Sweating the details - everywhere in the world

There are so many things about Windows Phone that are effortlessly delightful, from the clean layout to the proper font to the smooth animations to the only touchscreen keyboard I can actually type on. (Although, having tried both US and UK phones, I'm disappointed that the US keyboard is far better at autocorrection, particularly when I hit the 'b' key between two words instead of the space - a UK phone never corrects that, a US phone gets it right every time. Even so, it's the best keyboard that isn’t a BlackBerry or a TouchPro 2.)

I noticed a new one today; I'd flagged a message on the phone to do something about (reserving a place at Nokia World to find out about what the Nokia Windows Phones will be) and I hadn't cleared the flag in Outlook when I took care of the task. I wanted to forward to details to Simon so I did that from the phone and saw the flag was still there and tapped on it to see if I could clear it that way (instead of sliding up the menu or going back to the inbox, which are the two methods I already know). What I got instead was a pane of message details telling me when I'd flagged it and when I'd forwarded it. The information isn't cluttering up the screen when I don't need it, but it's right there when I do. And instead of feeling frustrated that I hadn't found the feature before, I felt delighted that I'd found another of the features that Windows Phone is packed with. I'd say crammed but that doesn’t really convey the elegance of the design.

Elegant isn't a word you associate much with Windows - or Microsoft at all; Microsoft products tend to be functional and powerful, but they're usually utilitarian rather than delightful. Office 365 is a nice clean design, until it drops you into the Forefront setup screen, which is about as elegant as SharePoint (powerful, yes; elegant, not so much). But there's an increasing number of exceptions and they tend to be the ones where the designers get in early, like the flexible Arc Touch mouse or the new capacitive multitouch Touch Mouse. Frequently, principal researcher Bill Buxton will turn out to have had something to do with it. He enthused about the designer who created the Arc Touch mouse to us and last MIX he revealed that he'd been using a Windows Phone as his only phone for three weeks before the MWC when Microsoft announced it, to give feedback on the user experience (he called the rate of change in just the month between the two events "staggering" and problems with distributing updates aside, Microsoft has kept up the pace of improvement).

Even with the current version of the Mango update, there are things Windows Phone doesn't do; little details that slip through - at least on the UK models. If you have a phone number in OneNote, you can't click to dial it and while you can copy it, you can't paste it into the dialler. When the very first version of Windows Phone didn't have copy and paste at all I complained about that very issue and was told that 'smart links' for phone numbers would take care of it. but only US format numbers are recognised, on US phones.

EDIT: when I first wrote this I wasn't sure if the very capable US voice recognition search that worked very well with my non US accent in testing and is live on the developer build of Mango would be in the final UK version. Microsoft's PR team just pointed me at a helpful blog post covering which languages will be supported and where you'll get voice search; and yes, the UK gets voice search.

But I still think - especially reading the comments on the post from users who want more of WP7 in their native langauge that to make a worldwide phone , Microsoft needs to either extend the full feature set to users all around the world or - since that does take time - pay more attention to the rough edges that not having those features leaves outside the US.

Microsoft should make the Windows Phone team use a UK phone (or a French or German phone or a Croatian phone…) for three weeks to see the difference and discover the details they need to take care of for the rest of us.

Mary Brascombe