Windows Phone 7 Series

The writing seemed to be on the wall for Windows Mobile. Ugly, unloved and hopelessly out of date compared to its more intuitive models, not many expected much from its successor. Microsoft surprised us all with Windows Phone 7 Series, a verbosely titled reboot of the entire series. Early praise flooded in, but since its unveiling at Mobile World Congress in January a number of worrying cracks in its glossy veneer are starting to appear. So here they are, exposed for you all.

The preamble: My cult and contentious reviews’ system. Designed as a time saver to highlight the potential deal breakers in a product before you commit to reading lengthy reviews on your favourites sites and/or magazines. For a more detailed description please read: THE RULES

Just the Bad Points Review: Windows Phone 7 Series

• No multi-tasking at launch (Microsoft confirms it could be added in future)
• No expandable storage (Microsoft hardware guidelines forbid it)
• No copy and paste at launch (yes, really!)
• No Adobe Flash support at launch
• No backwards compatibility with Windows Mobile (potentially a good point, long term)
• Microsoft’s high minimum specifications for Series 7 handsets suggest there won’t be many affordable options from day one or design variants
• Windows Marketplace (app store) begins from scratch thanks to incompatibilities
• All 7 Series smartphones are likely to be large thanks to Microsoft’s high screen resolution minimum requirements
• No proof Internet Explorer mobile edition can yet compete with Opera Mobile, Mobile Safari or even Mobile Firefox
• Currently no Mac support to sync Series 7 handsets (unsurprising really)
• Q4 release date still a long way off – where will the competition be? (A multi-tasking iPhone?)
• Bing search, Bing Maps and Bing Video verses Google search, Google Maps and YouTube?
• Unlike Android/iPhone firmware, the upgrade path for 7 Series uncertain. Free 8 Series upgrades? Don’t bet on it
• Music and video syncing through Windows Media Player is a love it/hate it affair

Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha, WolframAlpha, Wolfram|Alpha – however you want to say it – has the Internet very excited. It chooses to avoid the term ‘search engine’ in favour of “computational knowledge engine” and works very differently from Google by providing actual answers to questions rather than links to potential answers. Questions can be as simple as How tall in the Eiffel Tower? to real time mathematical calculation of satellite positions across the sky. If this sounds impressive, that’s because it is and while I’ve written an extensive and enthusiastic piece about Wolfram Alpha on TrustedReviews the fact is it isn’t perfect. So what are the bad points?

The preamble: My cult and contentious reviews’ system. Designed as a time saver to highlight the potential deal breakers in a product before you commit to reading lengthy reviews on your favourites sites and/or magazines. For a more detailed description please read: the Rules

Just the Bad Points Review: Wolfram Alpha

• It takes time and practice to learn the correct terminology to get good results from Wolfram Alpha
• Natural language interpretation is poor, more than 25% of queries trigger the response: “Wolfram|Alpha isn’t sure what to do with your input”
• It potentially damages traffic to traditional websites which spend time answering queries in greater detail
• Topics such as mathematics, science, medicine and currency help academics but real world public usefulness is much lower at present
• Many answers have little context
• Answers take longer to load than the results from traditional search engines
• Answers can be very dry. A search for Shakespeare, for example, could do with more than just his date/place of birth and a rather cold ‘timeline’
• We know little of the financial security behind the project other than “Infrastructure for this computation provided by Wolfram|Alpha launch partner Dell, Inc”
• Google is working on something similar with its Google Squared search project and its huge resources may outgun Wolfram Alpha