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Molly Wood’s Windows Phone Induces Facepalm’s across the Tech World

If you’re reading this it is a safe bet that you know about Brandon Watson’s terrific Windows Phone challenge where he gets Windows Phone Mango into the hands of celebrities who have been complaining about their experience on other platforms,particularly Mango.  Today Molly Wood, of CNET, gave her final verdict and it was lukewarm.  I had many thoughts watching her review but most of all I had to fight the urge to issue a facepalm to myself.

Don’t like the Metro UI? Fine, different strokes for different folks.  Not a fan of having to use Bing instead of Google search?  To each his or her own.  Choice is good.  To work in the tech sector and be viewed as somewhat of an authority, review a mobile OS platform and obviously failing to do any prior research or review any demos that are easily located on the net? Inexcusable.

Here are my beefs and the seeds of my desire to issue a facepalm:

  1. LOL, why upload to a cloud service when you have access to 12 million+ songs at your whim? Sounds seriously like she uses certain services and doesn’t know how to consider another method.
  2. I’m sorry Brandon Watson that you picked a tech columnist that apparently has completely ignored how you access SkyDrive in Mango. Its been shown off in every demo imaginable that you use the office hub. Its a classic case of thinking of the only way to access a service is through a separate app. She literally said "there just needs to be an app for that." I know I’m not the only person that wants her to facepalm herself because she completely misses the approach to Windows Phone. Please repeat after me Molly Wood "There doesn’t need to be an app for everything."
  3. When she complained about her Android experience it had nothing to do with speech to text or mapping.  Why not focus on the things you complained about? 
  4. What the What! Apple is known for its NON-integration. Where the heck does she think the slogan "there’s an app for that" came from. So to say people looking for an easy to use, integrated experience is Apple’s forte is just baffling.  How can someone NOT know that Apple is not all about apps.  That’s the reason they tout the vast number of apps.

Its clear that Microsoft didn’t quite think through the whole turn-by-turn direction thing and hopefully the Nokia agreement can get them the proper rights to do full turn-by-turn directions without having to locate and touch the screen every time.  Speech to text is a “nice to have but I’ll rarely use” feature on mobile phones.  There are millions and millions of users that will attest to that.  I almost wish that all the Mango-ized apps were in the marketplace right now and Mango could be shown off in its full glory.  No matter what the gripes Molly Wood had was downright atrocious given her position.  No tech columnist/blogger worth their salt should be that clueless on what is looking like one of the future big 3 mobile os platforms.

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