I’ve had my Samsung Omnia 7 for a while now, and I am definitely not disappointed with Windows Phone 7 – it’s a wonderful piece of software, every bit as good as iOS, Android or the BlackBerry OS. But, as with any mobile platform, finding the right apps in the Marketplace can be tricky. So, a future reference for fellow Windows Phone 7 users, here are my favourites so far (no games, sorry):
Birdsong
Birdsong is a Twitter app. There are plenty of Twitter apps for Windows Phone, including the official client and Seesmic, which work well on other platforms. Birdsong is, I think, exclusive to Windows Phone. I think it’s brilliant.
For a start, it is the only Twitter app I know of right now that makes use of Windows Phone’s live tiles, displaying the number of waiting mentions and direct messages without you needing to go in to the app itself. Think of the number icons that appear on your Facebook app on iOS devices and you get the idea – although live tiles can do far more than display numbers; it’s a much more powerful feature than in iOS.
Secondly, it sends push notifications, which I don’t see in any other Twitter app on Windows Phone, and tells you how many new Tweets are waiting for you to read. Finally, it has a “do not disturb” feature, which means you can tell it not to ring your phone when someone sends you a message at 2am. Bliss.
gMaps
Windows Phone comes with Bing maps. Bing maps are good, and very accurate, but I do like my Google Maps. That, in essence, is why I love this app. It’s Google Maps. But, even better, you can select any of the different views you normally can on the desktop version, you can track your journey, your current speed, and enable transport and traffic layers. Which, by my reckoning, means it slaps Google’s iOS maps app into the dust!
Last.fm
I love this because I love Last.fm. It really only does what you’d expect. You can access your profile, you can listen to recommended radio, library radio, look up information on what’s playing… but, it looks great and plays very well over both 3G and WiFi. It’s as good as the player on iOS.
Simple Dropbox Viewer
This is a brilliant app to access my Dropbox files on the move. Open it up, open the file, and if it’s an Office file, I can look at it in my Office app. Again, nothing special, but the ability to access my files in the cloud whilst on the move is invaluable.
Tweet & Go
Tweet & Go is another Twitter app, but it’s an app with a difference. It does one thing – it Tweets. It does nothing else. You wite a Tweet, you send it. No loading messages or timelines. You just Tweet and go – No excessive data. It’s for those times when you just want to say something, and nothing more. Or, when you need to cut down on data usage abroad! It’s amazing, one of my most-used apps. I Tweet using this, then wait for push notifications from Songbird, perfect!
LazyWorm YouTube
I’ll be honest, the default YouTube app is awful. It’s nothing more than a link to the mobile YouTube site. However, the LazyWorm YouTube app is a different matter entirely. It’s the best YouTube app I’ve seen, on any device. It’s gorgeous for a start, and aesthetics mean a lot.
Apart from this, video is delivered at very high quality (you can upgrade to HD video for a small fee), the app loads up your favourites, recent videos, plays back superbly over WiFi and quite well over 3G too. It also loads up their picks and the most viewed on YouTube. Within videos, you can rate up and down, comment, lock the screen orientation (great when viewing in bed), and either view full screen or with comments and everything else around it. This is how to deliver YouTube to mobile devices. It’s the most satisfying way to watch YouTube, it beats the desktop and iOS versions by a long way.
Closing Thoughts
What I love about these apps is that they all look like they were designed for Windows Phone. The Last.fm app looks and feels just like the iOS app in many ways, which is fine, and the Dropbox app does a job rather than being anything special, but the other apps are just brilliant. Birdsong and Tweet & Go are both wonderful apps – the first makes use of Windows Phone’s best features, the latter is just amazingly simple yet remarkable; then you have gMaps and the Lazyworm YouTube app – they simply take desktop web applications and, rather than just sticking them in a mobile wrapper, customise them to a point when the application itself looks more complete than it does on the web.
So, don’t let people say Windows Phone 7 isn’t a decent operating system. It’s very good. It’s every bit as good as iOS and BlackBerry OS, which I’ve used extensively, and I would also say Android is no better. I admit, I’ve not used Android much, but it’s never convinced me it’s as good as it’s made out to be – and I’ve not even mentioned email or Xbox Live integration…
A couple of your comparisons with iOS are a little short-sighted – you mention in Birdsong about ‘live tiles’, but iOS doesn’t really have anything like that to compare with. A better comparison would be with widgets on Android.
Likewise, you talk about the google maps app on iOS, but (surprise, surprise) the google maps app on Android is also far superior than the one on iOS – including layers, street view, 3d building view, and turn-by-turn voice navigation for drivers.
Android certainly isn’t perfect – no OS is – but it would appear that MS have decided to go down the Apple route with WinPo7, but trying to tightly control the hardware that it runs on , which, IMHO, will limit adoption (initial stats seem to back this up too).
I concede many Android apps may be as good, but I do not have direct experience of them, so I can’t really comment.
When it comes to approach, Microsoft’s approach is slightly different to Apple’s. Hardware has a minimum spec, which is down to minimum quality expectations more than anything, but it’s not a “one size fits all approach” like Apple’s. When it comes down to adoption, remember it’s a tough market to break, it’s still a new OS, yet to have its first major upgrade, and it would be better to wait and see what happens after Mango and the first Nokia phones come out for a clearer picture.