Submitted by “Once you’ve got used to it, and that the Hub is the home screen, BB10 is by some distance the most brutally efficient multitouch interface I have used so far. It makes the others look like hard work. Yes, the odds are stacked against RIM – and when it comes to the as-yet unseen hardware, it needs to pull some crackers out of the barrel. But phones sell on the user interface, and this is very good indeed.” Basically how I feel about Windows Phone. Much more pleasurable and fun to use than the childish and condescending iOS, and the at times confusing and messy Android (more Holo please, developers!), but sadly, the rest of the world doesn’t really care.
There’s that little thing called time to market. Being 3 years or so late just doesn’t cut it!
I generally respect Thom’s opinion, and I do want WP8 to succeed, but I gave a WP8 device a try this past weekend, and simply couldn’t get into it. The interface seemed flashy and ADD (especially those live tiles), configurability was extremely limited (and, really, what’s with every solitary on/off config option being nested under its own list item?), and the excessive transition animations took such a long time to complete that I found the experience frustrating.
I’m typically an Android user, and the Android interface can be frustrating and clunky at times (how is it that recent interface updates actually _increase_ the number of touches/clicks that it takes to get things done?), but this was a picnic compared to WP8, which seemed to consistently both annoy the hell out of me and put me on edge. Additionally, unlike typical reviews, I didn’t find the touch interface any more smooth and “buttery” than Android 4.0 (sic) — certainly not as smooth as iPhoneOS — and I got the feeling that Microsoft was trying to cover this up with flashy transitions to make the device _seem_ smoother and faster reacting. The _slight_ lack of smoothness and lag doesn’t bother me, but those transitions do.
I haven’t seen any reviews that agree with me, and Thom regularly praises WP8’s interface. Am I missing something obvious? Is there an easter egg that I can activate that will enable additional device configuration options (which might at least make the menu structure less useless)? Can I switch out the flashy, time-consuming transitions by tweaking a registry setting when attached to some debugging interface? Can I use live tiles in an interactive manner without them flipping and flitting every second? Does everyone have this initial reaction, but somehow find it fantastic after a week of use? Or is the WP8 interface simply not for me?
Throw me a bone here.
Reference device: HTC 8x
you aren’t missing anything. it is just kind of pretty. art from on high. like a happy meal, your main options are take it or leave it
I think it’s just a preference thing. It’s not that either of us is wrong – just that we both have different preferences. Metro on WP is quite jarring to new users – it was to me as well – but once I got into it and over the initial weirdness, it all just… Fell into place.
With iOS and Android, I have to work to get what I want. In WP things just… Work. They are where I expect them to be. It’s really hard to put into words.
I’m with thom here. Not everyone *needs* a lot of customization options. I absolutely adore the simple UI in WP. It gives me what I need at a glance and that’s that. I generally dislike UI transition animations, but the ones in WP generally do not annoy me, oddly enough.
I’ve never been a user of OSX or any version of Windows beyond Windows XP.
I feel the same way when I use OSX, Windows Vista, Windows 7, etc.
I’m sure it just takes time to get used to. I know there are people who are comfortable with OSX, and Windows 7… to me, because I don’t use them regularly, they often make me angry.
The worst thing you could ask me (and my mother-in-law did this over thanksgiving) is to set up a printer on a Windows 7 machine. 2 things I despise.
So you admit despise your mother-in-law?
(you said two things)
windows phone is “acquired taste”, you need to use it for more than a weekend to learn to appreciate it. Have it with you next time you are on vacation
and for gods sake, if you are going to use wp8, get a Nokia. Nokia Maps alone will make your smartphone experience (and your vacation) far far more pleasant.
Nokia Maps ( = Navteq maps) is a disaster in Europe.
Hm, perhaps that depends on which part of Europe… for me they are quite nice and detailed.
And it’s not so simple as “= Navteq”, a lot of Nokia mapping efforts is done in Berlin for example, IIRC.
lol @ the register. if it said “BB10 sucks”, nobody would read it because we already suspect that. and the images do make it look like it sucks.
but somehow, miraculously, the register has an interesting headline and story: BB10 is AWESOME. well then. call me skeptical.
If you read the article… its pretty slim on real details. Many of the screen shots show messaging unified from various social media platforms for a single contact. I hate that. I want to burn that with fire. Social Media should be subjugated to its own confined jail. I do not want to be notified when someone tweets or posts a new status update. If they won’t allow social media to be excluded, its tough for me to take it serious as a business oriented phone and its not for me.
Uhm, don’t add your social media accounts to the phone … and it won’t bug you about updates.
As a developer, BlackBerry worked really hard to make the platform attractive to us. They gave up hundrends o thousands of devices for free to developers, and even paid considerable money for us to port apps to the marketplace, or hold events in several parts of the world to convince other developers to do so. The platform is also really simple and nice to program for, much more than iOS Android or Windows Phone (despite having to work around some strange stuff).
The updates for the platform were also pretty good and a lot of functionality was added with time and, all the love to developers ensures that these phone devices ship, at launch, they will have a reasonable software catalog (at least much better than WP8).
Blackberry worked really, really hard to bring their vision together and reinvent themselves so I hope this second chance works for them. However, at this point, people thinks blackberry devices are the past so they may not succeed anyway.
I’ve got a 64GB PlayBook that’s still going cheap here – mainly via the DSG franchise in the UK (in fact, it remains by far the cheapest well-known 7″ tablet brand in the UK – only beaten by obscure Chinese imports) and BB10 does look quite innovative to me (and it’s apparently going to be on the PlayBook as well as new BB phones).
But is it too late? BlackBerry are desperate to get devs onboard to do native apps (all sorts of inducements – money, phones etc.), but what I’d like to see is a friendlier way to get Android apps on the BB devices *including* having them appear on BB’s store too (with no indication if they’re Android ports or BB native – it shouldn’t matter). Even if this meant eventually BB native apps died off, it would still mean the BB platform would have good chances to survive.
At the moment, you have to jump through a fair number of hoops to run Android apps and many of them don’t work. Bringing in Android apps as equal class citizens to BB apps would massively improve the number one BB weakness (the lack of apps) and also probably force BB devs to drop their prices (5 pounds for Angry Birds?!).
Edited 2012-12-01 14:05 UTC
I keep looking at those… £130 for a 64GB tablet seems pretty sweet… but then I’ve played with the Playbook a few times and come away with a bad taste. It’s too slow in certain respects, and I’ve seen (probably the older OS versions) crash hard a few times… the fact it can run some Android Apps and Adobe Air mobile apps does make it seem quite cool still…