Samsung Focus

One of the recent perks for working for Microsoft is that all employees recently received free Windows Phone 7 handsets.  I opted for the sexy AMOLED of the Samsung Focus.  I figured I’d put a few thoughts down about it preliminarily.

As far as the OS is concerned, I’m actually a HUGE fan.   I haven’t used an android phone, so I’m not sure how that would be, but this is the first phone I’ve used that feels like a legitimate upgrade to the iPhone. 

The keyboard is basically perfect, IMO.  I love the way it suggests words and I really find it as easy to type on as the iPhone, slightly easier due to the superior word suggestion feature.

The people hub is taking some getting used to. I like it for “quick” facebook checks, but I still downloaded the facebook app anyway.  I like the photo hub quite a bit also.  It is doing a GREAT job at picking images to use for the background and on my tiles page.  I am actually loving the whole tiles interface and how you can stick frequently used tiles to the homescreen but also have a list of apps.  I find this works fantastically well.  I actually can’t see myself having so many apps that the applications list gets unwieldy, particularly since games go in the XBox Live tile. 

One Note is really cool, I’ve already used it as a shopping list multiple times.  it’s really cool how you can stick a page to the tiles list.  It would be cool to have multiple one notes on the sky drive, however.

Zune is cool, but feels a little half baked.  Using the Zune pass is weird and unsatisfying.  Where is smart DJ?  Why does it feel like I’m sampling music when I’m just streaming with my Zune pass, and why didn’t streaming with my Zune Pass work well over 3g the one time I tried it?  There’s also no way to sign up for Zune Pass from the phone that I could fine (without going to IE), and it isn’t clear why you’d want to, when I think zune pass is one of the phone’s coolest features.  Hopefully some of these concerns are addressed in future zune updates.

I LOVE the email app.  not combining the inboxes is actually preferable to me, but I can see why people would want to blend multiple mailboxes.  I love that it tells me how many new messages there are since I last checked the inbox on the phone, and not how many unread messages are in the inbox, and I LOVE the way the pivot works to see unread or flagged messages.  I would like to see more support for gmail features, but otherwise I really love the interface.

Internet Explorer is functional but unimpressive.  I think I like it slightly better than safari, and I really like the way multiple instances are handled.  The only flaw so far is that some pages still don’t know it’s a mobile browser so you have to load full web pages instead of optimized for mobile ones.

Oh, and possibly my favorite thing about the phone?  The back button.  FANTASTIC.  I love going between apps with it.  I just find it totally game changing. It makes the phone SO much easier to navigate in my book.

A few missteps aside, I really love the first party apps on the Windows Phone.

The third party apps so far leave something to be desired.  As far as I can tell, the Yelp app is just broken, the facebook app has weird issues where sometimes I can’t select links.  The foursquare app is better than the iPhone one, but they’d have to work pretty hard to make it worse.   The built in weather and news app is pretty good, I think it’s from Samsung.  I’m bummed about no Kindle app, hopefully soon.

As for the hardware, I actually find it a pretty mixed bag.  The screen is mind-blowingly incredible, IMO.  I LOVE it.  Super sharp, awesome color, deep blacks, superb touch response, all in all INCREDIBLE screen.  Hands down the best thing about the phone.  Love the size, too.  The weight is also great, it’s a fairly light phone.  Very light for a smartphone.

I find the capacitive touch buttons somewhat annoying despite the “cool” factor.  I like the little vibration when you hit one.  But that awesome back button I talked about?  Less awesome when you hit it accidentally after typing in a URL by hand.  That’s the problem with capacitive buttons, all to easy to hit accidentally.  With the other buttons it’s fine, but with the back button, it’s particularly annoying because you can’t go “forward” at all. 

I’ve also had some oddities charging my battery and connecting and disconnecting my phone to my windows PC.  I’ve read online about a few other people having similar problems, it seems specific to the focus, which is sort of an odd thing to have to deal with, this kind of stuff was NEVER  a problem on the iPhone.

All said, in the first few days of use, the windows phone 7, the Samsung Focus in particular, is very close to greatness, I do see how powerful apple’s hardware/software combination can be and why it makes the iPhone so great when I see a few of the disconnects between Samsung and Microsoft on the phone.  That said, I am really hoping the phone remains as whiz bang snappy as it is right now (it feels SUPER FAST) and doesn’t get all iPhoned up.  My biggest problem with my iPhone is how terrible my 3G got when I “upgraded” to IOS 4.

I’m liking it so far, but there are caveats.  I do, however, consider it in most ways to be an upgrade over the iPhone.  Check out a few of the other hardware models though, I’m not 100% sure about the focus, despite the sexy AMOLED screen.