I still love my Windows Phone 7 after 30 days

I admit that I like shiny things.  I also admit that I don’t like the iPhone very much.  I also have looked forward to owning this phone for quite some time.  So I knew what I was getting into.

However, as a v1.0 product, I also knew that there would be some warts.  After all, it’s v1.0.  But, did Microsoft learn from Windows Mobile 6.x?  Could it match Steve’s app phone thing and Google’s mobile thing?

A short bit of background

The only phones I haven’t used for over a few months WebOs and Symbian phones.  They both looked alright, but I wasn’t in the position to ditch what I had to try them out.

However, I have used Windows Mobile since the very first incarnation in 2003.  Wow, that was not great.  Though, I did like the Motorola clamshell form factor at the time.  It also did so much vs. the other phones, it was OK to overlook the warts.  But, WM2003 basically remained the same until WM6.5.

The phone I stuck with, and modded the heck out of, for 2 years was the HTC Kaiser / TyTn II / AT&T Tilt.  It got flashed with every new Windows Mobile 6.x that saw the light of day.

And then, some wonderful people at XDA Developers put together a few builds of Android for testing.  And while that phone’s CPU wasn’t the strongest, I did use Android 1.x and 2.x for several months as my primary phone OS.

As my Tilt’s battery just couldn’t hack it anymore, and new batteries were basically dead on arrival, a good friend of mine loaned me his iPhone 3G for use.  So, I used that in iOS 3.x and 4.0, 4.1, and finally 4.2.1 for several months.

So, have I used enough of the available market to be informed?  I hope so.

What I like about Windows Phone 7

It’s different.  And not just arbitrarily or just because it’s shiny and new.  It’s different in that someone thought about how to use a phone to do their job, and took a good stab at it.

Web sites vs. beer – guess who wins?

It’s time for an update.  Vacations and a flurry of event activity has gobbled up most of my time recently.  And that’s a good thing!  Further pricing discussion will wait another few days while I write about the launch of a new idea that’s been hatching over the past few months.

SAP for Utilities 2009

This is a top-notch event.  This year I was lucky enough to be involved in the mechanics of a new extension of the event itself – a new, utility-centric collaboration and social networking community.  The event’s theme was “Collaboration Fuels Innovation”.  More specifically – cross-company collaboration. Nobody has to reinvent the wheel or solve the same problem twice if they work on common problems.

The event itself draws a very high level audience.  At the event itself, CxO’s, chief architects, and anyone involved in creating the next generation (pun intended) utility company all rub shoulders and share stories.

Utility companies (generation, transmission and distribution, retailers, and operators of all types) show up to talk about their plans for working with new demands in the marketplace as well as any new governmental mandates.

Our objective was to keep those conversations going beyond the event.  So, we created the UtilityCollaboration community.  The idea was first envisioned by the event organizer, Eventure Events.  I just helped figure out how to do it with them.

Opera Unite + Windows Home Server?

I’ve gotten a lot of hits on my article about how I extended my Windows Home Server (WHS) with Hamachi.  I use Hamachi because I need a more direct way to interact with my WHS content away from home (beyond what Microsoft’s remote access supports).  But that’s really just file sharing.

The next step to me is socialization.  If you’ve listened to Seth Godin’s TED talk about enabling “tribes”, you could see that the most immediate tribe most people have is their family.  WHS can help fulfill your tribe’s interest in family photos and media, but there could be more to it…

Perhaps there’s a way to use Opera Unite to create a richer experience around WHS.  While Opera Unite says it’s designed to remove the middleman (or the middle machine?) from the content-sharing equation, I contend there is a role for a server in this brave new peer-to-peer world.

What can getting “Scobleized” do for you?

This is a deviation from my blog trajectory, but bear with me.

I believe in many things.  Among them, that social networking / Web 2.0 (or whatever we call it today) technologies can be used for the purposes of good rather than evil.  Especially in a manufacturing or process industries setting.  I’ll post about that sometime soon.

Obviously, I experiment in whatever media seem to be on the leading or bleeding edge and call it “work”.  I just need to get paid for it.  Right…