Windows Phone Mango wins over SymbianGuru

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imageRicky Cadden, erstwhile of SymbianGuru before jumping on the Android bandwagon with a T-Mobile G2, has written about his experience of Windows Phone 7 Mango on the HTC HD7 and seems pretty won over.

He writes:

I’ve now been running Mango (in one form or another) for a few months, and I find myself coming back to the HD7 quite frequently, for a few reasons:

1. Windows Phone is freakin gorgeous. It’s easily one of the most aesthetically pleasing mobile operating systems out there, rivaling HP’s webOS in beauty. This is interesting because it’s really not very graphical, instead relying on beautiful typefaces and interesting fonts to really make itself stand out. It’s incredible, and it kind of sneaks up on you.

2. It syncs with nearly everything out of the box, and it does so really well. I really only need four accounts on my mobile device – Google, Exchange (for work), Facebook, and Twitter. Everything else is icing. Windows Phone handles all of these like a champ – especially the Exchange and Google support – it’s top notch, and more importantly, can sync both of them at the same time (Symbian cannot do this – not even in the upcoming Anna release). Repeat after me: I SHOULD NOT NEED TO CONNECT MY SMARTPHONE TO MY COMPUTER IN ORDER TO USE IT.

3. The Live Tiles are pretty sweet – so the main idea with the live tiles of Windows Phone is that you unlock your screen and can quickly glance at your phone to see all the important details. It even puts your next calendar appointment on the lockscreen, so you may not even need to unlock it. It’s brilliant and really works well – assuming the apps have a ‘live’ tile. Most don’t, and that’s a big problem.

4. The System-wide speech features are awesome. Speech-to-text, being able to talk to your phone and have it do things, works brilliantly. Text-to-speech, having your phone read stuff to you, is also great. If you get a Mango handset, connect a Bluetooth headset and have someone give you a call or send you an SMS. It’s just plain awesome, and most importantly – easy to use.

He had some complaints about the lack of notification lights, limited customization, some issues about the design of Marketplace, the limited integration between Xbox Live on the Xbox 360 and Windows Phone 7 and some issues with twitter integration.

He concludes however:

At this point, honestly, it’s a hard choice between the HD7 with Mango and my trusty T-Mobile G2 which has HTC’s Sense 3.0 user interface. The G2 is infinitely more powerful – especially with a hardware keyboard, but the HD7 is just a pleasure to use. The HD7 is also faster, smoother, and gets better battery life.

The thing is, if I could put Mango on my Nokia N8, I’d probably forget about the G2 and the HD7 within a week. In any case, if you think Windows Phone is a DOA platform with no hope, you’ve obviously not used Mango, and let’s face it, you probably won’t. But you’re missing out. Just remember how lame iOS was on the first iPhone…..

Hopefully Microsoft will have as much success winning over the hundreds of millions of Nokia users currently on Symbian phones to their new OS also.

Read the full post at Rickycadden.com here.

Thanks tkadrum for the tip.

More about the topics: mango, nokia, symbian, windows phone 7.5

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