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I got a WP7 phone (the HTC HD7) after realizing that I had a top-of-the-line Android phone (the HTC Evo) and, even with CyanogenMod, it still felt really slow. Almost worse than an iPhone 3G. For me, WP7 feels a lot better than Android or iOS.


Like you and the linked article, I really enjoy working with the WP7 development stack. I'm currently working (with 3 other devs) on a mobile application for 4 platforms (iOS, Android, WP7, and JQuery Mobile).

Even having skipped an entire sprint (~10 days) to focus more on Android, the WP7 app is progressing along further and faster than the other clients. Just having support for (albeit limited) databinding is a huge win. Plus, you get great looking apps pretty much for free with the theming defaults.

That said, I have access to a few Windows phones (HTC Surround, HTC HD7, and some keyboard phone) and I would not be able to switch to any of them over my Nexus One. Dealbreakers for me:

* The search button is locked to Bing (not configurable)

* The browser is not only IE, but a crappy offshoot of an old version of IE (I believe IE7 w/ a few patches)

* No Pandora


Can you please post your per-platform usage stats after you launch? I think that it would be of value for the mobile developers here.

Also, since you are attacking simultaneously on four fronts - a blog post about the advantages and disadvantages of developing code and assets (graphics) for each platform would be great (obvious one - no IB/ExprStudio for Android?).


We definitely want to do some posts (maybe a conference talk?) comparing the development and design for each of the environments.

As for usage stats, I'd have to check with the client (not sure they'd want that public).


Have you tried CM7? One hour after installing the CM7 release candidate, I found I was in love with Android. It's like upgrading from a cheapass Windows XP netbook to a MacBook Pro with an SSD.


Yeah, I was running CM7 stable. Still felt sluggish.


CM7 isn't stable there is just a rc out. So you must have been running CM6 which is based off 2.2 not 2.3.


Hmm, maybe it was the RC.

Also, I may be completely overstating how slow it was. It definitely wasn't unusable, but it felt slower than it should have been. This was after multiple wipes to multiple ROMs too.


Consider how much data you're putting on it. No phone is going to be fast when you ask it to pull down 5gb of email as some of my users do. The iPhone isn't that magical.


And how does utilizing more storage affect the processing or memory capacity of an iPhone or Android phone?


Is your sdcard slow, by any chance? A slow sdcard could affect performance if you -- like me -- keep most of your apps on it.




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