Windows Phone 7: My first impression

I like the old windows mobile platform and I have very good hopes for the WP7 platform. I took the plunge and bought a Samsung focus. My first impressions are promising, but I feel MS took their mantra of a clean start way too close to heart and (to a point) left the early adopters out in the cold in some key areas.

I would not call myself a fan boy: I would not go to blows with anyone about their gadget decisions. I believe in the mantra of "do what works best for you". For me, it was windows mobile. I think just about every smartphone I had has been a WM device: From the clunky old Compaq/HP ipaq to the my current HTC tilt2 (and two other HTC devices in between). I have been pretty happy with them in the way I can control my information, and despite the slowness and the occasional lockup, they've been good to me.

None of the aforementioned devices translate well into the modern smartphone model, and as such, they can't compete, nor can they survive. So, I understand and welcome the MS move of defining a brand new paradigm for their mobile platform. I think they did a very good job on the rev 1.0 of the platform. The problem-for me at least-is that this new way of doing things requires me to give up a lot control in exchange for what seems to be very little, and I am not sure that I'm ready for that.

For some people, putting all of you information in the public cloud doesn't seem to be a concern. It is to me, and this is my one major peeve with the paradigm. I don't mind the live id connectivity concept. Works for the android platform, but even they have the ability to sync with Outlook! What I'd like is the ability to control (easily) what the device chooses to do with MY data. What I'd really like is the ability to not publish anything unless I want to. One example of this is a simple one: the "Me" aspect of the phone. If I attach a picture it gets published to my live account, and there's not a damn thing I can do to control that. Even with the account settings set to manually sync. My recourse is to log into the live account and get rid of the picture.

I may sound zealous, but I treat other people's information as very private, and since I would not like others to put my information in harm's way, I would like to return the favor. So for now, my only mitigation is to limit the amount of information I keep on the device.

There are plenty of articles on the 'net discussing the issues the platform and with the people hub concept in great detail. I won't cover them again. So far, the only mitigation for this is to use exchange. For a single individual, that's a bit of overkill! The icing on the cake, so-to-speak, are the many documented security problems with hotmail and windows live over the years. I simply cannot trust the platform to keep my stuff secure.

Here's another one: notes. The WP7 answer to notes is the OneNote app, which is very nice. The problem? there is no way for me to convert the many notes I have into OneNote versions! I'd have to suck it up and re-enter everything either on the device itself, or put the notes in the cloud and sync them that way. Again: asinine.

I'm a developer, so I'd be happy with the ability to cook up a solution for myself. Alas, I can't do that either because there no API to connect to, or to provide the service to the device. Similarly, there are no public developer APIs to access basic services like a TCP/IP stack (That's why services such as Skype are not available at the moment), and no native access provides a consistent development platform, but it also cripples the ability for us-the developer portion of early adopters-from producing the apps could mitigate the issues and bring the users to the platform. This can easily be solved, but it requires the cooperation of the MS crew to get there.

At this point, I want to love device, but I don't. I am not even sure if I'll use it on a day-to-day basis. I know they needed to get something out that covered a lot of people's needs, but I think there were serious holes in the initial implementation that are going to leave some bad impressions on the likes of us. Let's hope for their sake we make the minority.

Later,

Windows Mobile 6: GPS device settings lost after installing FakeGPS

This is not the usual subject matter, but since it happened to me, and I could not really find a solution through the great Google, here it is:

If you happen to develop mobile apps, and you're tinkering with location-aware apps, beware that if for some reason you install the FakeGPS utility on the actual target(a bad idea), it will happily disable your integrated GPS device! The best part is, the uninstaller will not restore your old settings, and you will then have one of two choices:

• Hard-reset the device (and wipe out everything)
• Roll up your sleeves and modify the registry

The first option was not acceptable for me (although I did a full backup in expectation that I might have to), so I looked at the second option.

The "good" thing is that WinMo6 has the concept of an intermediate driver that allows you to swap between device ports while shielding the apps from the changes. It's basically a COM port proxy. The FakeGPS utility overwrites the default GPS driver entry for the intermediate device driver.

In \HLKM\System\CurrentControlSet\GPS Intermediate Driver\Drivers, change the CurrentDriver entry to read:

GPSOneDevice

Exit whatever registry editor you're using, then power cycle (not a soft reset) the device to ensure the registry hive is flushed and saved.

Once you restart the device, the GPS should work again.

Later,