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Recently graduated from Birmingham City University, specialising in Graphic Design. I like all things digital and everything that generally looks cool. I also play a lot of video games and treat them as a source of insperation rather than "time killer".

This blog is a place for me to reflect on things that I find interesting and worth sharing, some of my own work will be posted here as well.

One month with Windows Phone.

Today marks my one month with Nokia Lumia 800 running Windows Phone 7.5. Being iPhone user for a long time, I feel that WP7 isn’t quite polished as iOS but works efficiently with the resources it’s got. Because of that, I find myself missing some of the features iPhone has, like having instant push notifications for social media, developer priority when it comes to app store and not having well optimised maps with compass.

What I like about Windows Phone 7 is that everything is designed under Metro style which by nature makes apps put content before chrome, typography play much large role of navigating though out UI and generally information flow is more efficient than on any other OS. Instead of having different apps for capturing music, scanning QR and Bar codes, translating a language from a picture - WP7 have everything build in in the search section, that’s one of the great examples of OS optimisation. Live Tiles are in a way similar to icons but have a better function, for example on iOS, user can see that he got notification by seeing  red circle with the number of notifications on the icon, that would be pretty much the extend of icon function on iOS and Android. With live tiles, app can show not just a number of notifications, but who it’s from and additional information, e.g my Guardian tile shows me the latest news and top stories from section I chose to pin, Travel Apps can show latest information about your flight (delays, gate etc.).

WP certainly is a different experience from iOS and Android: no more shiny glass buttons, no more “slide to unlock”. For only 2 years I think WP7 does pretty good for itself, considering that iOS and Android been around 2-3 years longer which is a bit deal in today’s terms.

Buying Windows Phone, I knew that developer interest isn’t there quite yet, a lot of services don’t have their official apps on Microsoft’s Market Place, but they can still be accessed with 3rd party apps. Overall I don’t regret switching to Windows Phone, at least in my case I don’t lose my app database since I still use my iPad2, that being said switching tablet for Windows one will be a difficult move to make.