Fish_Face_McGee (Level 1)
As much as sales may not reflect it, 2011 has been a huge year for Windows Phone and its apps. Recently eclipsing the 50,000 milestone, Windows Phone (now with Mango) is getting better and better. After all of the hullabaloo over the best iPhone, iPad, and Android apps, I decided Windows Phone needed its own write-up. I got in touch with Falcon, and the following is our combined list of best/essential/etc. apps for Windows Phone.
Rowi (Free (with ads and no notifications) or $2.99)
blurb by Fish_Face_McGee
The beta of Rowi 2.0 is the best Twitter app on Windows Phone. Every main flaw that makes 1.5 less-than-great (laggy list scrolling comes to mind) is fixed, and Hidden Pineapple has added a read-status bar to tweets as well as threaded-esque view for conversations. It’s Live Tile is often faster at updating than the one for the Me hub, and paid users can also get Toast notifications for @ replies and DMs. Like many of the other apps in this list, it also adheres nicely to the Metro design language, letting it fit in with the rest of the OS. Also, MetroTwit users, get excited: the read-status bar in Rowi is yet another hook in place for (the perennially ‘coming soon’) The Nest.
AppFlow (Free)
blurb by Falcon
The Windows Phone Marketplace isn't terrible, but it's far from perfect. You've got the typical categories such as "tools + productivity", "news + weather", "social" and more to search by and you can sort by top, free, and new. Unfortunately it doesn't go any deeper than that though. Through all the ways to get the Marketplace you can see the star rating and number of ratings up front, but if you want more you need to dive into the page for that app. It's also not clear as to the order of which apps are listed in the Marketplace.
This is where AppFlow comes in. The first thing that stands out is the visual difference between it and the actual Marketplace. It can load up to 50 apps at a time, depending on which category you go into. On a single slide you see thumbnail versions of screenshots for the app, its star rating as well as how many ratings it has, what the price is, and a short description. You can slide through one by one, or tap on the icons to the right to see just a list and you can jump around via that. You can sort through apps with the same Categories that Microsoft uses. Once you dive into an app's page you can go to this super nifty Stats screen which not only will give you the percentages for how the ratings are distributed, but also even more crazier graphs about how well the app is doing.
But where this app shines are in the Lists section. Here you have a handful of groups, and within each group another handful of categories created by the app developers. From here you can sort apps by things like "Staff picks", "Highest rated", "On Sale", "Hidden Gems", "Best Live Tile Apps", and "Best Mango Apps". Those are all self-explanatory, so I'll finally stop rambling, but I can't express to you how helpful categories like these are. Some are hit-or-miss, but there are enough good categories to make users happy.
This is by far my number one recommended app for Windows Phone users. Not only is the presentation and layout of the Marketplace information phenomenal, it cuts out most of the crap and helps users find great apps quickly.
WeatherLive (Free (limited functionality) or $1.99)
blurb by Fish_Face_McGee
Since getting my phone in November 2010, I’ve been desperately looking for a great weather app. Current conditions and forecasts are one of the best use-cases for Live Tiles and the search has been frighteningly difficult. The Weather channel app has a quick-updating tile, and good functionality, but is a touch on the ugly side, and the tile has weird depth effects that are just out of place in Windows Phone. AccuWeather’s app is significantly more attractive, but the tile updates just slow enough to be less useful in Indiana where the joke is “Don’t like the weather? Wait an hour.” WeatherLive on the other hand does a relatively good job of looking Metro, while having a customizable Live Tile, both in content and update frequency. It also has push notifications (like the other two apps) for special weather alerts.
Connectivity Shortcuts (free)
blurb by Falcon
There's not much to this app, but I find it pretty useful. This app provides exactly what you think it would; shortcuts to the connectivity settings of the phone (Wi-Fi, cellular data, Bluetooth, and Airplane Mode). What makes this app good is the fact that within this app you can pin the shortcuts to any of those setting to your Start screen.
It's not perfect though. The live tiles aren't always... well, alive. Sometimes they won't update properly to tell you whether something is Enabled or Disabled. Sometimes they won't display the icon at all and will be just a colored square! However, I think the convenience this app offer users outweighs the potential jankiness. Also, for all but the Bluetooth setting (well, to be fair I don't own a Bluetooth device to test it) you can just tap the top of the screen while on the Start screen to see what's going on as far as your connections go, so you don't need a live tile to tell you whether or not something is on.
Personally, I turn my Wi-Fi on and off a lot throughout the day, so I like how quick I can get to it with this app. Similarly, if you're someone worried about how much data you're using you can use this to quickly get to that setting on a regular basis.
NextGen Reader (Free Trial or $1.99)
blurb by Fish_Face_McGee
Google Reader is one of the core pieces of functionality I need on a smartphone. RSS is still one of my primary methods of getting news, and being able to sync between my desktop and my phone is a vital feature. Like with weather apps, finding a good Google Reader app took me a while. I had started off with the trials of Flux and Wonder Reader, but prior to Mango, panoramic apps did not run particularly well, and WonderReader at the time of my search was more folder-focused than I was. NextGen Reader is my favorite: it’s fast, it looks and feels built-in, and (perhaps most importantly) the developer is incredibly responsive, both in email correspondence as well as updating the software. It has a live tile that tells you the number of unread articles you have, and supports GR folders and recently added Instapaper as a mobilizer.
Radio Controlled (free)
blurb by Falcon
In lieu of an official Pandora app, the dev community recently got their hands on APIs for the popular music streaming service. Radio Controlled is the better of the two released so far. There are a few features missing, but there's enough here for those who like using Pandora. You get access to all your stations and are able to create new ones. You can thumbs-up or not-thumbs-up songs, but you can't thumbs down a song you've already liked. You also don't get access to things like putting a song on snooze. Selecting a song will bring you to a page with links to buy it from Amazon or the Zune Marketplace. Somehow you can also see the next two songs coming up. As far as I'm concerned, that's gypsy magic.
4th & Mayor (Free)
blurb by Fish_Face_McGee
As should be fairly clear, lot of my picks come from a place of pseudo-necessity where alternatives either did not function great or just simply had better alternatives. 4 & Mayor is one such alternative, this time to the official Foursquare. At launch, the official Foursquare app did not run well and was missing numerous features when compared to its iOS and Android brethren. In came Jeff Wilcox with 4 & Mayor, a fast, powerful, and downright attractive Foursquare app. Like many of my other favorites, it looks and feels built-in. Not long after the launch of 4 & Mayor, Foursquare actually pulled their app and recommend 4 & Mayor on their site. They have since released a new official app, but it was panoramic, and so it had the same issues as Flux prior to Mango. Like NextGen reader, the updates are fast.
Stop the Music! (free)
blurb by Falcon
One annoying thing about Windows Phone is if you have audio playing, be it music/podcasts you have on your device or something you're streaming from an app, the pause/play and skip controls always appear on the lock screen and on the drop down volume bar. Even if you're listening to one track and it eventually plays completely through those controls will still be there.
Well open up this app, hit that stop button, and say goodbye to those track controls!
WP7applist (free)
blurb by Fish_Face_McGee
For as many things the Windows Phone Marketplace does right, as Falcon described in his description of AppFlow, it’s not perfect. On top of various filtering/sorting flaws, it’s not particularly fast about detecting updates for your installed apps. The recently updated (and redesigned) WP7applist helps, although my primary function for it is to check for updates. It’s now Mango-supported and has a less harsh orange-on-gray layout (versus the original white on orange). The live tile shows the number of apps listed on WP7applist.com, new updates, and new releases. I don’t remember if the ads were always there and I just ignored them better, but there are now ads in various areas of the app. It’s free, so it’s hard to complain too much about it, but the black on gray makes them stand out a touch more than is appealing.
Wizard's Choice (free)
blurb by Falcon
With this being Windows Phone, the big draw for games are Xbox Live supported ones. More often than not that's where the quality games can be found, and not to mention... PHONE POINTS! But there are still free, indie type games made for Windows Phone. Wizard's Choice is a choose your own adventure where you play the role of a young wizard and are accompanied by your warrior pal. At the end of every page you are given choices of options based upon whatever just happened (duh). Unlike a typical choose your own adventure paper book, this is on a smart device so at the top of the screen you can see your current Health, Manna, Gold, and Morale. If you die you start over at the beginning of the journey. Given all the Angry Birds and Tiny Wings clones out there, Wizard's Choice stands out as unique and I would recommend it even if cost a few Gold pieces.
Baconit (free)
blurb by Fish_Face_McGee
Baconit is a Reddit app for Windows Phone. It’s a pretty straightforward explanation, but there’s not a whole lot else to say. Quinn Damerell has done an admirable job of meshing the functionality of Reddit with the Metro design language. It has Live Tile support to show unread messages as well as your Karma, and has unlimited scrolling in subreddits. Speaking of which, if you sign in with your Reddit account, it will pull in all of your subscribed subreddits. It’s a simple touch, but it’s appreciated. There’s some roughness around the edges (mostly just error alerts the claim that the app cannot reach the internet which are virtually always wrong), but most issues are in the change log for the upcoming 1.4 update. Also, it’s free, and has rather full functionality.
MetroTube (free trial or $0.99) - Future support discontinued/no longer available as of Jan 1st
blurb by Fish_Face_McGee
So, here’s the thing: Google’s support of Windows Phone has been poor, to put it kindly. The official app is just a container for the website, and (once again) prior to Mango and IE9, it didn’t run well. Lazyworm Applications came in, in December of 2010, with Youtube (by Lazyworm) and Lazytube. Lazytube evolved into Metrotube a few months ago, a beautiful, fast Metro-inspired application. Sadly, as of January 1, the app will no longer be available. According to their letter to their customers, “YouTube’s current API does not have any documented methods for obtaining high quality video content. We have been using a workaround to obtain this content and it has recently come to our attention that this may not be sustainable in the long term…” Unfortunately, the choice of alternatives aren’t great, with the best that I’m aware of being Supertube.
ScreenCapturer (free (Homebrew; requires dev unlock))
blurb by Fish_Face_McGee
Frankly, this article wouldn’t have been possible (or would have been less visual) without this app. Sadly, Windows Phone 7 does not natively support taking screenshots. I believe the concern is intellectual-property related, but nonetheless, homebrewers to the rescue! The app works quite simply: open the app, tap “Start Capture Task” and just half-push the camera button on whatever screen or app you want to capture an image of. Strangely, the pictures look very bad while viewing them on the phone, but on computers the lessened picture quality from the native screens seems less severe.
Edit: Fixed broken formatting in the conversion from blog post to forum post.
How, you ask? Well, thanks to the Chevron tool itself and Rafael, my Samsung Focus is now running the pre-update, which came out this time last month for every part of the world other than AT&T and a handful of other North American carriers. Thanks to the Chevron tool and people on the XDA-developers forum, I have been running my Focus with a microSD card for over two months now with no performance problems, and (with some registry hacks) it's actually running faster than it did without a microSD card with no noticeable detriment to battery life.
What has Microsoft done to improve my WP7 experience? Well, they've made the updates. However, due to their desire to be on every carrier, they were forced to follow the carrier-demands of update-policy control, meaning that as far as my pre-unlock experience goes, I would have had no impression that they've done anything, especially since with crippling lack of information about what causes an update whose website made it seem it would launch in January to actually launch in March and may not hit all phones until the end of April. Since Windows Phone 7 launched, they have provided no information about getting microSD card support for the Focus (which was a selling point of the device) except that they were apparently buying all kinds of cards back in November to make a list of Certified cards.
What has Samsung done to improve my WP7 experience? They've made firmware improvements that were included in the updates. However, due to the above concessions to carriers, I wouldn't have had any updates without unlocking my phone. On the microSD front, they've been the biggest cause of misinformation. Before launch, they said the phone was tested to support up to a 32GB microSD. Then in the manual for the Focus, it mentioned once again it was tested up to a 32GB microSD but then says that it will only work with a certified card and the only certified card was a Class 2 8GB Sandisk card. Then, the model number provided by Samsung support staff is not associated with a product anyone can buy in a store. However, even with all of this, Samsung staff has been consistently more open and more reach-able about the microSD issues than Microsoft and AT&T, though it's not saying too much for the latter.
What has AT&T done to improve my WP7 experience? I would say they've done more to harm my experience, with malicious intent or otherwise, than the either two companies. Right after launch, an AT&T rep told me on Twitter than Microsoft was going to release an update to improve microSD support. Then there's the fact that they're the reason why, before un-branding my phone, I likely would have gotten neither the February update or March update until April. Thanks to my experiences with AT&T with my last phone (it took 1 year for them to let RIM release BlackBerry OS5 for the Bold 9000), I don't trust them to not screw their customers over with updates.
The most frustrating part of all of this? I love my Focus. It's wonderful. However, there are some bugs that, in a perfect (or even reasonably ideal) world, would have been fixed in November. Or December. Or January. Or February. Or March (unless AT&T rocks the world in the next 8 days). Between Microsoft's update policy and their decision to let carriers control rollout, I can't help but feel that the three companies involved with my Focus don't like it as much as I do. Also, from the rhetoric Microsoft was spouting leading up to the launch of Windows Phone 7, I had no intent of ever unlocking my phone or using any non-Marketplace software, so the fact that I'm currently relying on them to give me the support I want is weird.
Am I just bitching? Yeah, probably; I can agree with that. However, it's been 4 months and my Focus wouldn't have changed in any noticeable, positive way if it weren't for what the homebrew community has enabled. I also understand that I'm likely over-blowing my situation. I kinda look forward to Vogon or someone pushing reasonableness into my skull because I know this frustration isn't really helpful to anybody, but I feel like, as opposed to a number of people on the XDA forums, telling Microsoft how much we love them isn't helpful either when they make it difficult.
I am now on the other side of upgrading hardware and reinstalling Windows on both my desktop and laptop, and already have noticed some huge improvements, and I figured what better place to share them than here? I wanted to find out how drastic (if at all) the changes to my computer-usage would be after my hardware changes completed. So I did some "scientific" tests (benchmarking software and the stopwatch program on my phone for timing) to see what improved.
Desktop
The Problem:
My gaming rig takes a bit longer to boot up than it could. My DVD drives are IDE, and my motherboard has to run a specific chip to support them, which causes bootup to take longer as it initializes the IDE and detects the drive. My main boot drive, a Gen 1 60 GB OCZ Solid Series SSD, has been showing its obsolescence. Due to how poorly it performs under reasonable stress (surfing the web while listening to music {which resided on another drive} or copying files), I was forced to move my whole AppData file structure to an HDD so that Google Chrome wouldn't cause my computer to hang often for short bits of time. Also, OCZ's Gen 1 drives do not support TRIM, meaning that in order to keep the drive in proper condition, I need to constantly be running maintenance on it.Pre-fix Benchmarks:
Time it takes computer to show the desktop from hitting the power button: approximately 1 minute, 15 seconds.
Soluto's "Time to Boot" time once in Windows: approximately 1 minute, 4 seconds.
Before Specs:
Intel Core i7 920 2.6 Ghz
60 GB OCZ Solid Series SSD
2 Seagate Barracuda 1 TB HDDs
6 GB of DDR31600 Corsair RAM
1 BFG Nvidia 280 GTX Card
2 IDE DVD RW Drives
The Solution:
The solution was relatively simple, get SATA DVD drives so no conversion check needs to happen, and replace the SSD with a more modern drive. I also decided to give myself another speed boost by combining my two 1TB HDDs into a RAID 0 drive. Given how simple the fixes were (the hardest part was performing some much needed wire organization to get the SSD out), the improvements were pretty dramatic.Post-fix benchmarks
Time it takes the computer to show the desktop from hitting the power button: approximately 45 seconds
Soluto's "Time to Boot" time once in Windows: approximately 56 seconds.
After Specs:
Intel Core i7 920 2.6 Ghz
64 GB Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue Series SSD
1 2TB RAID 0 Drive (made from the above Barracudas)
6 GB of DDR31600 Corsair RAM
1 BFG Nvidia 280 GTX Card
2 SATA DVD RW Drives
Laptop
The Problem:
No huge problem here, more frustration. Before it got cancelled, i was using my laptop to take notes in one of my classes. However, I had no access to an outlet, and the class was about 3 hours or so. Even with Aerofoil installed, I was always closer to battery death than I would like. Also, boot time was so slow that I ended up constantly leaving the laptop in sleep mode or hibernation, so I wanted to improve boot speed there if possible.Pre-fix benchmarks:
Time it takes the computer to show the desktop from hitting the power button: approximately 1 minute, 3 seconds
Soluto's "Time to Boot" time once in Windows: approximately 1 minute, 6 seconds
First battery life reported by Windows after power plug is pulled from Laptop (using Aerofoil): approximately 2 hours, 29 minutes
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz
250 GB Seagate HDD
4 GB of RAM
Nvidia 9300M
1 DVD Drive
The Solution:
Replace the current HDD with the desktop's old SSD. As mentioned above, this is clearly not the best solution given the issues with the drive. However, my hope is that the lighter usage I will have with the computer (most of my classes have desktops and I prefer the larger screens) I will not wear the drive as quickly and will not have to consolidate free space and run AS Cleaner as often. Another issue is the capacity drop in the hard drive. I'm going from 250 to 60 GB. Luckily for me, I only used about 100 GB, and most of that was removable. I was actually able to cut down everything to about 40 GB taken by Windows and programs, leaving me 20 GB for data.Post-Fix Benchmarks:
Time it takes the computer to show the desktop from hitting the power button: approximately 58 seconds
Soluto's "Time to Boot" time once in Windows: approximately 43 seconds
First battery life reported by Windows after power plug is pulled from Laptop (using Aerofoil): approximately 3 hours, 37 minutes
After Specs
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz
60 GB OCZ Solid Series SSD
4 GB of RAM
Nvidia 9300M
1 DVD Drive
Reflection
There a couple of obvious issues from making the tests I did strong, but I am ecstatic with the results, nonetheless. For instance, the tests on the "new" computers were on new installs of Windows and they're known to run better than months-old machines. I may come back to compare my stats in a few months. I'm pleased that everything went without a hitch. Well, mostly without a hitch. I ended up having to install Windows twice on both machines. I had to install it on the desktop twice because I was using Upgrade media on a blank hard drive, and that's the only way to use it for a truly clean install that does not cause the new Validation tool to throw a flag. I had to install it twice on the laptop because after I installed it, I noticed that the desktop would never shut down fully. The screen would blank, and the hard drive would spin down, but never actually shut off. I am not sure if this was directly related, but I know that OCZ recommends having their Gen 1 Solid Series drives in IDE mode. I changed the BIOS on the laptop to be in IDE mode and reinstalled just to make sure that drivers and registry gelled with that change.Honestly, the biggest way I noticed the improvement on the desktop was when I installed Adobe CS5. My school only provides it in the Design Premium and Production Premium suites. When I installed them on the desktop previously, the whole process took about 45 minutes to an hour. This was loading it from my data drive and installing it to my SSD. When I installed them on the desktop yesterday, the whole process took 20 minutes, loading from the RAID to the SSD.
Now, functionally, I have one major issue with the Zune HD: it does not support WPA Enterprise/WPA2 Enterprise. For many people, this is not a problem. However, my Zune is my primary music player at school, and IUPUI uses WPA2 Enterprise, so I am unable to use any of the HD's wifi-dependent features, like the marketplace, in a situation where it makes the most sense. I have no reason to use my Zune HD at home because I can listen to the music on my computer or steam it to my 360. Microsoft acknowledges this issue so much as to say that they're looking into it, however my hopes for getting fix are becoming ever-slim and I've stopped caring about it.
Why? Microsoft essentially killed the Zune HD for me when they announced the Windows 7 Phone Series. It highlighted one of the biggest comments of detractors (it's just an MP3 player) and agreed with it by implementing the entire Zune experience as a portion of the Windows 7 Phone OS. While doing so, they also added functionality that makes the WPA2 Enterprise issue irrelevant: Windows 7 Phones can download songs straight to the phone over the cellular connection, and users with Zune Pass can download the song for free. This is why the "death" of my Zune HD (and BlackBerry for that matter) is not a case of eventually, but has a reasonably hard-set date.
The biggest hurdle the Zune has is Microsoft's insistence on making a me-too competitor to the iPod. Jerry Holkins (Tycho of Penny-Arcade) made fun of this situation before the original Zune came out. He and Mike were recording a podcast while writing this comic. He made the comment, while hypothesizing another strip where a Microsoft employee is trying to convince a superior that the Zune needs to have the features mentioned in the comic, that, "We don't have to fail right now. We can fail when it's most convenient for us." By making a device that is the same as an iPod at its core, they have been doomed on the hardware front from the word, "Go." The inclusion of Wi-fi for sharing is a joke. The whole concept is based around the idea of sharing songs with other people, implying that this is already a popular product.
Perhaps it was always Microsoft's intention to make the Zune a service/experience that is not tied to just one device. I'll admit, the Zune PC software is pretty great, and slapping the Zune name on the incredible 1080p instant streaming on Xbox 360 isn't bad at all. The problem lies with the fact that anyone who, like me, bought the Zune or Zune HD has bought a product that is doomed to always be one step behind, whether it be the iPod or one of Microsoft's own products.
So why is this a catch-22, you may be asking now? I have made a fairly good argument as to why no one should bother with any Zune product, or at least any Zune hardware. The catch-22 with the Zune (and really, all ecosystem-based devices) is that it's detrimental to leave an ecosystem. If I stop using my Zune and don't replace it with a Windows 7 Phone or some other device that is essentially a Zune, then all of the songs I have downloaded through the Zune Pass but have not credited to keep are worthless due to DRM. Of course, that is partly a reason to not use the Zune Pass, but it's convenient.
If you actually read this, thank you for taking the time, and I apologize for subjecting you to my ramblings.
