A brave new world

Meet L, she needs a new phone

This is L, our Window Phone 7 test pilot

She (in her own words) is an “average user” in that she doesn’t care about:

• What goes into the operating system,
• How its powered
• Running apps in the background
• why x is better than y

She does care about:

• Speed
• Games like angry birds, god hand, fruit ninja
• Solid hardware that conveys a sense of durability
• and a quality user experience

What I mean by the last one can be summed up when we went phone shopping last month:

Me: “So what are you looking for?”

Her: “You know, a new phone”

Me: “So you staying with iOS or do you want to try Android, Symbian even?

Her:”……”

Me:”okaaay, so moving on there are couple of phones but hardware wise check out this (I hand her a N8), it has a 12 megapixel camera!”

She plays with the phone for a minute

Her:”Nope, this wont work, its not intuitive” Then pausing for a moment “I dont know what to do with it”

And its true we all know that Symbian on the N8 isn’t great, but it begins to dawn on me how quickly my list of candidates are being removed.

It essentially comes down to Android (Experia x10, staying with her 3GS until the iPhon5 comes out or the HTC HD7 running windows phone 7.

It’s a nice bit of kit.

My viewpoint on the competing phone OS’s is this:

Apple: Currently Top Dog because it offers a seamless enviroment in which to use your phone, the interface is well realised and its easy to use.

Android: Nice try but it still feels half finished, perhaps with 3.0 it can finally compete with Apple on the UI front, so until its released, why bother?

Window Phone 7: I like WP7 because its trying something different, I love the transitions between layers, it feels like its pushing the mobile space forward and more importantly it has mobile versions of excel (critical in her line of work).

And more importantly, she likes the HD7, so we buy one outright (£280 on ebay, she’ll be able to sell her 3GS for £250) so if she grows to hate it she can just sell it and get something else further down the line.

The phone should arrive today, so I will try and capture her experience in the next couple of blog posts.