24 insightful thoughts

  1. what’s even funnier about these pictures… remember Steve Balmer’s quip about the original iPhone: “That thing doesn’t even have a physical keyboard. Who would want a phone without a physical keyboard?”

    3 1/2 years late to the party… guess who will have a phone OS on phones with no physical keyboard?

    What was the reason for the hold up? Did the lawyers take that long to sign-off on the designs?

    1. You’re slightly wrong there Tom. Balmer was actually referring to Apple’s enforced “you’re not even allowed to choose a physical keyboard” attitude… meanwhile, the numerous WM manufacturers allows all sorts of form factors.

    2. Like GTRoberts said, it was more about flexibility. This is why the Windows 7 Phone OS won’t be tied to any specific phone, but allow manufacturers to evolve/make it their own while letting the consumer decide what is most important to them.

    3. Flexibility is just another word for fragmentation. End users hate fragmentation when it leads to poorer user experiences and developer hate fragmentation because it makes their job even harder. If you allow some phones to have a touch screen and others to have a physical keyboard but no touch screen, you are limiting the ability of developers to great an engaging UI experience with touch.

      Sometimes hard choices need to be made when creating a compelling product and you cannot be all things to everyone. I think that these are some hard lessons which MSFT has to learn if they want to remain relevant.

  2. Very funny, especially as they were just bragging about how they’ve removed ad signatures in hotmail

    1. you know that is just a signature line you can remove right? And yes, I would proudly display “Sent from my Windows Phone” at the end of my emails.

  3. Its been (kind of) interesting to watch the default email signature change in WM over the years.

    My HD2 was the same as your’s but our recent new HTC Snap’s had a slightly different sig and it comes without the “R”. Strangely, my old TouchPro 1 just said “Sent from HTC Phone”.

    Thankfully its easy to change the sig and have multiple ones.

  4. True, but at least their product designers don’t choose form over function to the point that if you hold the phone normally it loses signal, and use glass, one of the worst possible contraction materials for that kind of device as the main element…

    Full disclosure:
    Sent from my iPad

  5. Funny, but I don’t believe it’s something Microsoft’s corporate team dictated, and as GTRoberts pointed out, it’s something that OEM’s have been changing and customizing for a long time.

    1. The signature shown there is actually the default one from Windows Mobile 6.5, though OEMs can still change them to their liking, I guess.

  6. I don’t understand this one. How’s it supposed to be funny? How does this picture indicate that lawyers involved?

    1. You think a designer would ever want ugly (R) and (TM) after product names (sometimes next to multiple parts of a single name)?

      Only a lawyer — or someone pretending to be a designer but who was really born a lawyer and just hasn’t come out of the closet yet — would do such a thing.

      (Except where it’s an ironic joke about people doing that sort of thing, like in the Monkey Island games.)

  7. Normally big companies have guidelines where and when to use or not to use these legalese symbols…
    The shown application seems to be really off!

  8. Well they have *sincerely* tried to copy it but failing to “copy” its success.

  9. As a user I find annoying having “ads” about my mail client.
    Who cares what client I’m/you’re using anyways – as far as you can reply to your mails in your language.

  10. WTF, did Apple invent the composer window of a Mail client ? Is the iphone ones “that” original ?

    1. The screenshot is pointing out the (R) symbol in the Windows phone email sig.

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