Mobile Archives - Praval Singh

Today morning, I was lucky to get access to the MailBox app.

Mailbox is a nice email app, but there’s nothing revolutionary about it. After having used it for a day, I realise that it’s better marketed than built or conceived as a product. Early access to a few folks, brilliant idea of reserving the app in advance, and all that topped with the icing that allows you to download and keep looking at the ticker. This game looked very interesting.

However, while there was so much noise about this app ‘changing’ the way we’ll handle email, I realised that it is for a certain ‘kind’ of users. They’re definitely not the ones who have considerably high volume of emails coming in.

Not just that, it tries to mix the task app and the email app, which for me, serve very different purposes. I would instead wish for an excellent integration between the two. Not a replacement of either.

Reminds me of John Gruber, who rightly said that this app has a different target audience, those who are very gmail centric and have one email address.

I would agree with John on the fact that this won’t replace the Mail.app on iPhone for me. I love labels, folders and the ability to ‘manage’ email.

Bryan on Pandodaily correctly calls it a ‘feature’, not a product.

If you love giving away the control of your email and hide behind the curtain of procrastination fabricated within a good UI, you must try this app. 🙂

I had an chat with Tim Van Damme (@maxvoltar) of Instagram and Chris Herbert (@hrbrt) from MacWorld, on what they feel about Mailbox. Turns out that Tim is liking it for his personal email.

I’ve always been inclined towards gadgets. That includes mobile phones. More importantly, I am keen on observing what does a mobile phone OS offer and how are hardware manufacturers riding on it.

Not to my surprise, there are only few good examples of a perfect marriage between hardware and software when it comes to smart phones. The problem can be battery life, support and OS upgrades across manufacturers, price point, … you get the idea.

I have had a chance to play with *most* of the android phones available in India. Also, the iPhones, iPod touch and now the iPad 2 running iOS. Did I forget Symbian? 😉 I have had a HTC Touch phone running Windows Mobile 6, a few years ago. I remember that was my first smartphone. At that age and time, it was really a different feeling to own a *smartphone*. I still have memories of using the stylus (and losing one only to find that the product was shipped with a spare stylus in the box. wow!)

Do you love your windows phone 7 device?

Do you love Windows Phone 7?

However, I never really got a chance to play with a Windows Phone 7 device ever since its launch. The whole idea of Microsoft considering consumers ahead of enterprises makes a good sense to me. Building devices for people and not walls. I have heard about it from a few friends and read a lot of good online. However, I am still unsure of how is Windows Phone 7 creating an ecosystem of developers that put some hard work and build kick ass apps, on the lines of iOS and Android (though android is far from good when it comes to my experience with apps). In a smart move by Windows Phone 7, where it partnered with AppMakr to increase apps in the marketplace, I am keen to discover the resulting apps. In case there are a handful of good ones, I might have to arrange a device to test them! But that’s for the novice. How about serious developers plug-in on to the Windows Phone 7 SDK? In case you’re interested, you may head to the APP HUB, now!

By the way, there is some action happening at the APP HUB forum. From what I assume, they’re the developers who have already rolled up their sleeves. Before starting to write this, I was going through an interesting trajectory of Windows Phone 7 OS – from naming to the handset tie-ups.

While I begin to look out for a solution to quench my thirst of getting a Windows Phone 7 review device, I shall leave you with an interesting resource for Windows Phone 7 development. Pretty much to get you started, in case you’re a developer (or a budding one!)

This one is by @MarkKirby.

Not just that, there are a couple of interesting blogs dedicated to Windows Phone 7. One such is being run by Abhishek Baxi. It’s called I Love Windows Phone!

Today, I use a Blackberry and have previously used an iPhone 3GS amongst a dozen other mobile phones. I would love to try a Windows Phone 7. Have you tried using a Windows Phone 7 device? How has been your experience? How do you compare it with other smartphone OS in the market? If there’s a good note/ review/ video you have, please feel free to share that in the comments.

Ciao!

Image credits: yum9me