Absolutely. The idea is just asking for trouble - there will always be at least some dude who feels that he was treaded unfairly and reallies up the internets. Plus I am not sure how important the "speed" factor for most users really is. There are the fuzzy Apples, the Androids of freedom, the business berrys, but I am not sure if speed is an adequate positioning.
Emphasizing speed misses qualities people actually love about Windows Phone 7 by miles. Only someone who is disconnected from or unfamiliar with the product will come up with stuff like that.
There is the stark and fresh design that (independently of whatever merits it might have) makes other mobile operating systems look old. There is the cohesiveness of the experience that even makes iOS look like it doesn’t know what it wants to be. There is the integration with Facebook that makes the phone personal without having to do anything†.
All those are things actual people praised about Windows Phone 7. Not speed in some highly constrained scenarios.
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† If you use Facebook a lot. This might shock some people on HN, but most people who also can buy a smartphone do.
Can you be more specific? I found Windows Phone 7 to be terrible as in worse than Android, iPhone, and Blackberry bad. The tile interface falls down vary quickly and the app store is a ghost town.
There is a lot I don't like about Windows 7 phones but I am going to stick with the tile interface because it's the most obviously bad design.
Smooth scrolling looks cool, but locating something in the middle of a long list is much easier with separate pages. Which is not such a big deal, but tiles take up more space than the old button interface so you don't get to display a lot of them at the same time.
Basicly, 2 tiles wide * 4 tiles tall = at most 8 per tiles page. Sliding up and down one page works fine, but what if you want 17 tiles? you now slide a little and look for what you want to hit which you can't do with muscle memory. Compare with both iPhone and Android which fit 20 apps per page just fine no scrolling required.
As to updates, texts, email, phone calls have value. Knowing what temperature is is right now in two city's at the same time is practically pointless. As in how often do you want this vs. the actual forecast over some period of time?
PS: And I don't say this as someone that hates MS. I am a C# developer, with an MSDN subscription who like a lot of what they have been up to recently. I even liked Vista on good hardware, but I just think there phone OS is terrible.
The "speed" idea came from an older ad campaign which kindof made more sense. It basically said "get off your phone and spend more time with the people around you." So having a quick phone was positioned as a way to be more engaged in life.
Interesting. I can see that working but they would need to hammer that message much more consistently. Plus this should be really hard to get across as most people's experience with the Microsoft brand might be originating from desktop software/OS. And the experiences from that area are most likely contradicting the efforts of developing a "speedmaster" position.
