I love my windows phone, I think the UI is wonderful the live tiles are a great way of presenting information and the people & media hubs are great ideas.
The only thing that has tarnished the Phone in my opinion is slow updates that is compounded by the fact that MS can’t get it straight as to when the first updates are going to be released … first it was January, then February then early March now late March and AT&T users have not even seen the pre-update that is supposedly needed before the first update can be delivered.
Microsoft in a recent blog post about the update process basically said “it’s complex” and “we have a lot of partners that we have to make happy” well that’s kinda a cop-out. Microsoft every second Tuesday of the month releases updates for billions of PCs and while there are a few hiccups now and then the vast majority of time there are no issues. It would be hard to argue that the process of dealing with updates for thousands of different makes of PCs with various hardware configurations and driver updates from even more partners is far more complex.
So why the issues with Windows Phone?
If the issue is that the partners (phone carriers) need to approve changes to low level code that effect network service and connectivity, then Microsoft should make the updates more modular like the windows updates are. The updates for UI, bundled applications should be able to be pushed out like the updates for marketplace applications. This way the broken marketplace search and update Bing, Maps and other non-core OS fixes could be done without having to wait for “Partners” to approve updates and generally muck things up. Possibly this is what the minor update was supposed to do, nobody at MS is saying anything useful, all they seem to be doing is pussy footing around the issue for fear of pissing off their “Partners”, maybe they need some better partners.
