WP7.5 vs iOS5

Warning: This guy is a fanboi. However, the real issue is that his comparisons are rubbish. He doesn't compare WP7.5 on a new phone with iOS5 on the 4S. He compares the WP7.5 on a year old phone with iOS5 on a 3GS. Which had me go "WTF?!". Mind you. I have a WP7.5 (HTC HD7) phone and I like it alot (I have grown as a person, lol). But come on, if you're going to do a comparison at least make it a fair and reasonable one.

/me venting

plox rename post to "The internets are full of stupid and it makes me sad alot"?

Well indeed - similarly it annoys me all the ridiculous and unfair comparisons made to make Apple look better in the media (I guess it's a nice change that someone's a WP fanatic for once;)). Also annoys me when new IPhone 4 owners compare to an ancient low end Nokia, or new Apple laptop owners compare their new high end machine to their last 5 year old PC, and conclude that all non-Apple PCs are still like their old one ("It has multitouch trackpad, isn't that amazing?").

To be honest, even when reviewers are trying to be sincere, you can't trust anything that tries to make vague claims about phone OSs. Consider, if you read a review of Windows vs Mac, which declared one the winner, would you take it as true? Especially if it simply declared that some things were "better" without giving examples? Of course not - there are going to be a million different opinions on the matter, and phone OSs are no different (if anything, the level of fanaticism is often more intense).

Reviews are useful to learn specific objective factual things about which features are present or not. If I'm reading a review, I don't care what the reviewer's opinion is on IOS vs WP vs whatever. I have a brain, I the reader have my own opinions on that - what I want to read a review for is to learn about specific things that I might not be aware of.

So many paragraphs. So many words.

But not a single thing was said.

That takes skill.

The guy is probably being paid by Microsoft to write glowing reviews specifically against iOS. Not a single one of his points mentioned Android. I wonder why he's so bitter towards iOS.

@mdwh: Though I agree with your post, I could care less if he's stating an opinion. But at least state the opinion with relevant hardware. Not: "ooooh Mango is better because it runs on ancient hardware and the iOS5 doesn't". (unfortunately, GD doesn't provide a WTF emoticon) That blog just rubbed me the wrong way.

Well indeed - similarly it annoys me all the ridiculous and unfair comparisons made to make Apple look better in the media (I guess it's a nice change that someone's a WP fanatic for once;)). Also annoys me when new IPhone 4 owners compare to an ancient low end Nokia, or new Apple laptop owners compare their new high end machine to their last 5 year old PC, and conclude that all non-Apple PCs are still like their old one ("It has multitouch trackpad, isn't that amazing?").

I was fairly displeased when Molly Wood (CNet Editor) did her Windows 7 Mango test drive and nit picked the phone to death on a not-feature-complete version of Mango. I believe Windows Phone 7.5 has full turn by turn navigation, but at the time they were part of a lawsuit that prevented them from having it do turn by turn, so you had to hit the screen to give you the next instruction (correct me if I'm wrong if this is not in the current version, but this led me to believe it was). This was a huge complaint that seemed to pretty much sour her on the whole phone.

There were a couple other features she complained about which I think WP7 supports, but just isn't done the same way it's done in android or on iPhone. In general the review felt very much like a, "Why doesn't WP7 act just like Android/iPhone?!" review, which didn't make any sense to me because I like it most because it's actually somewhat unique compared to the other 2, which both also felt derivative of the blackberry, palm, and old windows mobile experiences.

I wonder why he's so bitter towards iOS.

When I first used OS/2, its amazing multi-threading (on a 286/386 type hardware) didn't amaze me. What turned me completely off was the fact that icons were not aligned to a grid, like Windows 3.1 (at the time) did. Flexibility might have sounded nice, but it the look was foreign.

Meanwhile, UX has shown that certain alignment types are better and grid is better. Similar to how full justified text is harder to read than left aligned.


Performance isn't and never was a factor. It's a known fact (5-10 minute query times are typical in enterprise, so if you do something in 15 seconds you're a hero). If apps take a tiny bit longer to open (say 1-5 seconds, consequence of web response time training), it doesn't matter. For geeks it's blasphemy, but true geeks use 80x25 terminals, so these gadgets don't matter. Meanwhile, hard-core gamers today play games with 300-700ms local input latency. Times of FPS Dougs flipping out over 2ms CRT refresh delay and deeming anything with under 250FPS unplayable are over.

The amazing part is these devices came so far, that today one nitpicks over how the "number of unopened emails" is rendered.

Imagine that you were comparing Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu 11 and the only thing you could come up with was the fact one had 2 pixels sharper corners on icons.

In the review what gets mentioned is Facebook, MobileMe and Photos. Not call quality, SMS, messaging, voice quality, battery life, screen resolution - nothing. On one hand, this is progress. On another the fact that both phones are utterly and completely identical with only tiny cosmetic differences.


There was controversy a while back over Top Gear's review of an electric car, where they let it run out of juice. Any reviewer will try to pick out something obvious and drive that point home. But fake such review, and they'll be called out. There simply isn't anything to call out anymore due to homogenization. Except for icon showing number of unread emails.

controversy a while back over Top Gear's review of an electric car, where they let it run out of juice. Any reviewer will try to pick out something obvious and drive that point home. But fake such review, and they'll be called out. There simply isn't anything to call out anymore due to homogenization. Except for icon showing number of unread emails.

To be fair about that review, after they had run their batteries down to about half of what they were at when they started, they couldn't find any charging stations within a short enough distance to charge them without the cars running out as indicated by the car's navigation system, which I believe they had to turn off for long periods of time in order to have enough battery to possibly make it to a charging station which did not happen.

What drove me nuts what Apple used to advertise their phone as "The worlds thinnest smartphone", which made me shake my head with a giant WTF moment? My Xperia X10 is much slimmer than an iPhone 4, it's even smaller than my old iPhone 3g. It was just so flagrantly wrong I went huh???


I am interested in getting a WP7.5 device, but so far there is no RDP client, or at least there wasn't when I last checked. No remote desktop makes it a complete non-starter for me.