One week with Windows Phone

Because I was able to buy a HTC Radar at a low price, I thought I should give Windows Phone (WP) a try. For a week, I turned my Galaxy S2 off and used the Radar.

For your explanation: I use my phone mostly for checking Twitter, browsing the web (links from Tweets), checking my email/appointments and web searches. I don’t know if WP7 is designed for a different audience with other requirements, but this is what I expect from a smartphone.

 

Basically the second task I did on the phone was to search for “Twitter” on the marketplace. And although I selected “Applications” before doing the search, the instant results should one Application and three “Music” title. Not very clever of WP7 when I already made absolutely clear that I wanted to search for Applications only.

Anyhow, the Twitter application itself is terrible to use. If you are used to ÜberSocial, it’s like using an early Alpha of a twitter client. Upon each start it requires four to five seconds to actually display something, it doesn’t remember you the last location in the timeline etc. But knowing that WP7 has built in support for Twitter, I tried using Twitter with the “People” hub.

That wasn’t any better at all. 1/5 of the screen is displaying “People/What’s new” instead of given more room for tweets. It also doesn’t remember the position in the timeline from the last use, so I was constantly forced to scroll down and then trying to remember where I was the last time. Clicking on a tweet shows them on a new screen with a small font and 50% of the screen being blank. Yes, it also displays replies and the keyboard there, but the important content is the tweet itself so it should be displayed bigger there. It usually took me two to three tries to click on the embedded links because it was so tiny. And I couldn’t find any setting to make the font any bigger.

What was actually better to use then expected was the browser. From what I have heard in the news it should have all sorts of issues, but it worked flawless the entire week. Only sometimes the text was jumping around a little bit, I guess because of pictures that were loaded in the background.

Connecting to my Exchange server has worked without any problems, but I have to admit that I was expecting this (even my three years old Windows Mobile 6.5 plays nice with Exchange). What is really insane: The email application use a white background while all other build-in applications have a black background (and for good reason). And again, there is no setting to change that.

Performing a web search should be easy as WP7 has a mandatory search button. Clicking on it brings up Bing search but you need another click before the keyboard appears. Is it really so complicated to display the keyboard by default? In fact, the Google App is working exactly this way: Start and type right away. But of course, you can’t change that the search key so it launches the Google app instead of Bing.

And while we are at “Entering text”: The default keyboard isn’t a pleasure to work with. It get’s the job done, but if you are used to Swype or SliteIT it’s a step backward.

What really drove me crazy: WP7 is by default hiding the signal strength bar! You either click on the top bar to display it or, within Internet Explorer, bring up the menu with “…” to see it. I really don’t know if the coverage in Redmond is so awesome you do not need the display, but I prefer to see it.

Many times I was waiting for Internet Explorer until it displayed “We’re having trouble displaying this page”. This is a no brainer on Android as I see it always and act accordingly. But with WP7 I need an extra click to check if it makes sense to open a link.

Finally, yesterday I was taking some photos of a broken Laptop of a friend of me and we wanted to send those to the vendor by Email from his secondary computer.

We took the photos, plugged in the phone and waited for the drive to show up in Explorer. But guess what: All we got was “Install Zune to exchange data with your Phone”. It really seems to be very hard to give the user easy access to their data.

My (Android based) Galaxy S2 also comes with connection software (Kies) but when I plug it in, it simply asks “USB Storage or Kies”, and the first option gives me access to the phone right away without any installation on any computer.

 

My personal verdict: WP7 is not the “Awesome phone” it wants to be. Not everything is bad, it has some nice features (like the long battery runtime), great developer support (C#!) and with ChevronWP7 a, somewhat, official way to unlock.

But my Galaxy S2 suits me better and has less issues then WP7.

Debugging DHCP on the client

In case a computer has problem with DHCP, there is a special log within Windows 7 that can help you a lot.

Go to Event Viewer, Applications and Services Logs, Microsoft, Windows, Dhcp-Client, Microsoft-Windows-DHCP Client Events/Operational.

By default this trace log will be empty, because you need to enable it by clicking on “Enable log” on the right side.

It can help you a lot to analyze the problems the computer might have, but there is one little thing that can drive you nuts at first.

The log will not reveal about which network connection the event is, it will only tell you about Adapter X or Interface X:

Inform ack is received in the adapter 10.

Dhcp has notified NLA for the configuration changes for the interface 10

The events are referring to an internal Windows index that identifies each network connection which is called Interface Index. You can use the netsh command to get the interface index (First column, “Idx”)

netsh interface ipv4 show interface

You can also use wmic to display the interface index:

wmic nic get name, index, DeviceID, NetConnectionStatus, InterfaceIndex

Android: WidgetLocker plus Go Launcher Ex Launcher Problems

I really like my Galaxy S2, it’s the phone I always was dreaming off. However, there are two areas that really need improvement.

First, the lock screen: Samsung has created it’s own lock screen and is even more useless than the stock Android lock screen (but you can’t select that one either). What is annoying even more: You can bypass the lock screen by pressing the Home button twice. This caused that my telephone was doing strange things while it actually be locked.

Next is the default Home Screen, TouchWiz. It was okay when the Galaxy S2 was released but given that no updates have been released since then, it was time to search for a replacement.

Because of the openness of Android, there are hundreds of replacement out there and I choose WidgetLocker as my lock screen replacement and GO Launcher EX for my home screen.

I customized my lock screen so I can start the camera as well as the phone directly from it. Also, I choose to keep the notification icons visible so I can easily see what is going on in the background.

Important for me was also the option to block the Home button so the phone will not unlock when the Home button is pressed twice. To do this, start WidgetLocker and click “Settings”, “Advanced”, “Home Helper”, “HomeHelper Block Home”.

GO Launcher EX was has tons of settings so I skip the part what I have configured there.

Two weeks later my phone suddenly showed the “Select home screen applications” (Complete action using):

I selected “GO Launcher EX”, activated “Set as default” and didn’t think about it. Some hours later it appeared again, and it was appearing several hours later again.

This was very strange because until then this “bug” didn’t showed up and I had no idea where this comes from.

Playing around with some settings and doing a lot of searching, I finally understood what was going wrong: In order for WidgetLocker to override the default Home button behavior, you need to chose “WL HomeHelper” in the above screen.

When you press “Home”, Android will start WidgetLocker which will check if the phone is currently locked or not. If it is not locked, it will start the launcher that you have configured inside WidgetLocker, “Advanced”, “HomeHelper”, “HomeHelper’s Launcher” (see screenshots above).

This means:

• If there is an update of WidgetLocker, Android will show the “Complete action using” dialog: Choose WL HomeHelper
• If there is an update of GO Launcher EX, go to “WidgetLocker, “Advanced”, “HomeHelper”, “HomeHelper’s Launcher” and choose GO Launcher EX