I would like to start off by saying that I know everyone thinks I hate everything Microsoft but I had several windows mobiles phones that I liked. For their time, the Pocket PC 6700 and the AT&T Tilt were the most advanced smartphones out there. Now after failing miserably with the Pink/Kin project microsoft is trying again with Windows Mobile 7. I think they are probably going to fail. Then again I never thought nokia would fail and apple would previal with the iphone, so who am I to say.

First of all, I find the OS is so freakin ugly. This pic is from engagdet.


But really, the looks aren't that important in a phone - its the functionality that counts. Somehow it doesn't even have cut/copy/paste. I can't believe after all the drama with the original iphone not coming with copy/paste, and all the windows 6+ fans making fun of them for it - the new Windows 7 Phone will not have it at launch next week. How does this feature slip through development. Is there something so terribly complicated about copy/paste that I am missing?

From the engadget article:

Update: We just super-double-ultra-plus-confirmed this with Microsoft -- Windows Phone 7 Series will not have copy and paste functionality. There is a data-detection service built into the text-handling API that will recognize phone numbers and addresses, but Microsoft says most users, including Office users, don't really need clipboard functionality. We... respectfully disagree? Sure, let's leave it at that.

From the wiki article you can also see that in addition to cut/copy/paste - tethering, sd card support, and multitasking are left out of windows mobile 7.

..some features found in Windows Mobile 6.5 will not be in Windows Phone 7 at launch. Among the features that won't be present at launch but have been announced to be coming are cut, copy, and paste[46] and full multitasking[47]. Additionally, support for Adobe Flash (version 10.1) has been confirmed to be coming to the browser as well.[48] Support for removable SD cards and tethering[49] have also been left out of the OS. Microsoft claims this to be in the interest of data security for enterprise users.[50] Windows Phone 7 will also not support Silverlight in the web browser[51] or IPsec virtual private network (VPN) security.[52]

The other thing I think is kind of damning is that they do not have sd card slots. You get a 8 or 16GB version and some people are saying you will have the option to purchase space on a "skydrive" which is basically your data in the cloud on microsoft servers. Doesn't that strike you as paying to rent your own content. I would much rather pay the $40 up front and have enough space to store all my content on a card so that I can insert into other devices and use when I have no connection. People are saying they are limiting the sizes to not compete with their own Zune market. I am sure the battery life playing songs from your "skydrive" is far worse than playing songs right off an SD card. On my android phone and former iphone you could play music off the SD card for about a day straight. Plus when you are out of services area - these phones are GSM afterall - there is a good chance you would not even be able to get to your music. That and the fact that mobile broadband prices are skyrocketing - notice there are almost no more unlimited accounts (which were really only 5GB to begin with.) Most plans are somewhere around 2GB-3GB. So after that, what is the point of even having a skydrive. To pay $1000 a month to listen to your own music.

In the end the real killer for me would be having to stick with Pocket IE vs mobile Safari or Chrome. If microsoft has trouble keeping its flagship browser relevant and up to date - how on earth will the mobile one be. According the the wiki article

Windows Phone 7 features a version of Internet Explorer Mobile with a rendering engine that is "halfway between IE7 and IE8"

This week Microsoft sued Motorola over android. The way the news portrays it you would think that motorola's android mobile technology is based on windows mobile code. What they are really suing over is this:

synchronizing email, calendars and contacts, scheduling meetings, and notifying applications of changes in signal strength and battery power.

Notifying applications of changes in signal stength and battery power on a mobile platform is essential and I highly doubt microsoft was the first corporation to come up with such an algorithm. It is the computer equivalent of granting a corporation a patent to cook food in pots and pans or to carry water in a container. The thing is microsoft and other large corporations have the ability to pay for all these patents or buy up smaller corporations that own them. It puts way to much power in the hands of big corporations and stifles the development of new technology.

I think a lot of the patents were granted because the people granting the patents had no idea what they really meant. It is pretty easy to make something so basic seem complicated and specific.

I find it ironic that the same large corporations that vie for free markets in order to ship their jobs off to 2nd and 3rd world countries with cheaper wages rely on this total government bureaucracy style protection. If someone can make something better or more efficient using different code, then let them.

If anything allow people to use copyright to protect the expression of the idea (the entire software package/product) but prevent patents on ideas.

In connection with computer software, copyright law can be used to prevent the total duplication of a software program, as well as the copying of a portion of software code (both of which are examples of "literal infringement"). In addition, copyright does provide some protection against non-literal infringement, such as the creation of "cloned" software.

I hope the windows 7 phone fails miserably. Then I hope they go out of the mobile phone business once and for all.

Found this pic of me smashing rocks for gems at Ace of Diamonds on (e:Terry)'s phone. The striped shirt gives it a real chain gang look.

I can't believe how much money I was made off of this thing. My $125 original investment made in 2002 has yielded thousands.

I wish I had time to play more because I am sure I could make much more. Maybe I should stop working so hard on my real job and start concentrating on more interesting things.

Rounded corners have been really annoying the last 10 years. Everyone loves them but there was really no easy, efficient way to produce them.

In order to make them work you needed all kinds of extra markup or images cut out and stuck on all the corners. The problem with the markup up is that even when you create a function to auto generate it serverside or with clientside javascript you end up with a ton of unnecessary markup that make managing the DOM that much harder. With the images it is even worse in that they don't scale well because they are bitmap graphics and everyone zooms now on they many devices from mobile phones to televisions.

CSS3 brought support for a new style called border-radius and the browsers began to accept it but only with their own proprietary prefixes. I don't understand why browsers do this. Before they accept the new styles they always add their own prefixes.

e.g. -webkit is safari/chrome, -moz is firefox, i.e. has nothing to do with this yet.

So in order to get the comment bubbles to appear rounded on the front page I need this.

border-radius:15px 15px 15px 15px;

Seems simple enough, but no stable browser supports that yet. Instead I need that, for when they do, and then these custom prefixed values of the same thing. Here is the mozilla one.

-moz-border-radius:15px 15px 15px 15px;

Then to make it even more stupid, chrome can't handle the shortcut of adding all the corners on one line which makes it require these four lines.
-webkit-border-top-right-radius:15px;
-webkit-border-top-left-radius:15px;
-webkit-border-bottom-right-radius:15px;
-webkit-border-bottom-left-radius:15px;

This article covers it all