Hacker News Reader

Comment by saturdaysaint | Hacker News Reader

The term "killer app" seems kind of outmoded, but I'm still waiting for WP7 to show me some really new functionality. I don't think we need something that can do the same stuff we've been doing for years on mobile phones, even if they've streamlined things here and there and have a pretty piece of hardware.

Also, I honestly wonder if the dashboard-oriented UI makes it weak as an app platform. I have two friends who switched from iPhone to WP7 and they've both remarked how few apps they use/buy outside of the included ones. The big tiles are nice, but they also mean one's homescreen is likely to be completely dominated by basic functionality apps (e-mail, contacts, pictures, etc). I'm sure that this enhances those select home screen apps, but I think it discourages adding much. Knock the iPhone interface, but the screens pages of tiny colorful icons do seem to encourage people to collect apps like badges and actually use them more.

View on HN

"Knock the iPhone interface, but the screens pages of tiny colorful icons do seem to encourage people to collect apps like badges and actually use them more."

Is that a good thing? Because I'm really not sure that it is. I used a W7 phone for a few weeks and I actually loved not having to launch half a dozen different apps- I view a person, I see their Facebook updates, their tweets, photos, etc. all in one place. It's awesome.

FWIW, there is talk of adding folders to WP7 in the next incremental upgrade.

I've found that folders suffer the same fate as the all-purpose drawer of apps - simply having to do the extra app discourages usage of anything in the folder.

Third parties can add similar functionality to their live tiles too, and a lot of apps do that. For example, the package tracker app can update the live tile with the latest location of the package, the twitter app can update with the latest tweets or tweet count etc. That is the whole point of the 'glance and go' mantra. When you're busy doing other stuff, you can just glance at the homescreen to see if there's something important or not. A bunch of icons like every other phone UI designed by Xerox PARC in the early 1980s doesn't do that.

I "get" live tiles and I kind of like the concept. I'm saying that their size has disadvantages, though.

Three "pages" of apps on an iPhone (which is pretty average) hold 52 apps (16 x 3, plus the 4 in the "dock") that you can quickly navigate between. From what I've seen, anything more than 20 apps on WP7 seems to be more trouble than it's worth. At that point, you're exhausting the limit of "glance and go". Anything beyond that you relegate to the drawer of apps that few people actively use.

Those 20 apps are better reserved for the ones that do live updates, although I agree the app drawer can get a little crowded(there's alphabetical search in Mango to mitigate that a little).

But wasn't there a study showing how many apps people use on average? I believe it was far less than 20. Someone made a concept app to add folders to the UI(need to be dev unlocked or jailbroken to use it) http://www.engadget.com/2011/10/25/want-folders-on-your-wind...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com