Wednesday the 9:th of June, I attended the Windows Phone 7 Developer Hub in Stockholm. Holding the technical presentations were Ben Riga and Niel Hutson and during the evening was a design centric lecture held by Albert Shum and Bryan Agnetta.
Overall the event was very good I felt. There was quite a lot of info I got that I never had heard about before, we also got some hands on with devices they had brought, and I also got a few of my questions answered.
The devices they had brought with them was the LG “Panther” and the Asus phone we’ve seen so many times by now. I didn’t know it before, but the Asus phone actually got a name, it’s called “Galaxy”.
I got some hands on time with the Panther and these are some of my thoughts:
- The device it self feels pretty solid but there is still a plastic vibe there that they need to chip away before release.
- The slider keyboard is actually much nicer than I had originally thought.
- The keyboard felt easy to use and enter text on.
- The slide out mechanism was distinct and felt good.
- The OS felt responsive and quite complete, I was honestly expecting a less finished feel.
- There is a small resistance in the GUI when flipping between screens or pictures, some times it feels like that resistance is just a little too much. I think that the idea is great, it shouldn’t start flipping about stuff to easily, so there should be a bit of a resistance and it ties in so beautifully with the accordion effect the UI got. But it shouldn’t be too exaggerated either, cause right now it some times felt hard in portrait mode to flip stuff about.
I didn’t get any hands on time with the Asus Galaxy device, but I got confirmed that it was just a very early prototype, just as suspected from it being shown as the first device in Barcelona at MWC 2010. They said Asus has more devices in line, and they look nothing like the Galaxy.
More posts with information from the event to follow tomorrow…