Short description of experience so far: Windows Phone 7 is like beautiful candy… that doesn’t taste all that great and comes in a wrapper prone to give you paper cuts.

I’m really torn on WP7. There are parts, mostly visual, that I love. I really like the Metro UI and I like that most applications adhere to it. It’s wonderful to go from app to app and have a UI that is not only consistent, but clean while also modern.

On the other hand, WP7 is missing a lot of stuff that I’ve come to expect with Android and is now standard on iOS and has always been present on WebOS, namely multitasking. Now, I’m not just talking about the ability to quickly switch from app to app, I’m talking about the ability to listen to something and then go do something else and continue listening. In that respect, WP7 is much like iOS used to be. As long as you stick to the 1st party apps you’re in good shape but as soon as you start using other apps, all bets are off. Things like TuneIn and Rdio stop playing the instant you leave the application.

Not only can apps not play media when they are not front and center, but there does not seem to be any real notification system that apps have access to. Forget about getting an instant message if the app isn’t currently running, or getting notified of a comment on your blog, or getting a ping from twitter or facebook when you get nibble there. I find myself constantly visiting these apps to see what’s going on and when I open them, because they are unable to update in the background, they have to update when the app opens… insane.

I’m going to try to stick it out with using this phone, but the more I use it, the more it feels like a feature phone with a big screen and a great interface.

I’ve been given an opportunity to try an HTC Arrive on Sprint for a couple of weeks and rather than just dabble with it, I have decided to put down my Evo for the time and use this as my main phone. Will Windows Phone 7 have itself a convert at the end of this or will I go running back to Android?

I’m going to try to avoid turning this into a full walkthrough of the phone. You can get that plenty of places. In fact, here are links to many that I read or watched before starting this.

• BGR
• Cnet
• WPCentral
• PCWorld
• WireFLY

What I am going to do is talk about what’s been going through my mind as I use the phone. I received it yesterday and at this point have had it for less than a day.

The Arrive

HTC Arrive, Sprint

Most of this will hopefully be about Windows Phone 7 itself, so let’s get the hardware out of the way. This thing is a tank. The weight isn’t bothersome, but you sure wouldn’t want to have it thrown at you.

I think the keyboard sliding mechanism works very well. It can be a little tricky at first but either it has loosened up a bit or I’ve gotten better at it. Either way, it opens and closes easily.

The ports are exactly what we thankfully come to expect on a phone. A standard headphone jack and a micro-usb jack. It’s hard to believe that not long ago each manufacturer had its own ports for charging/data/audio.

The battery is a standard HTC 1500 mAh battery. My last three phones have all used the exact same battery—which is awesome! I had a fully charged battery ready to go which I just popped in. While we’re on power, this phone gets very warm if you use it for any length of time.

I have not noticed any notification lights on the Arrive. I don’t know if this is an omission of the Arrive—that would surprise me as my other HTC phones have lights on them—or if it is not something that WP7 supports. Regardless, it is major pain as there is no way to tell when the phone is off if there are messages awaiting you.

Using Windows Phone 7

Lock Screen

The lock screen is beautiful and gives you a lot of information without needing unlock your phone. Besides the time and date, it tells you what your next appointment is and through icons at the bottom of the screen also tells you how many messages you have, by account. I could tell just by looking this morning how many personal messages I had and how many work messages I had without even entering the phone. That’s pretty slick and something that I wish the Android lock screen would adopt.

Glance and Go

I don’t get “Glance and Go”. It’s what all of Microsoft’s WP7 “Really?” commercials focus on. They would lead you to think that just a quick look at your home screen will tell you everything you need to know and that you won’t be spending any time, checked out from the world staring at your phone. This hasn’t been my experience at all.

The lock screen tells might tell that you have 5 exchange messages and 4 gmail messages and maybe 2 text messages. Once you unlock your phone and get to the home screen, it will tell you via tiles that you have 5 exchange messages, 4 gmail messages and 2 text messages. Now you are engaging in the same activity you would be with any smartphone, tapping on each tile/icon and reading/filing/deleting messages. If any OS is possibly “Glance and Go”, it is Android. You can find widgets that do nearly anything, including putting the actual message subjects right on your home screen so that you don’t have to even enter your mail to see what is there.

While there are a few “Live Tiles” (tiles that are dynamic and show information), they are mostly decorative and at this point, in my experience, do not give any more information than the little numeric badges that appear on iOS icons when an application is trying to tell you something.

Home Screen

I can’t decide what I think about the home screen. The tiles are clean, big and easy to tap. Some of the live ones move around and give the home screen some life which is nice. On the other hand, the tiles are large and not that many fit on a screen at one time (4 to 8 depending on the size of the tiles), meaning that you are doing a lot of scrolling to see the rest. I don’t think I would mind this at all as I’m not doing any more scrolling down on this home screen than I did left and right on my Android home screens, but there is again nothing “Glance and Go” about it.

Maybe this doesn’t bother others and perhaps I’ll get used to it, but I’m annoyed by the large empty spaces on the top and right of the screen. I can appreciate the design, but I don’t like to see space on a smartphone screen completely forfeited. Seems like some quick-launch icons or other useful widgets could find a home there.

Network/Radio/Battery Status

Something that really struck me yesterday afternoon was that there is no battery status on the screen. Nor are there status icons for your Wi-Fi, cellular connection, bluetooth or any of the other things you would find on any other phone. I found myself caught between “Why the heck wouldn’t they put the icons there?!” and “That looks really really clean!”. I was delighted (Ballmer would be happy) when a finger swipe down from the top of the screen revealed the icons for a short time before they zipped away. Nice.

Mail/Calendar

I’m going to detail this later, but here’s my brief experience so far. Gmail was easy to set up, but I had to specifically select to sync the calendar in the settings as the default was to only sync mail and contacts. Google Calendar is only syncing my personal calendar and does not see any of my other calendars. Activesync was hard to setup against our Zimbra server at work. I finally figured it out, but it was much more difficult than Android, iOS or WebOS.

Voice Search/Dialing

Voice search is very useful on this phone because looking up contacts is a pain in the bottom. Given this, I’ve been happy to discover that so far it works better than any voice dialing I have used in the past. Each name I have thrown at it, it has pulled up and dialed without needing a second chance.

I have a lot of faith in Google search. I can’t say the same about Bing. So when we wanted to call a pizza place in another town last night, I was ready for my phone to throw up on itself when I searched for the restaurant. I was pleased/surprised when the phone had no problems finding what I was after and returning a phone number to me.

More to come later!

Well, the kids are waking up and it’s time to get another day started. This will be my first full day with the Arrive. My Evo is sitting right here next to me looking lonely and I already miss it a little as well. Here’s your chance WP7

I’m in Minneapolis for a couple days at the An Event Apart conference. Great speakers.

Come on. Just a little further…

• K-9 Mail: The IMAP client on my phone is serviceable, but K-9 mail (which is based on the same project) is a much more featured app and I find it more enjoyable to use.
• Barcode Scanner: I have really come to love QR codes and Barcode scanner is the best app that I’ve found for reading them. My favorite use? Partnered with either the Firefox plugin Mobile Barcoder or the Chrome extension QR-Code Tag Extension, I can quickly get the same page on my phone that I’m looking at on my computer to read on the go.
• Amazon: I’ve tweeted it before, but I love to scan barcodes in stores and price match it against Amazon and if I find a better price, tap the order button.
• FlightTrack Pro and Tripit: These are two apps, but if you use one you should really grab the other. Tripit is a free internet service that is great for building and sharing itineraries (which you can do by simply emailing them your hotel/flight/car reservations). They have an app, but it is mostly to reference your itinerary data. FlightTrack Pro is a flight tracking app that ties into your Tripit account and will automatically show you your (or shared) flights. It sports notifications and a nice widget displaying information about your next flight. On my last trip, FlightTrack notified me as soon as we landed and I had my phone on that there had been a gate change.
• Listen: This is Google’s podcast application and was one of the things I was most excited about when I got my Android phone (and one of the biggest disappointments). The app has been upgraded a few times though since I started using it and it is now a very good app that I enjoy using. One of the nicest new features is that it ties into Google Reader so if you want to add a podcast while at your computer, just subscribe to the feed in reader and put it in your “Listen Subscriptions” folder.
• Locale: This is the newest addition to my phone, but I am really really enjoying it. Locale allows you to change the settings on your phone dependent on situational variables. In my case, I have it drop the ringtone volume, turn off bluetooth, set my Google Talk status to “work” and change my wallpaper when it detects the wireless network at work while at home it turns up the volumes since I tend to leave the phone all over and switches to a more fun ringtone. You can adjust many settings and there are a lot of plugins for it in the market to extend it further.
• Radiotime: I love news/sports radio and I like to hear things things being covered locally. When the huskers are playing I often have the opposing team’s broadcast tuned in to see what they are saying while news events are great times to tune in stations local to that event. Radiotime makes this easy. If nothing else, it is the easiest way I have found to listen to Nebraska NPR radio on Android.
• SMS Popup: I love to text message and I receive quite a lot of text messages. SMS popup is a great replacement to the standard notifications on my phone, offering a popup dialog containing any new message and customizable buttons to do things like delete the message, reply or even do a quick reply from a list of pre-composed replies.
• Seesmic: There are a lot of twitter clients for Android. I think this is one of the prettier ones, it has a solid feature set and it is free.

What apps are on your must-have list?

First, we do have backups and if an entire directory gets whapped or there are other serious issues, I always have that to fall back on, but it can take a lot of work to get into the backups and recover what you are after and in this case I’m looking for one line of code, so I’d like something quicker.

This is a great time to use Google’s web cache. Simply search for the URL of the page you need to fix and Google will very likely have a cached version available that you can use to recover what you lost.

It’s embarrassing, but we actually recovered many MANY sites based on userland Manila after a crash using this method several years ago. We were able to get the images, code and fully recover the sites.

Spending some time today upgrading WordPress and watching Olympics.

The grilling/patio stuff has arrived at Target.