and LinkedIn was easy but of course going through the people hub and linking everything together took a few minutes.

Complex Password

The next feature I wanted to use was the complex lock screen passwords.  However there is no setting to enable this on the phone, you must enable it through an Exchange server policy.  This is highly disappointing, MS has denied the majority of its users this enhanced security.

However having Exchange I enabled the appropriate policy with some unintended consequences.  Mango picked up the change on the next sync and forced me to update my password, however the same thing happened on my TouchPad as well.  In Exchange there are options on how complex the password must be and I have selected the lowest possible values (4 characters long, no requirement for multiple case/numbers/etc.), this was fine on Mango, however the TouchPad seems to see the complex requirements and force you to have upper/lower case and numbers in the password no matter what the Exchange values are.

Miscellaneous Items

One interesting point I found was the search provider setting which was defaulted to Yahoo on my Bell phone instead of Bing (the only other choice).

Another change is in the lock screen, in NoDo when you woke up the phone, the lock screen with the clock and other text appeared all at the same time.  In Mango the background appears first and then after a slight delay the text is drawn on the screen.  Not a big deal, just kind of weird.

One nice item I found in the “Battery Saver” settings area is a percentage of battery left as well as an estimated run time.  Too bad they’re buried so deep instead of being available at the top level.

Another overdue item is in the camera, the menu now orients itself properly if you want to take a portrait photo in stead of landscape.

Apps

HTC has updated their bundled apps to better work with Mango and I have to admit that I had deleted them all from my phone, however two caught my eye and so I downloaded them again:

HTC Hub

The original hub was, quite frankly, useless.  The new HTC Hub is actually quite nice, the best feature is the pinable weather tiles.  For the time being it’s replaced the Weather Network app on my start page.

HTC Connected Media

This is a DLNA compliant media server and client, I have to admit I haven’t had much time to play with this, but it seems to work.

IE9

IE 9 on Mango is a big change, but the one that I think is going to annoy me the most is the removal of the tabs button from the lower menu.  I know they had to do this to get the address bar there and I image most people will not have an issue, but here’s the scenario that I use it a lot in:

• read an E-mail
• select a link from the message that open’s IE
• browse around a bit
• hit the back button to go back to the message… Opps that just goes back one web page.
• instead open the tabs, close the current tab and go to a blank tab
• now hit the back button to get back to the e-mail

The good news is that using the task switcher gets you back to the message now so this is probably livable.

E-Mail

The big news on the e-mail client side is the threaded conversation view and I have to admit I like in in Outlook on the desktop so this is pretty much a no brainer in WP7.

However, just like in IE9, MS has decided to move the folder button in e-mail off of the bottom menu and you now must pull up the full menu to change folders.  This will be an inconvenience as I receive mail in to several folders, not just my Inbox.

Invalid SIM

Other than the Facebook issue, the only other problem I’ve had since upgrading to Mango is a single instance of the phone giving me an “Invalid SIM card” error.  A simple reset of the device cleared the issue and I’m not sure if this is a Mango or Bell issue.  I’ll keep an eye on it and for the time being assume it was just a Bell network issue.

So what’s still missing?

As good as Mango is there are still things missing:

• SMS Sync with Exchange (this could include the IM as well?)
• Flash/Silverlight support
• VOIP integration (SIP and Skype at least)
• VPN support (can anyone say OpenVPN?)
• Pinable configuration items (like Wi-Fi) (there is a third party app for this now)
• Real customizable color themes
• Artist information (a-la Zune)
• Notification profiles so I don’t have to listen to every e-mail that comes in at 4am
• Exchange Notes folder sync

The good news is that Microsoft has started a site to list what people want to see next in Windows Phone and be able to vote on the suggestions so they can prioritize them, I think I’ll be using that quite a bit .

The Good:

• Far too much to list here, but…
• Integrated Twitter and LinkedIn
• Complex passwords
• IE9
• Threaded conversations

The not so bad/not so good:

• Had to force the update instead of continuing to wait and wait and wait for it
• Finding Mangofied apps in the Marketplace is hard as there is no way to tell which ones are and aren’t upgraded
• IE tabs button no longer displayed in menu bar

The Bad:

• Facebook upgrade didn’t go smoothly
• Complex passwords require Exchange policy
• Still missing quite a few features, some of which were available in Windows Mobile
• Folder button no longer displayed in menu bar in E-Mail

[sc:mobile-category ]Finally, Microsoft had said something about the release of Mango… “in the next week or two”.

Ok, that’s nice, but what does it actually mean?

• Will Mango be send to the carriers?
• Will testing be complete by the carriers?
• Will carriers start deploying it to handsets?

This continued ineffectual communication from Microsoft is really starting to suck.

Back in May at the Mango preview MS claimed we would not have to wait for it, but at every turn we seem to be waiting, and waiting, and waiting.

When Apple holds a press conference and announces the next version of iOS, they give an exact date when the end user will have the code available to them.  Is it really asking MS too much to do the same?

If your within two weeks of deployment, shouldn’t you be able to give an exact date?  Even if you have to give out the last possible day, it’s better than continuing to give out fuzzy statements like “in the next week or two”.

Come on MS, get it together and give me Manog .