Related
Just a quick question!
How do you think Android will stack up to Windows Mobile when it comes to functionality? Android will certainly look better and be much more finger friendly,etc, but will it be closer to the limits of the iPhone when it comes to copy paste (Android has copy paste, but dont know if it works everywhere), email, contacts, and such? Will Windows Mobile fans be dissapointed or feel crippled when using Android?
Ive played around with the Android SDK a bit, but i havent really gotten a definite feeling if the functionality suits my needs
Cheers!
Yes I am also looking for some forum information on this matter. I would like to know the opinion of anyone who has had a hands on experience with both OS's. Found a nice article in endgadget but I like user opinions better.
I definetly want to know too!
Here is what I want to know for the Droid...
Can you use it as wifi router?
Does it do push hotmail instantly?
Is there logmein support?
Does it work with orb?
i'm moving to Android when Acer A1 liquid is out, then Sony X10a.
Android got free gps navigation with realtime traffic! nice!
segadc said:
I definetly want to know too!
Here is what I want to know for the Droid...
Can you use it as wifi router?
Does it do push hotmail instantly?
Is there logmein support?
Does it work with orb?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
1. Yes
2. No, not that I'm aware of anyway, but you can forward Hotmail email to your Google Account to receive it instantly.
3. Yes
4. Yes
Anything else anyone else wants to know then feel free to post here and I'll do my best to answer it in a reasonable time.
I swapped my Touch Diamond for my G1 and I can do everything that I could do on my windows mobile (although I didn't have WinMo for long)
I've had all of the mobile OS's and always come back to windows mobile. Android is approaching windows mobile when you think of the ability to flash other OS versions and wide range of applications on an open system. But windows mobile gives me true multitasking ability like a desktop computer, and windows mobile can be edited and programmed to be something else. Through haret windows mobile phones can run haret and even android.
dashauns said:
I've had all of the mobile OS's and always come back to windows mobile........
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes I'm heading this way too. Android has been quite a disappointment to me. Initially I was very happy with my new Milestone that replaced an HTC Touch Pro running WM6.1. The performance difference was staggering, there really is no comparison between them. However I just find more and more things missing from Android/Milestone note this list is just a braindump, some of it's in Android, some of it's the packaging for the Milestone, I'm guessing you can tell the difference.
No Outlook Integration, I really think that should have been there out of the box, there are third party apps that i've used with varying degrees of success.
Restricted Video viewing. I used to use coreplayer to view just about anything on WM without any conversions. Now through restricted information on APIs needed to port CorePlayer to ANdroid I'm stuck with a lengthy conversion process when I want to put video on the phone.
No contact lookup while dialing from the keypad, I really miss that.
No note taking, or word editing apps built in.
Can't save attachments in email - wtf!! this is basic functionality, everytime I want to view a word file attached to an email I have to wait while it downloads form my mail server.
Can't foreward some attachment types - crazy crazy
Can't edit original text in replies or forwards - this is basic functionality missing
Cut and paste is awful - ranging from not implemented, to badly implemented depending on where you try to use it.
Can't switch an sd card without rebooting - I don't know if this is milestone specific but you actually can't remove the sd card without removing the battery.
Tethering, I'm using PDANet, I don't think there is a WMWifiRouter equivalent without rooting the phone? So I am using PDANets blueTooth Dun service, much inferior to WMWifiRouters Personal Area Network implementation.
Can't charge from my exisiting Solar charger (Power Monkey Explorer), thats a pain in the ass, not sure why it doesn't work.
Facebook Contact integration, it claims to have it but it just doesnt work
Logmein doesnt work for me, nor do citrix support it for gotomypc
I'll add more as and when.
dashauns said:
I've had all of the mobile OS's and always come back to windows mobile. Android is approaching windows mobile when you think of the ability to flash other OS versions and wide range of applications on an open system. But windows mobile gives me true multitasking ability like a desktop computer, and windows mobile can be edited and programmed to be something else. Through haret windows mobile phones can run haret and even android.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
can you explain what you mean with real multitasking? what miss you on android?
Hi guys new to the forum and my first post
So I have both OS I just got a HTC HD2 Winmo 6.5 and a HTC g1 Android
To me the Android is a lot lot easyer to use then Winmo. And the Markit place is the best I have used. But the HD2 looks nice the layout is top notch but when I go behind the HTC front skine and in to the Winmo I get lost and it all so looks like my winmo PDA witch I dont like.
As you can tell im not realy in to phones that much so dont know the correct names for the stuff im talking about lol.
If I could have Android under the Htc HD2 skin I would be happy
I have some specific questions about Android compared to WM or WP7, whatever. I have been a WM user for quite a long time until WM 6.5 bur never had experience with Android.
I have the following questions:
1) Does Android maintain registry like Windows? In other words, will install/uninstall of test software cause the device to become slower over time or unstable and require hard reset and start from clean?
2) Being a systems engineer, I was able to install several tools including network diagnostic ools on WM. Will I be able to do the same with Android? Better or worse?
3) Can I find similar applications for GPS like those I had on WM? In specific, can I use for example, MLS destinator with Android?
4) Generally, which device is more flexible with applications? (I know that WP7 doesn't have any yet but over time, it will) so, based on that concept, will both devices have the asme capability of handling the same applications or maybe one will be more for games applications and the other for business apps?
1) Uninstall removes everything. You can also selectively wipe data associated to individual apps.
2,3) Maybe you should figure out what you need and ask specific questions Android comes with online maps/navigation and offline apps are for sale on the market.
4) As all first-generation Microsoft products, WP7 will flop. In a few years after pouring countless millions from the OS monopoly it'll be usable...
Moved to General.
Completely agree with Volker. I've used both WinMo and Android, and I'm not going back. I personally feel that Android is much more flexible, especially so because of the open architecture. For the most part, the apps you see in the market will work with most of the modern Android phones. The market itself is a great feature and it's a shame that WinMo didn't really have it. It makes searching for apps really easy, rather than having them floating all over the place and really requiring some searching every now and then for what you might want.
I'm sure you can find equivalent apps to the ones you're looking for, but if you could be a little more specific I'm sure people here would be better able to help you.
And I think WP7 has already been declared a flop in many circles. That's the way it is with their mobile platform, they were too little too late with just not enough put into it to outshine either iOS or Android.
Thanks, I have another concern.
I am a heavy Microsoft Office user. I want all my Outlook calendar, contacts, emails to be in Sync with my phone all the time.
Also, I use Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents a lot on the phone. Will I be able to sync between phone and PC and also compose/modify on the phone? In other words can I have MS Office mobile on Android?
If yes, have you used it? is it reliable/user-friendly?
andreasy said:
Thanks, I have another concern.
I am a heavy Microsoft Office user. I want all my Outlook calendar, contacts, emails to be in Sync with my phone all the time.
Also, I use Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents a lot on the phone. Will I be able to sync between phone and PC and also compose/modify on the phone? In other words can I have MS Office mobile on Android?
If yes, have you used it? is it reliable/user-friendly?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The default mail program in Froyo will sync mail and contacts with exchange (dun't know 'bout calendar), though I prefer Touchdown from the market (all 3). And OfficeSuite will handle your office needs. Both work fantastic IMHO.
Anyway ,I like WM,may be I have used..
Hello there, I'm about to make the big jump from android to windows phone 7!
I love android but I hate so much of it at the same time, for instance the lack of a decent media manager, doubletwist has too many issues and a lack of features!
Regardless I'm now making the switch to the Lumia 900 thought I've got a few uncertainties I'm hoping people can clarify for me.
1)Contacts- At the moment, I love google contacts, it works so seamlessly and gmail is a pleasure to use! However switching to WP7 is going to mean I have to use live, which is alright but it's a laggy mess in comparison to gmail I find. It's a mess to work around and it keeps shoving ****ty Bing in my face! Any way I can still use gmail or at least make the whole live experience less...crap?
2)Zune- I love the zune interface, one of the main reasons I'm switching but how are updates coming along for it? It's beautiful to look at however it hasn't been updated in quiet some time and there's vital features missing, for instance a repeat button! How well does this sync with WP7, I'm hoping beautifully with my entire library and all my custom playlists? One of the main reasons I'm switching
3)Docking- no docks i'm assuming, I want iphone docking abilities but since there's no feature on microusb to output audio that's a lost cause =[ However there's talk of a microsoft dock, what's that all about anyone know?
4)Updates- with talks of WP Apollo I'm worried about when to get a phone. I really like the lumia 800 and i'm holding out for the 900 just for those extra few features like a front facing camera since my contract just finished, not to mention my HTC desire is dead hence I'm using a replacement.
In fact would you say it's even worth waiting for the 900?? Since it's really not that different!
5)Bluetooth- I presumed this was standard but I can stream music via bluetooth to bluetooth speakers right with the 800/900???? I heard people saying it wasn't capable?
6)Dual-Boot?- Any hope of dual booting android?
7Free games/apps- Android had thousands of free apps and games, how does WP7 fare in this department?
Thank you for your help!
1) WP7 can use your Google contacts, Calendar, and sync your Gmail account just fine. You need to have a Windows Live account, but you don't really ahve to do anything with it. If you already have a Xbox Live account or Zune Tag, just use that. FWIW, I personally really don't like either the Windows Live or Google web interfaces, but prefer Bing over Google for first-try searching (I'll try the other if I don't find what I want right off the bat, but I usually find what I want faster if I start with Bing).
1.1) Be aware that Bing is pretty integrated into Windows Phone, while Google is not. In fact, Google has very few apps for the phone. Although the integration with Google services like Gmail and Calendar is good, others like Talk, Voice, Docs, and G+ is not. Google has (not a huge surprise) shown very little interest in developing apps for WP7.
2) Zune gets updates every now and then. The last was just before Mango came out, call it five or six months ago. It definitely supports Repeat though, both on the phone and on the PC... As for syncing with WP7, it's very good. You can choose what types of media to automatically sync, you can manually sync anything, and yes, things like custom playlists are certainly supported. If you've added a folder to your "Libraries" in Windows, the Zune software will see it and be able to sync it. You can also manually add additional folders.
3) I don't know anything here. There's a "Dock Mode" app on HTC, but as far as I know there's no standard dock interface on WP7. All the phones use MicroUSB, but they don't put the ports in the same place or anything.
4) So far, all updates have been available for all phones. I don't know how long that'll keep up, but Mango isn't even slightly laggy on my first-gen HD7 so I expect it'll remain true for a while. The only reason to wait for a newer phone is if you want new hardware features; the software is almost entirely the same across all phones and all generations. None of that Android fragmentation, where a device may be running an obsolete major version at its release, never be brought fully up to date, and abandoned six months later while there's still a long wait on your contract.
5) WP7 can stream music to A2DP BlueTooth devices, and can use Headset profile BlueTooth as well (of course). It's a little more limited than other smartphones in terms of BlueTooth - no native support for file transfer or BT tethering, for example - but it's generally suficient and MS has added capabilities in previous updates so hopefully that will keep going.
6) So far, no natively WP7 devices can run Android. It's theoretically possible, but you'd need both an unlocked bootloader and a port of Android to the device's hardware. The only phone I know of that can run both WP7 and Android is the HTC HD2, and that actually comes with Windows Mobile, not WP7 *or* Android. It's also a bit old and becoming hard to buy.
7) There are many thousands of free apps, or apps with functional trial versions, in the WP7 Marketplace. That includes games. It's certainly not as vast (yet) as iOS or Android, but those platforms have huge head-starts. It's growing very rapidly. Microsoft has also put some effort into "must-have" apps and games, although generally those end up costing a few dollars. Almost all paid apps have trials, though.
Thanks for the help. =)
How is tethering as a general? I love my wi-fi hotspot on my desire. One of the BEST things about the phone. How is it on the Lumias and WP7 in general?
Didn't realise Zune had been updated(updating after this post!)
So it is definitely possible to keep my WP7 contacts synced with google? if so YAY!
Also iOS jailbreaking, android rooting. What about WP7? And as bad as it is, is there a way to install 'free' apps. Not that one ever would partake in such criminal activities, I'm just curious I guess?
Most WP7 devices offer WiFi hotspot tethering. It depends on the carrier (some disable it entirely, others charge for it) and the phone (I've heard surprising claims that the Lumia 710 doesn't permit it, even though T-Mobile US generally does - hopefully they push an update soon to fix that). Where it's supported, it works well.
The last Zune update was, as I said, months ago... but yeah, if you don't have a Repeat button you're ona very old version. The current version is 4.8.something.
Yeah, syncing contacts with Google is very easy. When I create a contact on the phone, I get the option of storing it on my Google account instead of my Live or Exchange accounts.
So far, nobody has managed to root the Lumias or install custom ROMs, but they're still quite new. Until a month or so back, the same was true of the Samsung WP7 devices (at least for custom ROMs; they were rooted months ago). I'm sure that, as the Lumias become more popular, they too will be rooted and have their bootloaders unlocked.
Discussion of piracy is quite frowned upon here on XDA-Devs. The only legit reason I can think of for a potential user to ask about it is if they're also a potential developer and are concerned about their apps being pirated. That said, there are some protections but they can be worked around. Microsoft has said they're going to start encrypting the Marketplace apps though, and that will make it much more difficult.
If you're seriously interested in dual booting, I'll have a Telstra (fully AT&T compatible) HTC HD2 available for sale as soon as Internet Sharing becomes enabled on the Lumia 800. It's a hard to find version of the phone.
Staright question...
http://getpebble.com/ + Windows Phone 7.5
What do you think ?
I know I want one, and I want it to work with my HTC Titan...
Could work
I checked the technical info on their website and saw the following piece of info:
One more feature that we think is especially cool: we’ll provide a web service so that web app developers can send notifications to Pebble without having to write a single line of code for either the smartphone or the watch itself.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
If a web app can communicate with a Pebble, it should not be too hard to write a web app that communicates both with a Pebble and a WP7 phone, and a corresponding WP7 client app to drive the whole thing.
The Pebble people do not write something about a Pebble SDK on WP7, but I think if they tried they would only find out that a WP7 app does not have sufficient access to Bluetooth to communicate with the Pebble. That insanely locked-down WP7 API problem again
Update: Checked their info again. Maybe doesn't work after all, because the Pebble seems to need the smartphone to reach the Internet, and of course a WP7 phone could not provide that:
And we’ll allow Pebble to send data (such as a motion log, or recorded times from a stopwatch app) to a web service via Bluetooth and the smartphone’s internet connection.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Depending on the Bluetooth profile, it *might* work (especially with homebrew). WP7 does have Bluetooth after all, it's just rather limited.
With Windows 8 and Surface coming out soon and the fact that I've enjoyed Windows 8 on my laptop and it's new ecosystem, I think I may dump Android for WP8.
I know the biggest thing to come up is Apps. Android apps I use on a daily basis or ones I really like are:
Flipboard
Google Reader
Google Maps (and navigation)
YouTube (Official App)
I am tied into the Google ecosystem for my contacts and google services and I know they can be converted to a Microsoft Account. But, I do have a Windows Phone 7 as my work phone and while I love the OS much more than Android, I love the above mentioned apps much more on the droid. I've tried the third party Reader and YouTube apps and they just don't measure up. But I am also ready for one ecosystem and since I already have an XBOX and a Microsoft shop at home, I am ready to go all Microsoft for my mobile world. But so want my apps!
Anyone else face this quandary?
garak0410 said:
With Windows 8 and Surface coming out soon and the fact that I've enjoyed Windows 8 on my laptop and it's new ecosystem, I think I may dump Android for WP8.
I know the biggest thing to come up is Apps. Android apps I use on a daily basis or ones I really like are:
Flipboard
Google Reader
Google Maps (and navigation)
YouTube (Official App)
I am tied into the Google ecosystem for my contacts and google services and I know they can be converted to a Microsoft Account. But, I do have a Windows Phone 7 as my work phone and while I love the OS much more than Android, I love the above mentioned apps much more on the droid. I've tried the third party Reader and YouTube apps and they just don't measure up. But I am also ready for one ecosystem and since I already have an XBOX and a Microsoft shop at home, I am ready to go all Microsoft for my mobile world. But so want my apps!
Anyone else face this quandary?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
you need to decide what you can do without more.
Personally I don't give too hoots about the apps on any platform which then leave the OS choice its self as the main reason for change, and hence why im on WP7 as well.
If I were you I would consider this, those apps you talk about have alternatives on WP7, so its not like its completely missing, so the question you need to ask yourself is this, is the overall OS and general phone features of WP more important than half a dozen apps that are still available to WP but not quite as youd want?
in my humble opinion again, a WP device is a phone first device, everything else is secondary inc apps.
dazza9075 said:
you need to decide what you can do without more.
Personally I don't give too hoots about the apps on any platform which then leave the OS choice its self as the main reason for change, and hence why im on WP7 as well.
If I were you I would consider this, those apps you talk about have alternatives on WP7, so its not like its completely missing, so the question you need to ask yourself is this, is the overall OS and general phone features of WP more important than half a dozen apps that are still available to WP but not quite as youd want?
in my humble opinion again, a WP device is a phone first device, everything else is secondary inc apps.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well, I understand the apps arguments. If there isn't an app, I can always use the browser. And I really don't care that I have every Angry Birds edition. But it is important to me that the platform is shown some love. I can't imagine why it is so hard for Yahoo! to release a Fantasy Football App for example. It is much easier to use in an app than in a mobile browser.
As mentioned, I have Verizon's one and only Windows Phone for work, the HTC Trophy. It is very lackluster hardware but I am able to get my WP7 fix. I just don't find myself using it much, mainly because I really don't like carrying two devices (often just forward the number to my personal phone.) I took your advice and looked for good, alternative apps:
PrimeTube: Prime tube seems to work quite well as my YouTube app. The Android YouTube app is pretty good but I was quite surprised with this app as it may surpass the Android App. Nice Work.
NextGen Reader: A passable Google Reader app. Kind of generic looking but it does the job. The small screen of the Trophy doesn't help so I imagine it will look good on a larger phone. The mobile web page for Google Reader isn't a bad option either.
Those are the only two I found. I do enjoy playing Madden 12 from time to time on my Android devices. The YouVersion Bible app is good but it is lacking the LIVE notes option.
My next step is to try out navigation on WP7 to see how is measures up with Google Maps. Going on a trip in a few weeks, so will test it. I will also try merging my Google contacts with my live account to see how I like the cloud services that MS offers.
I am also a long time ZunePass subscriber. I am disappointed at the lack of playlist options for streaming music. It if becomes more like Spotify, Microsoft will have a hit on their hands here.
Again, I want WP to succeed but I also don't want to ditch what I am comfortable with. I have a few months until Surface and WP8 are released. We will see what happens when that time comes.