Stumpokapow said:
1) There was no Wifi strength indicator.
Strange, I have a wifi signal indicator on mine. Then again, it only appears when I'm on the lock screen or when I flick from the top to see my battery status and such.
Stumpokapow said:
2) If the phone went inactive and turned off, I had to use the top button to reactivate it, not the face button. On the iPhone both the home button and the power button would work for reactivating the phone.
It's a bit annoying for me as well since the power button is a tiny thing on the top of the phone, but then again, my phone's physical buttons are raised slightly, so I can see myself inadvertently pressing the start button just from walking.
Stumpokapow said:
3) While downloading games from the games marketplace, there didn't seem to be an easy way to view the download progress or queue and although it did background download there was no indication that it was background downloading.
The progress of all downloads can be viewed from the marketplace main page; there's a link that appears only when downloads are occurring, and pressing it takes you to your download queue. It would be nice to have the same feature in the games hub.
Stumpokapow said:
4) LG Branded apps in the marketplace. Fuck device/carrier branding. One marketplace for all is non-negotiable. Ugh.
I actually like some of the apps LG wrote for my phone. The "Play To" DLNA-certified app kicks ass. If the carriers/phone manufacturers want to spend resources to create special apps, let them, I say, and I don't see any other exclusive apps in the marketplace anyway.
Stumpokapow said:
5) No quick mute; volume down just steadily lowers volume. Either a mute lever or a hold-for-two-seconds-and-auto-mute function would have been appreciated.
Agreed. My old BlackBerry's volume buttons also allowed me to change tracks based on how I pressed them.
Stumpokapow said:
6) Almost no application has a back gesture. They all use the virtual back button at the bottom of the touch screen. That's fine, but on this particular phone the back button is not permanently backlit, and I didn't even realize it was there for about ten minutes when I was using the phone. I'm not sure if a dedicated back button is a plus or minus on the overall (I can think of use-cases for both sides), but it being unclear is definitely a minus.
I think it depends on the phone. The back button is very clear on my LG phone (not the Optimus Quantum with the keyboard, but raised buttons), and I'm adjusting to the WP7 UX paradigm; "back" for going back within an application and to previous applications, "start" to start new applications, and "search" to search within an application.
Stumpokapow said:
7) While the UI is very nice and the titles are large and obvious and there's some great typography use, sometimes the titles are awkwardly cut off. Like, under games the title looked like "games"--the s was kind of just barely cut off. It feels like some of the UI panels are very well scaled for the phone and some aren't.
That's just the way "panorama" applications work on the phone; as you scroll horizontally, the text and background move on separate parallax layers. The "g" in games gets cut off when you scroll right, for example.
Stumpokapow said:
8) The main menu seems a little unbalanced. You've got two horizontal tiles, and those tiles bring you to about 75-80% of the screen... and then you've got an empty black space. It's not a continuous flow to the next horizontal screen, there's no prompt that there is a next horizontal screen, and the tiles don't fill up the screen. I'm not sure why they did it this way.
I think it's for your thumb if you hold the phone with your right hand; you can scroll without covering any information that may be presented by the tiles. That being said, it would be nice to have a southpaw option.
Stumpokapow said:
9) The games marketplace doesn't seem particularly well laid out. The main categories are fine--XBL, Top, Free, New--and navigation between them works fine. But once you're in a category, it's just a giant list. I have no idea how the lists were sorted, there's no pagination, and I feel like this isn't going to scale well. The iOS App Store is easy to get lost in, certainly, but I definitely feel like it scaled better.
There's a "categories" section after "free", which has various game genres for you to drill down deeper. Is this is a new addition? I agree with the pagination issue in terms of scrolling, because the virtual list sometimes doesn't load as fast as I scroll.
Stumpokapow said:
10) Achievement integration isn't visually consistent from the games I checked out. I would have preferred a standardized achievement list display and a standardized achievement unlocked display.
I can't comment on this because I haven't played many XBL games yet on the phone.
Stumpokapow said:
11) When the phone goes inactive you get booted out of the game you're playing and have to relaunch it. What the hell were they thinking there?
I think it depends on the game's resource utilisation. Games can remain active under the lock screen, so I think the OS tombstones games that may drain the battery.
