Pogue Corrects The Record

Last week I complained that David Pogue’s review of Windows Phone 7 had factual inaccuracies. After posting that, David Pogue was nice enough to exchange a few emails with me and I suggested that factually his statements on YouTube and Facebook contacts were wrong. He’s now acknowledged the inaccuracies in a new post:

Anyway, I wanted to point out (as many Microsoft fans did) that there are actually fixes for two of the limitations I cited.

First, I noted that these phones can’t play Flash or HTML5 videos on the Web, making them even more video-limited than the iPhone. “So, no YouTube, no Hulu, no online news videos,” I wrote.

Well, not quite. There’s an app for that. In the final software release, when you try to watch a YouTube video, the O.S. elegantly offers to download and install a YouTube player app for you. After that, you can play YouTube videos without a hiccup.

Second, I wrote about the address book program, “If you have hundreds of Facebook friends, they clutter up the list of people you call often.” True enough. But deep in Settings, there’s an option to add your Facebook friends to your address book “cards” only if you’ve already listed them in the address book by other means, if that makes any sense. In any case, it’s easy to turn off the flooding-Facebook effect I described, once you know about this setting.

He still thinks that the day one release of Windows Phone isn’t ready for prime time (due to the omissions that are covered on both iPhone and Android like copy and paste) but concludes “Truth is, another credible contender in the app-phone war can only make the whole thing more exciting — and can only lead to better phones for all of us. And Microsoft, in its 1.0 version of Windows Phone 7, has done a beautiful job.”

I want to thank David for taking the time to look into this and taking it serious enough to do a follow-up piece on it. And I’ve already warned him that when the first Service Pack comes out in mid-January (with copy and paste, turn-by-turn directions, task switching and plugins for Flash and Silverlight) that I’ll be in contact with him again;)